Points of Interest | Green Energy News

April 11, 2004 – Vol.9 No.3

POINTS OF INTEREST.

A weekly collection of websites worth visiting.

While chicken manure is a pollution problem that could become a renewable fuel, ditto is pig manure.

A research team led by Yanhui Zhang at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is working on turning pig manure into a form of crude oil that could be refined to a fuel to heat homes or generate electricity.

The process is similar to the natural process which makes crude oil in the earths crust, but instead of taking centuries the process takes as little as a half hour. Like the natural process Zhang’s process uses heat and high pressure to break down the molecular structure of manure into oil.

Eventually Zhang sees the day when a reactor the size of home furnace could convert manure to oil at a cost of about $10 per barrel.

Already a similar process developed by Changing World Technologies converts turkey waste - entrails, feathers, fat and grease - from a Butterball turkey plant in Missouri to a kind of light crude oil.

Zhang has been working on other energy/environmental technologies such as inflatable covers for hog waste lagoons and the evaluation of attic ventilation systems.

Visit Zhang’s team at http://www.age.uiuc.edu/faculty/yhz/index.htm (click Current Research Interest) and Changing World Technologies at http://www.changingworldtech.com/