Good News: Pork-oline

Next thing you know, we’ll all be fussing about the price of bacon and the AntiSomethings will be fuming about Big Pig!

Zhang predicts the process could get 3.6 gallons of crude oil a day out of each pig.

And what, pray tell, is that all about?

They say you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but University of Illinois researchers are working some interesting magic at the other end of the animal.

“We are the first to actually do this,” professor Yuanhui Zhang says proudly of his team’s ability to turn swine manure into crude oil. He’s a bio-environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has led the 10-year research project that recently announced a breakthrough in porcine petroleum.

That neat trick may sound crude.

But it also sounds good to a pork industry swamped with oceans of swine manure, and it sounds like the national anthem to those looking to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.

A typical pig produces about 6 gallons of waste a day.

Now, go do the right thing.

(I know, I know — that’s someone else’s line.)