| Tyson Foods and Conoco Team Up to Make Pig-Diesel |
| Written by Hank Green | ||
| Thursday, 09 August 2007 | ||
 Yaughh! This seems kinda unnecessary...but Tyson Foods and ConocoPhillips are teaming up to make diesel out of animal fat. Like there weren't already enough good reasons to kill pigs. But, like Homer said, they are a miraculous animal...bacon, ribs, pork loin, pulled pork, hot dogs and now diesel fuel. It's like my grandma always said, "You can use everything but the squeal." Tyson promises that they won't be using food-grade fat to create the diesel. All of that will still end up in your can of Spam. The fat that will be converted to diesel is the fat that is currently used in making soaps, pet food and cosmetics. And it's more than pigs too. Fat from chicken and beef processing plants will be used as well. Tyson and ConocoPhillips hope that as much as three percent of the diesel produced by ConocoPhillips will eventually have animal fat as its origin. CP will be building a $100 million plant to refine the animal fats into a chemical mixture virtually identical to current diesel fuel. The only bad news is that it's kinda creepy...and that there will be one more thing that vegans can't do. Via InventorSpot See Also: -Catfish Diesel- -Frybrids- -McD's Grease for McD's Trucks-
Comments
(4)
Fat
written by Alison , August 09, 2007
I thought this was creepy the first time I heard of it as well. But, apparently one advantage is you don't need to build a new plant to process it into synthetic diesel. Any existing oil refinery can do the job!
Yuk
written by Tracy , August 09, 2007
It's a bit Soylent Green, dontcha think?
Denny Crane would invest
written by Culprititus , August 10, 2007
If anyone watches Boston Legal, there's an episode about processing human fat taken during liposuction into bio-fuel. Unfortunately it is illegal to buy/sell human body parts of any kind.
That would certainly be some Soylent Green gasoline 
more than just creepy
written by Mary , August 12, 2007
I think in any environmental impact assessment of animal-based biodiesel products, you have to take into account what the animals go through....wait, this is sounding too vegan of me. (i loves me some ham every now and again).
There's a tyson plant about 45 minutes from my school. Even when we don't look at their appallingly dangerous working conditions (they forced out the union a couple years ago), there's still the huge environmental impact of the feedlot attached to the plant. (and believe me, it stinks!) As awesome as it is that the big companies are starting to think about biodiesel, that doesn't make up for what they're doing in the other parts of the business. | ||
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