Got Chicken Parts? Make Biodiesel
11 billion pounds of chicken feather meal are accumulated annually by the poultry industry in the U.S., and if a process developed by scientists in Nevada moves forward, those chicken parts could be used to produce 153 million gallons of biodiesel a year, and 593 million gallons worldwide.
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Chicken feather meal consists of processed chicken feathers, blood, and innards that have been steam processed at high temperatures, and because of its high protein and nitrogen content is currently used as animal feed and fertilizer. The meal also has a 12% fat content, which could be used as a nonfood feedstock to make biodiesel.
The process is touted as being environmentally friendly and would extract the fat from chicken feather meal using boiling water. Researchers say that removal of the fat content from feather meal makes for both a higher-grade animal feed and a better nitrogen source for fertilizer.
The study from the University of Nevada, by Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, Narasimharao Kondamudi, and Jason Strull, is published online in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry: A Green Process for Producing Biodiesel from Feather Meal
Image: Just chaos at Flickr under CC License
Is this the “Anything Into Oil”?
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=
It all works fine and good, but one of the problems come in when instead of paying someone to haul away the chicken/turkey feathers (guts), they then get a Premium price tag put on them, stifling the process….never underestimate the power of greed!
Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but 153 million gallons equals about 4.5 hours of U.S. consumption.
Actually, 150m gallons is about 5 days worth of diesel consumption in the US, and 500+million is about 2-3 days world-wide. The US consumes about 12 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year (primarily in transport trucks, busses and train locomotives). Annual worldwide consumption is about 120 billion gallons (diesel is more commonly used than gasoline outside of N. America, since it is also used widely in passenger cars).
Yes “every bit helps”, but what people just don’t seem to get is that, just because it sounds like a good idea, it isn’t a good idea if the thing isn’t going to scale up. It seems that too often, people don’t look at the whole picture. This has been the problem in biofuels, hybrids and electric cars. We can’t make enough ethanol, even using non-food sources like switchgrass, to make a dent in oil consumption (ethanol today makes up less than 1% of the fuel used by passenger cars, and even getting 10x production means we’ll maybe hit 10% of fuel consumed, or about 3-4 weeks worth of imported oil).
Hybrids are all well and good, there is no way we can make enough batteries to sell multiple hundreds of thousands or several million of them a year (even at slow sales rates, Toyota will sell around 300,000 Camrys in the US. It is expected that 10-11 million new cars will be sold in the US in 2009. The peak year was 17 million new cars and trucks in the US).
We barely have the generating capacity to handle plug-in cars, and not nearly enough transmission capacity to get the electrons there in the first place. Transmission capacity to handle the extra load is years away, stalled by NIMBY opposition to construction of new transmission capacity (Carl Icahn found this out the hard way, and really needs to get better advisors when it comes to wind farms).
So great, we can generate less than 1 week’s worth of diesel fuel, or not even 2% of the total diesel fuel consumed. Now, what about the other 51 weeks and 2 days (or 98%) that still require trucks and trains to run?
Just askin’… they say they have to extract the useful thingies with boiling water. Are they going to use solar heaters or anything? Because if they aren’t, I call this BS.
“So great, we can generate less than 1 week’s worth of diesel fuel, or not even 2% of the total diesel fuel consumed. Now, what about the other 51 weeks and 2 days (or 98%) that still require trucks and trains to run?”
Take a page from chic-fil-a’s book…. Eat more chicken!!! I wonder if the same if for cow and pigs too?
Someguy, I mostly like your pos but some of your numbers are off. Verify the 12 billion figure on diesel consumption. It is not even close.
[...] used for fertilizer and animal feed and is 12% fat. That fat can be used to make biodiesel. The process is touted as being environmentally friendly and would extract the fat from chicken feather meal [...]