Picture this: You’ve gone out for a nice country drive in Suffolk, hair blowing in the wind as you take on a car-free long and windy road. Then you look at your petrol light and it’s bleeping red, uh-oh. You need some juice in your trunk. But what do you fill up your tank with? Well, according to David Wernick, a Fullbright scholar and his UCLA peers the answer is, well…shit.
Before you click off this article cause you can’t hack reading about poop, hear us out. Fuels like gasoline and diesel are non-renewable resources, which means at some point in our lifetime they will run out and then we’re screwed. So that’s why poo is now the answer.
Over 1 billion tons of crap is produced in the United States alone (sorry, we haven’t got access to the UK poo numbers right now), and most of it ends up going to waste even though if contains proteins that can be reengineered to supply us with fuel. If we start to use this natural source it would even help redirect the greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere – what are we waiting for.
Wernick and his poo pals are working to develop biofuels that will have more favorable properties as a fuel than the standard ethanol, essentially starting with poo as start point and ending with fuel. Wernick wants to “try to produce chain alchohols, that are a little larger, more energy dense and burn more like real gasoline. You can drop it right into your car You don’t need any modification.” Obviously we're at here questioning the smell of said petrol...and hoping if this does actually go through our cars don't end up smelling like a cattle farm or we might just start walking everywhere.
Give it a few years and poo petrol might be available at a station near you. It’s not a DIY job though folks, so please don’t try this at home, gross.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.