Submitted by Kratos: Scientists in energy-poor Japan said Friday they have found a new source of gasoline — cattle dung. Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted 0.042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat."The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders" to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said. About 551,155 U.S. tons of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said.Gasoline extracted from cow dung is unheard of, said Tomiaki Tamura, an official of the Natural Resources and Energy Agency. Japan relies almost totally on imports for its oil and gasoline needs.

The team, helped by staff from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology near Tokyo, produced gasoline by adding several unspecified metal catalysts to the dung inside a container and applying a 30-atmosphere pressure and heat of up to 572 Fahrenheit, Shibusawa said. Details of the catalysts could not be disclosed, he added.The team hopes to improve the technology so that it can be used commercially within five years, Shibusawa said.

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The people in America in the Wild West did the same thing, it's nothing new.

That could become quite a lot of extra gas just laying around.



Care to explain that?

Wonder how long till the big oil companies buy them off?

Good idea though, we can exploit cows in a new way now. Prob engineer them to crap more!

Or feed them alot of prunes and fibre!

I think he's referring to how buffalo dung was used for fire fuel. Maybe.

I'm amazed at what scientists are doing with dung these days! There was that story the other day about San Francisco running a pilot project for getting energy from dog dung.

and the heat and pressure requires how much gasoline to start with? 5 ounces?

doesn't this means u are using more gasoline to create them? remember, gasoline dig from underground yields 30 unit of energy per every 1 unit energy spend

She was referring to burning buffalo dung for fires.

Isn't it ironic that we've been throwing away all this dung when we could have been powering cars?!

I see where you are going with that. This is a little different though. Extracting gasoline from dung is different from using the dung as actual fuel.

They said it was a chemical process under intense heat and using some sort of metal that they won't disclose as of now (probably trying to get it patented to become filthy rich off of, who can blame them though? ).

Thank god, as long as we keep our cows, we can get some awful smelling, although very needed, fossil fuels.