With the price of oil shooting up almost on a weekly basis, people have been trying to find alternative means to get fuel for their cars. But the last thing you’d expect them to get it from is from manure. Pig’s manure to be exact. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, huh?

So who was able to come up with this idea? That would be the researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST. According to them, they were able to devise a way to produce Biofuel through pig excrements. They were able to accomplish this by heating and pressurizing the manure allowing it to be converted into crude oil. This method sprung from an experiment made at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Yuanhui Zhang and Les Christianson.

So why go for pig’s manure? Well, since this process is able to provide a 70% manure-to-fuel efficiency, if this method takes off, we’ll be able to get 21 gallons of crude oil from a pig’s production-cycle excretions. And since a lot of pigs exist and are slaughtered yearly, this could help provide us with an alternative fuel that can help us get by the current oil crisis.

Although it shows potential, even the NIST admits it still needs a lot of work. But at least they were able to come up with an alternative way to power our cars. I just hope that if they do make this work, it won’t cause our cars and their emissions to smell as bad as pig’s manure.

Sources: Kicking Tires, Wired