Q: 3 year old MacBook with extremely swollen/bloated battery

If it's more than 36 months old, it's no longer covered by warranty, even if you purchased AppleCare. Whatever is wrong with your battery sounds serious, and if it were me I'd stop using it immediately.

You can get very good replacement batteries for a decent price from Other World Computing (macsales.com), and very inexpensive somewhat low-quality batteries on eBay.

do not charge anymore, shut down the Macbook. Danger.

I advise not to buy oem batteries, but the Apple brand.

Then follow the advice in those threads and cross your fingers. No one here can give you magic words that will make an Apple Store employee or phone support person do your bidding.

Again, if it were me, I'd stop using that battery IMMEDIATELY and just buy a replacement. My time (and you indicated in your OP that the nearest Apple Store is a long drive, not to mention time spent there or on the phone) is worth more than the replacement cost for a battery.

If the trip to the Apple Store is less cost than a new battery, do that.

It is possible that if you go into an apple store and say that you are worried abou the saftey of this unit and explain that this should not be happening that they may just may replace it.

What i can say though is it looks like it was covered at one time but now it that has passed.

I had the same thing happen to my 4-yr old Macbook. The additonal issue this created was that the trackpad was very unresponsive when the battery got hot. I just bought another battery through batteryedge.com and everything seems to be working fine. Fully agree that you should NOT use this computer with the battery in its swollen condition.

read my advice above

I'd say it's almost always better to get an Apple-branded battery over any other. But you'll pay more for what you get that way.

The options I suggested cost less. In the case of the batteries from OWC and other reputable resellers, you can get third-party batteries with higher capacity than the Apple branded batteries at the same or lower cost than the Apple branded batteries.

The expected life expectancy of your battery is 300 cycles... after that, you can generally expect a gradual degradation in performance.  Typically, Apple will provide a replacement under warranty if the battery has less than that.  As you have nearly twice that, I wouldn't expect them to provide a free replacement.  Swelling or not, the battery is well beyond it's typically expected life.  You may be able to talk them into giving you a replacment, but I certainly wouldn't expect it at this point.

Hey Brian. 

It happened to me and at apple they told me it was because of the age of the battery, over 4 years now, although only 270 cycles. It's just a question of built up gases in the battery pouches, no joking! I did my research and I have found a video tutorial that explains out to fix it.  Check out the video tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOIb6pZ6vo

It has worked for me for over 1 month now with no issues what so ever! 

Apple has just patented a new pouch with a valve to let the gases out.  They hope this will prevent any further bloating of batteries and therefore any further free replacement. 

Let us know if it works for you!