Bile enhances fat digestion, but said digestion is not absolutely dependent on bile. Much emulsification of the ingested fat takes place just by mastication and gastric digestive activity, which break up the fat into small globules and coat it with phospholipids. Later in the duodenum, bile adds more phospholipids, and further enhance the formation of digestibly sized particles.
What is really needed for fat digestion is lipase, which breaks the fat down into monoglycerides and fatty acids. This comes from the pancreas.
When the system works well, 94% of ingested fat is absorbed. The remainder passes thru the bowel and exits eventually.
Overall, the amount of absorption is thus dependent on degree of chewing, concentration of fat in food, length of time spent in stomach, relative amounts of bile and lipase added to the mix, length of transit time thru the bowel, bacterial flora of the bowel, and probably atmospheric pressure and phase of the moon for all I know.
It’s certainly possible to overwhelm one’s ability to digest about 94% of fat eaten, but where the tipping point is for each individual is quite multi-factorial. But when one passes the tipping point, it’s generally easily noticed, as stool becomes very gassy, greasy, loose, floating, and incredibly foul-smelling. Most folks experience this sort of stool due to dietary overindulgence at least once in college.
But go ahead a try it! Standard protocol is to do a food diary tracking closely all the fat ingested for 72 hours, then collect all stool excreted for 72 hours, store it, and when done, take it to a lab for analysis of total fat content of the stool. Subtract stool fat from total fat, and you’ve got percentage absorbed at that level of intake! Then up the fat intake, and do it again.