I just googled it. 15 minutes and 2 liters of undried manure becomes 0.26 liters of pig oil. One unit in and 3 energy units out. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0701_040702_pigoil.html p.s. Jimmy Carter said that once a nuclear fuel rod is used once, it can never be used again... in the US. Every other country can retrieve energy until the fuel rod is fully spent. As I understand it, the fuel rod is then dramatically less polluting and cheaper (but nuclear energy is dirt cheap to begin with).
Butanol. If anyones alive in 50 years, there might even be some stocks in companies trying to make the sensible switch.
That article is 2 years old. Things have moved on since then: http://pantagraph.com/articles/2006/04/29/news/doc44529b9ca9c3e326281643.txt http://159.54.227.3/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060821/NEWS/608210332 3.6 gallons a day per pig. 3 units of energy out for every 1 unit in. The results of the recent full-sized pilot reactor projects will obviously be crucial. The results should be known in a few months.
A) Your link does not work B) Actually nuclear energy has been the most expensive source of energy until recently from the innovations of French companies. Nuclear energy was preferred because of the greatly lowered emissions and the CAPACITY (unmatched by any other power plant). A nuclear power plant costs BILLIONS, its maintenance and operations costs a lot of money. Then there is the Uranium costs, have you seen those prices lately. Nuclear power has been subsidized everywhere, even France. USA subsidies for it have been falling but they are still there. In general, the public does not want nuclear power, for good reasons. Chernobyl aside, there have similiar incidents across the world and quite a few close calls (like one up in upstate New York 10-20 years ago) C) It's not petroleum but more of a diesel fuel. You need to read more carefully. They can potentially make smth like 8 mil barrels a day. It's still a backwards move. If you have the slightest concern for the environment the idea is to move away from fossil fuel not find new dirty ways to create more of it. I highly doubt that cooking manure is a clean & friendly process.
There is clear evidence of its potential right here, at ET. Start a thread with a single post in the Politics & Religion forum, and the resulting out-of-control and raging locomotive will be fueled by a seemingly limitless supply of crap.
People have discovered that they can use Cow Manure instead of fossil fuel to run ETHANOL plants, making the net energy balance a lot more efficient. We can agree that in terms of the stock market the ethanol industry is dead, but it still has a large possibility of being the prioritized alternative, maybe cow manure will be the deciding factor? http://gog2g.com/2006/08/29/pacific-ethanol-no-panda-ethanol.aspx
For what it's worth, Cramer panned ethanol Friday night. As I recall, he hit the button on his control panel that says, "Sell! Sell! Sell!"
I was being sarcastic when I said that the future is pig manure (although it is promising). I was also a little bit tipsy. Anyways, on the subject of death-enol can anyone explain why it takes 25% more ethanol than gas to get to the same destination?
Basic chemistry: gas is pure hydro-carbon, burns completely. Ethanol includes also oxygen as deadweight which does not burn.