Remember when gas prices rose past $3 a gallon in many cities across the United States? Drivers clamored for alternative fuels so that the country wouldn’t be so reliant on foreign sources of oil. As gas prices have gone back down, the shouts for alternative fuels have quieted.
But that hardly means that the United States doesn’t need to invest its resources into developing green gas alternatives that can not only power our cars and trucks, but the machinery in our factories, too.
Fortunately, there are plenty of researchers and scientists today developing alternative fuels. There’s hope that that one day the United States will no longer have to rely on unstable outside governments to provide as …

Scientists in Nevada are reporting development of a new and environmentally friendly process for producing biodiesel fuel from “chicken feather meal,” made from the 11 billion pounds of poultry industry waste that accumulate annually in the United States alone. Their study is scheduled for the July 22 issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.
In the study Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, Narasimharao Kondamudi, and Jason Strull note that chicken feather meal consists of processed chicken feathers, blood, and innards that have been processed at high temperatures with steam.
Currently feather meal is used as animal feed and fertilizer because of its high protein and nitrogen content. With as much as 12 percent …