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When pigs fly? Researcher makes oil from manure
By Dave Orrick
Associated Press
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HAMPSHIRE -- Can the other white meat’s manure make black gold? They say you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but University of Illinois researchers are working some interesting magic at the other end of the animal.

"We are the first to actually do this," professor Yuanhui Zhang says proudly of his team’s ability to turn swine manure into crude oil.

He’s a bio-environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has led the 10-year research project that recently announced a breakthrough in porcine petroleum.

That neat trick may sound crude.

But it also sounds good to a pork industry swamped with oceans of swine manure, and it sounds like the national anthem to those looking to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.

A typical pig produces about 6 gallons of waste a day. For a hog farmer like Pat Dumoulin of Hampshire, who has about 1,200 sows, that’s enough stinky and potentially hazardous fumes that he has a pair of 500,000-gallon tanks to properly store the stuff.

Like most farmers, much of the manure from Dumoulin’s hogs winds up as fertilizer.

"Most of the farmers in our area are open to taking the hog manure," says Dumoulin, whose farm has been in his family for more than 50 years. "Sometimes it’s done for no cost, sometimes they pay us a fee to spread it on their fields."

Either way, scientists have agreed for years that the chemical and capital potential of pig manure, like almost all organic waste, could have other uses.

Zhang’s breakthrough wasn’t that he and fellow researchers had become excrement alchemists; in about 1998, he figured out how to convert some of a pig’s byproduct to an energy source.

Turning garbage into natural gas, cow manure into fuel for power plants, and even fast-food grease into auto fuel are other examples of recent advances in the sub-field of icky-but-renewable energy.

Zhang’s big breakthrough is that he’s designed a more efficient process: a continuous reactor.

Instead of converting hog waste one batch at a time, Zhang’s lab, which is funded in part by the Illinois Pork Producers Association, has developed a method to feed waste continuously into a reactor, which is essentially an industrial-strength pressurized oven.

And, Zhang boasts, "We don’t even need pre-drying."

Chemically, pig dung isn’t as different from oil as one might think. In Zhang’s reactor, a process known as thermochemical conversion partially breaks down hydrocarbon molecules that make up most of the excrement, and voila: porky petrol.

Similar but not identical to the black gold it took Mother Nature eons to brew, Zhang’s fuel behaves like diesel.

Now the plan is to move from the lab to a full-sized pilot reactor on a farm somewhere downstate. Zhang predicts the process could get 3.6 gallons of crude oil a day out of each pig.

Illinois brings some 7.2 million hogs to market each year and the nationwide industry is about 100-million hogs strong.

Theoretically, the resulting millions of barrels of crude a day could make a significant dent in America’s dependence on nonrenewable, and often imported, oil.

But converting the nations automobile fleet to hog-oline isn’t what Zhang or the hog industry is thinking about right now. No research has been done into how many current commercial vehicles could run on the fuel.

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Reader comments on this story - 12 total

Note: All views and opinions expressed in reader comments are solely those of the individual submitting the comment, and not those of the Pantagraph or its staff.

Dylan Gaily wrote on Dec 5, 2007 8:27 AM:

" I like peanuts and trumpets. "

feelgood wrote on May 1, 2006 3:53 PM:

" I have a bumper sticker for Prof. Zhang's project. How 'bout "your pig poo is my bread and butter." Now, wasn't that helpful?? "

resident wrote on Apr 29, 2006 10:36 PM:

" Brazil gets oil independence, and we get .... more pig crap. What a country! "

Hurray! wrote on Apr 29, 2006 9:43 PM:

" Potbelly pig power! "

wow wrote on Apr 29, 2006 2:42 PM:

" And to think, all we had to do was follow a politician around with a pooper scooper everytime they gave a speech. It works with BS too right? "

jimmy wrote on Apr 29, 2006 1:32 PM:

" no mention of what the energy balance of this process is. if it takes more energy to run the "industrial-strength pressurized oven" than what's left in the resulting oil, then there's a real problem to overcome. interesting, though. "

? wrote on Apr 29, 2006 7:13 AM:

" does it just have to come from pigs or an it come from any animal or human? the cities do process tons of crao everyday and spread it! "

Neat! wrote on Apr 28, 2006 8:37 PM:

" I heard recently that there are some scientists who are starting to question how we traditionally thought oil was made. We were all told it is the decayed remains of dinosaurs, but in fact it may have more to do with methane conversion than left over animal remains, thus the supply may not be finite like we thought. This study helps to reinforce that thought, that oil can be manufactured. Won't help in the short or medium term, but may be very useful for our grandchildren. Good work guys. "

asoulfinder wrote on Apr 28, 2006 7:24 PM:

" Even at peak efficiency, this won't make much of a dent in our dependance for oil. I am more hopeful of the enviromental aspects of turning a poisionous byproduct of industrial farming into something useful. "

table up wrote on Apr 28, 2006 7:17 PM:

" to pork chops and ham. "

Lee wrote on Apr 28, 2006 6:42 PM:

" Let's pig out on pork and let the Arabs keep their oil. "

No BS wrote on Apr 28, 2006 6:10 PM:

" We can poop our way to prosperity ... and to freedom from foreign oil. It may sound crappy, but we'll be happy. "
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