Ever find yourself saying “I wouldn’t give a squirt of piss” for this or that?

Well, there’s more behind those words than you think. Via bookofjoe comes this PhysOrg story on the green potential for the stuff that makes snow yellow.

Yes, it seems urine, which for millennia humans have been wantonly voiding down toilets, against walls of bars, and even on each other, may just be a fluid more precious than petrol. Urea, urine’s signature chemical, holds the key to the magic. “Urine’s major constituent is urea,” the PhysOrg story reports, “which incorporates four hydrogen atoms per molecule — importantly, less tightly bonded than the hydrogen atoms in water molecules.”

The highest hurdle standing between humanity and a hydrogen economy is the fact that isolating hydrogen from other elements — “cracking” in industry lingo — requires more energy than it releases. Because energy’s got to come from somewhere, and usually at some cost, the hydrogen economy hasn’t looked terribly economical to date.

Piddle promises to change all that; easily crackable urea puts a tiger in your car’s tank with the by-product of a weekend bender. Suddenly, frat guys go from being roofie-aided rapists to strategic resources.

A golden shower of horsepower: piss and the hydrogen economy.

Ohio University’s Gerardine Bott, inventor of the process that releases hydrogen from urea, sets about it thusly:

Botte uses electrolysis to break the molecule apart, developing an inexpensive new nickel-based electrode to selectively and efficiently oxidise the urea. To break the molecule down, a voltage of 0.37V needs to be applied across the cell — much less than the 1.23V needed to split water.

This process has the added benefit of relieving waterways of a noisome burden:

Botte believes the technology could be easily scaled-up to generate hydrogen while cleaning up the effluent from sewage plants.

Bookofjoe strikes a note of enthusiastic approval, describing Professor Botte’s uro-mancy as “[m]aybe even better than gold from lead and other long sought, as yet unrealized dreams of transformation.”

And we at Generation Bubble couldn’t agree more. Here’s to the discovery of the philosopher’s (bladder) stone!