Power your car with dead cats

Found on The Inquierer on Friday, 16 September 2005
Browse Technology

Christian Koch, 55, has angered animal rights people with his alternative fuel which is made from a secret recipe of garbage, mashed-up moggies, and other ingredients.

He said that his normal diesel-powered car has clocked 170,000 kilometres (106,000 miles) on pussy power without any major catastrophe.

His company "Alphakat GmbH", says his patented "KDV 500" machine can produce "bio-diesel" fuel at about 23 euro cents (30 cents) a litre.

It takes 20 dead cats added to the mix to produce enough fuel to fill up a 50-litre (11 gallon) tank. The engine really purrs apparently.

That's the problem when you copy stories without additional research. The cat-headline was used to discredit the inventor. During the KDV process, trash (plastics, rubber, old oil and fat, theoretically also dead animals) is heated to 400°C and partially converted to diesel with the help of a catalyst. The inventor has already filed a lawsuit against the newspaper which made up that fictional headline. Also incorrect is that animal rights people are angered. The "quoted" person, Annelise Krauß, said there wouldn't be a problem, because it's all about dead material; but the newspaper just wrote that it is "as bad as animal experiments". Really, who would believe that? Everybody who does, please use your brain: raising a cat to convert it to diesel would be way more expensive than today's sources.