So I read an odd but interesting article recently.

Scientists extract gasoline from cattle dung

As you may have guessed from the title…

It’s about getting gasoline out of poop.

Cow poop.

Some Japanese scientist figured this out.

The numbers in the article are based on Japanese Cattle statistics, so I was left wondering how viable a solution this would be in the US.

Here’s how it breaks down.

First the problem:

How much gasoline do we use every year in the US?

Well…

The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil each day.

A barrel of oil (which contains 42 gallons) will yield something like 19 or 20 gallons of gasoline, depending on the refinery.

Therefore, in the United States, something like 400 million gallons of gasoline gets consumed every day.

In a year, therefore, the U.S. consumes about 146 billion gallons of gasoline.

(source: How Stuff Works)

Fair Enough.

Now we know from our Japanese Scientist friends that you can get 0.042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung.

So the question becomes:

Is there enough cow poop in the US every year to satisfy a significant percentage of our gasoline needs?

Well…

There are roughly 100,000,000 (One Hundred Million) cows in the United States.

According to this article a well-fed dairy cow produces 120 pounds of manure every day.

That’s 40,000 pounds per year per animal.

Which puts the annual cow poop tabulation at an astounding 4,000,000,000,000 (Four TRILLION) pounds.

Wow.

You smell that?

Which converts to 1,814,369,482 (1.8 BILLION) metric tons.

Further we know that there are 35,274 ounces in a metric ton so…

Each year the United States produces 64,000,069,091,189.90 (64 TRILLION) ounces of cow poop.

Which (if we are to believe the Japanese) will yield 435,374,619,667,958 (435 TRILLION) ounces of gasoline.

… which equates to 12,342,649,534.16 (12 BILLION) Metric Tons of gasoline.

… 27,210,884,353,741.50 (27.2 TRILLION) pounds of gasoline.

NOW…

A gallon of gasoline weighs somewhere between 5.8 and 6.5 pounds.

For the purposes of this exercise I used 6 as a nice middle ground.

Which leaves us with…

4,535,147,392,290.25 (4.5 TRILLION) gallons of gasoline per year.

All from cow poop.

If the United States really does consume 146 BILLION gallons of gasoline.

The 4.5 Trillion gallons of gasoline we could get from cow poop is nearly 31 times what we need.

Clearly I think that covers any swag my numbers may have had.

Why the hell are we not doing this?

We’d pretty much END our dependance on foreign oil.

We’d have a USEFUL end for cow poop, which believe it or not is a big problem.

And we’d have enough gasoline left over WE COULD MAKE MONEY.

Talk about a cash cow!!