Yuanhui Zhang has smelled the future of oil, and it stinks.
The pungent, earthy scent emanates from swine pens that professor Zhang's graduate students visit regularly at the University of Illinois. Holding spades in gloved hands, they collect buckets of moist pig poop and carefully drive it to a lab on the edge of campus.
Inside a white metal building nestled among fields of corn and soybeans, the students pressure-cook the messy muck until it becomes thick, black, energy-dense crude oil remarkably similar to the stuff pumped from deep within the earth.
Wow. And now, for some reason, I can't get Tina Turner out of my mind.
"Not shit!!! Energy!!!"
Posted by: LC Scotty | August 18, 2006 at 10:17 PM