The energy potential of chicken droppings

First cow farts, now chicken dung.

A whole host of interesting and until now—unwanted agricultural and animal waste products are now being touted as the new superheroes of environmental protection.

In fact, manure could soon heat and power farms using a thermochemical method known as “pyrolysis.”

Engineers at the Plains Soil, Water and Plant Research Center in South Carolina want to develop new waste treatment methods and strategies that could be used by almost any farm – large or small– to meet all their energy needs.

Pyrolysis involves cooking biomass such as woodchips, corn husks, peanut shells and chicken droppings under intense heat, transforming them into three products: an oil that can be used for heating, a slow-release fertilizer called biochar and a gas that the researchers hope will one day be recycled to power the machine.

Biochar could help save millions of trees and could become one of the keys to unlocking large-scale food and energy production.

And there is no shortage of…er…source material. The average chicken eats almost 4 kilograms of feed. With 2,800 chicken farmers in Canada and more that 23, 000 in the United States, that’s a lot of poo-tential.

Cock-a-doodle-doo.