Urine powered car will get 90 mpg

[uruk]

Brings new meaning to the word car-lover

Honest, officer I was just filling my urine powered car!

 

[CORed]

Damn you, man! Don't you care at all about AGS (Anthropogenic Global Stinking)?

I'm not completely sure, as I've never actually tried to run a car on farts, but I think if you burn it, most of the stink goes away.

 

[CORed]

Reading through the Wikipedia page on Urea, I was surprised by how many uses it has. In some cars, for example, Urea is injected into the exhaust system to reduce Nitrous Oxide emissions. (BlueTec System.)

And because of the huge demand for it, there are methods of producing it synthetically: "Urea is produced on a scale of some 100,000,000 tons per year worldwide".

If there's already a demand for 100,000,000 tons of Urea per year, why isn't it already being extracted from urine? The only reason I can think of is that it is more economical (and convenient) to produce it synthetically.

I don't think we'll be seeing cars powered by actual urine anytime soon.

Here's the Wikipedia list of some of the current commercial uses for Urea:


I don't know about you, but I find some of these uses disturbing.

Funny Widipedia doesn't mention it, but urea is a major ingredient in most lawn fertilizers. It's used as a slow-release nitrogen source. I believe that soil bacteria have to convert it to ammonia or nitrate before plants can use it.

 

[Belgian thought]

How long will it take before people in the US (the UK being so small we still use miles) will talk about the trip taking only 4 pisses instead of 7 hours?

 

[Brian-M]

The ingredients are very cheap, as well: natural gas and air to make ammonia, carbon dioxide with that ammonia to make urea.

Ah, so the urea-powered cars will, ultimately, still be fossil-fuel powered cars.

Funny Widipedia doesn't mention it, but urea is a major ingredient in most lawn fertilizers. It's used as a slow-release nitrogen source. I believe that soil bacteria have to convert it to ammonia or nitrate before plants can use it.

It does mention fertilizer in the agriculture section. I only copy-pasted the "Other commercial uses" section.

Agriculture

More than 90% of world production of urea is destined for use as a nitrogen-release fertilizer. Urea has the highest nitrogen content of all solid nitrogenous fertilizers in common use (46.7%). Therefore, it has the lowest transportation costs per unit of nitrogen nutrient.

 

[Soapy Sam]

This is old hat in Britain, where we have been running cars on insect urine for years.
There are BP stations in every town.