Michael Kanellos | September 8, 2008 at 5:55 AM 1 Comments

Pig Urine: The Latest Substitute for Fossil Fuels

Copenhagen—Yes, you can make plastic forks out of it.

Agroplast, a green chemistry start-up in Denmark, has figured out a way to produce plastics, fuel additives and other products from the urine of barnyard animals. The system automatically collects the urine, separates out the urea, and then prepares the urea for a useful life beyond the farm.

Chemical manufacturers now use urea in a variety of products, but it is largely artificially produced by cracking natural gas, or methane.

That top picture you’re looking at is a solid plastic bottle made from urea from the farm-collected urea. That stuff in the white dish is what urea looks like when solidified. It sort of has a texture like Crisco, in case you were wondering.

Getting urea straight from the farm has a number of benefits, says Chairman Jes Thomsen. For one thing, you’re not digging up buried fossil fuels to make chemicals. The urea comes from a renewable process. Two, pig waste product is now a major problem for farmers. In the U.S., farmers have to pay collectors around $86 per pig per year (not counting subsidies) to dispose of the waste. Pigs produce a lot more waste than can be used as fertilizer.

Third, there are a lot of pigs out there. the pigs in the U.S. produce enough urine to cover the urea needs of the states. The U.S. now imports 50 percent of its urea. The pig population in Canada, the U.S. and the six largest European countries comes to 200 million pigs. If you collected four percent of that urine, you’re talking 2. 5 million tons a year.

Fourth, it’s cheaper. Thomsen estimates that the company’s products could cost half to produce as those produced with natural gas, once Agroplast hits volume. Farmers in Europe also get credits for employing high tech solutions like this.

Fifth, you could drastically cut down shipping costs and fuel consumption. Natural gas comes from the Middle East and Russia. “But s… is everywhere,” said COO Bent Hundrup.

Here is how it works. The company has a collection system that lets the waste from pigs fall through a grate. Once beneath the grate, the urine is rapidly separated from the manure. If the separation isn’t accomplished quickly, the urine turns to ammonia, said Thomsen. Ammonia is actually the source of the terrible smells on farms (chalk up another benefit.).

Agroplast then removes the yellow color, water and other materials. It’s a tricky process. “Urea is a small molecule,” Thomsen said.

The company’s first product, coming next year, is AgroBlue, which is sprayed into the tailpipe of diesel cars and trucks to eliminate NOx fumes. It is a mixture of urea and water. It is chemically identical to Adblue, a formula produced right now out of urea-produced methane. The EU mandates these sort of chemicals and the U.S. will have similar regulations soon. (That’s Jes holding the bottle of AgroBlue, by the way.)

Plastics will follow. The AgroBlue product was simply easier to produce, explained Hundrup. Bioplastics are clearly moving beyond corn. University of College Dublin is experimenting with a way to convert difficult-to-recycle plastic into a biodegradable form of plastic with the help of bacteria.

The company does not sell the equipment. Instead, it installs a system on large farms (or near groups of smaller farms) and then charges farmers to eliminate their waste, albeit in an economically advantageous way to the farmer. In some cases, the company may even offer to take waste away for free as a way to build market share. Agroplast then processes the chemicals and sells them

The company has proven the technology works in prototype plants in the U.S. and Europe and is currently seeking funding to build commercial-sized plants. A single module of their technology would serve 25,000 pigs and cost $2 million dollars.

And once they do get into mass manufacturing, the plants will probably become one of the more popular and memorable third grade field trips around. There’s another benefit.