Anything into Oil(solution to dependence on foregn oil?)

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true. "Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.

"The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world."

"This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director. The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes.

Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world's agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, "This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this."

But first things first. Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts. A forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's first stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray brown slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes, which hum and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture. Two hours later, a white-jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours a honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills a glass beaker.

It really is a lovely oil. "The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially the same as a mix of half fuel oil, half gasoline."

Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate economy."

Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this—generally thousands or millions of years—because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular bonds.

Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel using waste products before, but their efforts have been notoriously inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried to do the transformation in one step—superheat the material to drive off the water and simultaneously break down the molecules," says Appel. That leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous substances to pollute the finished product.

Very wet waste—and much of the world's waste is wet—is particularly difficult to process efficiently because driving off the water requires so much energy. Usually, the Btu content in the resulting oil or gas barely exceeds the amount needed to make the stuff.

That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the late 1980s. He says he "had a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind another inventor's waste-reforming process. "The prototype I saw produced a heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement and filed the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors and, in 1996, met Appel, a former commodities trader. "I saw what this could be and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a partnership with the Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration plant up and running by 1999.

Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.

So how does it work? In the cold Philadelphia warehouse, Appel waves a long arm at the apparatus, which looks surprisingly low tech: a tangle of pressure vessels, pipes, valves, and heat exchangers terminating in storage tanks. It resembles the oil refineries that stretch to the horizon on either side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and in part, that's exactly what it is.

Appel strides to a silver gray pressure tank that is 20 feet long, three feet wide, heavily insulated, and wrapped with electric heating coils. He raps on its side. "The chief difference in our process is that we make water a friend rather than an enemy," he says. "The other processes all tried to drive out water. We drive it in, inside this tank, with heat and pressure. We super-hydrate the material." Thus temperatures and pressures need only be modest, because water helps to convey heat into the feedstock. "We're talking about temperatures of 500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of about 600 pounds for most organic material—not at all extreme or energy intensive. And the cooking times are pretty short, usually about 15 minutes."

Once the organic soup is heated and partially depolymerized in the reactor vessel, phase two begins. "We quickly drop the slurry to a lower pressure," says Appel, pointing at a branching series of pipes. The rapid depressurization releases about 90 percent of the slurry's free water. Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because no heat is wasted. "We send the flashed-off water back up there," Appel says, pointing to a pipe that leads to the beginning of the process, "to heat the incoming stream."

At this stage, the minerals—in turkey waste, they come mostly from bones—settle out and are shunted to storage tanks. Rich in calcium and magnesium, the dried brown powder "is a perfect balanced fertilizer," Appel says.

The remaining concentrated organic soup gushes into a second-stage reactor similar to the coke ovens used to refine oil into gasoline. "This technology is as old as the hills," says Appel, grinning broadly. The reactor heats the soup to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit to further break apart long molecular chains. Next, in vertical distillation columns, hot vapor flows up, condenses, and flows out from different levels: gases from the top of the column, light oils from the upper middle, heavier oils from the middle, water from the lower middle, and powdered carbon—used to manufacture tires, filters, and printer toners—from the bottom. "Gas is expensive to transport, so we use it on-site in the plant to heat the process," Appel says. The oil, minerals, and carbon are sold to the highest bidders.

Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more profitable than oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes—yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. "That's what's so great about making water a friend," says Appel. "The hydrogen in water combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin—very toxic."

Brian Appel, CEO of Changing World Technologies, strolls through a thermal depolymerization plant in Philadelphia. Experiments at the pilot facility revealed that the process is scalable—plants can sprawl over acres and handle 4,000 tons of waste a day or be "small enough to go on the back of a flatbed truck" and handle just one ton daily, says Appel.

The technicians here have spent three years feeding different kinds of waste into their machinery to formulate recipes. In a little trailer next to the plant, Appel picks up a handful of one-gallon plastic bags sent by a potential customer in Japan. The first is full of ground-up appliances, each piece no larger than a pea. "Put a computer and a refrigerator into a grinder, and that's what you get," he says, shaking the bag. "It's PVC, wood, fiberglass, metal, just a mess of different things. This process handles mixed waste beautifully." Next to the ground-up appliances is a plastic bucket of municipal sewage. Appel pops the lid and instantly regrets it. "Whew," he says. "That is nasty."

Experimentation revealed that different waste streams require different cooking and coking times and yield different finished products. "It's a two-step process, and you do more in step one or step two depending on what you are processing," Terry Adams says. "With the turkey guts, you do the lion's share in the first stage. With mixed plastics, most of the breakdown happens in the second stage." The oil-to-mineral ratios vary too. Plastic bottles, for example, yield copious amounts of oil, while tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says Adams, "nothing hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try."

"The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel says. "If it contains carbon, we can do it."

This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.

The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving all the time. At the Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package 30,000 turkeys each workday, filling the air with the distinctive tang of boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of large-scale poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging carcasses clanks past knife-wielding laborers who slash away. Outside, a tanker truck idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many years, ConAgra Foods has trucked the plant's waste—feathers, organs, and other nonusable parts—to a rendering facility where it was ground and dried to make animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products. But bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can spread among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease has been found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about feeding animals to animals.

In Europe the practice is illegal for all livestock. Since 1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of most recycled animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of European-style mad-cow regulations may kick-start the acceptance of thermal depolymerization. "In Europe, there are mountains of bones piling up," says Alf Andreassen. "When recycling waste into feed stops in this country, it will change everything."

Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level, Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant—an artless assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings—as if it were his favorite child.

"This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make 21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It's amazing.

The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually manufacturers—that's what our permit says. This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit."

He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops of piping. A group of 15 investors and corporate advisers, including Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among the sparks and hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders emphasizes that once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to oil refining. The equipment, the procedures, the safety factors, the maintenance—it's all proven technology."

And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing in Philadelphia, we already know the costs," he says. "This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there."

"We've got a lot of confidence in this," Buffett says. "I represent ConAgra's investment. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't anticipate success." Buffett isn't alone. Appel has lined up federal grant money to help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. Also in the works are plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and cheese waste in Italy. He says the first generation of depolymerization centers will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear whether the technology is as miraculous as its backers claim.

Description

FIELD AND BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

This invention relates generally to a chemical reforming apparatus and process, and more particularly to a thermal depolymerization processor for converting organic and/or inorganic materials into different more usable products.

Numerous systems have been proposed in the past for converting waste materials into useful products. For example, the following listed U.S. patents describe systems which purport to convert organic waste materials into useful products such as oil and gas:
______________________________________
NUMBER PATENTEE DATE
______________________________________
4,108,730 CHEN et al. 08-22-78
4,175,211 CHEN et al. 11-20-79
4,118,281 YAN 10-03-78
4,935,038 WOLF 06-19-90
4,636,318 BAKER 01-13-87
4,842,692 BAKER 06-27-89
4,842,728 BAKER 06-27-89
4,923,604 BAKER 05-08-90
______________________________________

Further, the Shimizu U.S. Pat. No. 4,203,838 describes a system for processing sludge, and the Ohsol U.S. Pat. No. 4,938,876 describes a system for separating oil, gas and solids.

It is a general object of the present invention to provide an improved process for converting a process material such as organic materials (coal and/or organic waste) and inorganic materials into useful oils, gas and solids.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

Generally, a processor in accordance with this invention comprises means for mixing a process material with a process liquid (such as water) and forming an emulsion or slurry. Means is provided for pressuring and heating the slurry, and the slurry is then fed to means for quickly reducing the pressure to a relatively low value and further increasing the temperature. The rapid drop in pressure and increase in temperature causes volatile components of the slurry to convert to a gas and separate from the remainder of the slurry which is removed from the processor in the form of solids. The gas is fed to one or more condensers which separate the gas into useful liquids such as various grades of oil.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE FIGURE

The invention will be better understood from the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the single figure of the drawing, wherein:

FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a processor constructed in accordance with a preferred form of this invention.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

While a processor constructed in accordance with this invention may be used to process a variety of organic and inorganic materials, the following description relates to a specific example wherein the material being processed (the process material) is coal and the liquid (the process liquid) mixed with the process material is water.

Small pieces of process material (anthracite coal nuggets in this specific example) are loaded into a hopper 10 which feeds the coal into a grinder 11. In a continuous flow system, a steady flow of coal would go into the hopper whereas in a batch system discrete quantities of coal would be introduced. The ground up pieces of coal move to an emulsifier 12 that mixes the coal with water and forms a coal-water emulsion. The amount of water may be approximately 50 to 100% (mass to mass) of the coal. The water is fed into the emulsifier through a tube 13 which receives recycled water as will be described hereinafter. The emulsion leaves through a flow conduit or pipe 14 connected to the intake of a high pressure pump 16 that discharges the mixture through a pipe 17 connected to the coils 18 of a heat exchanger. The coils 18 receive heat from a main condenser column 19 to be described further hereinafter, and the emulsion is further heated by flowing through a pipe 21 mounted in the enclosure 22 of the heating unit 23. The pipe 21 includes a heat exchanger coil 24 mounted in the upper portion of the enclosure 22.

The portion of the processor including the outlet of the pump 16, the pipe 17, the coil 18, the pipe 21 and the coil 24 may be referred to as the low-temperature-high-pressure (LTHP) portion of the system. At the emulsifier 12, the coal and the water may be at essentially ambient pressure and temperature, whereas in the coil 24 the temperature and the pressure may be increased to approximately 250 DEG C. and 500 to 700 psi (relative pressure). The pressure in the LTHP portion is a function of the temperature and the volume of the pipe 21, and in this portion the coal becomes hydrated or saturated with water. The rate of flow of the emulsion and the length of the tube should be adjusted so that there is about a twenty minute dwell time in the high pressure part of the processor, to allow sufficient time for the reaction under high pressure. The high pressure keeps volatile components dissolved and in the solution. The operating parameters of temperature, pressure, the flow of velocity and the dwell time must be balanced to produce the above dwell time and pressure and to keep the particles in suspension.

The outlet of the coil 24 is connected to a valve 26 that acts as a differential pressure regulator. The outlet 27 of the valve 36 opens into an expansion container 28 wherein the pressure is reduced almost instantly to between approximately 0 and 200 psi (relative pressure). The incoming material is also quickly heated to approximately 350 DEG to 500 DEG C. A portion of the system including the container 28 may be referred to as the high-temperature-low-pressure (HTLP) portion of the processor. The sudden drop in the pressure combined with the sharp increase in temperature causes the slurry to separate into solids and volatile gas. The gas leaves the container through an outlet pipe 29 connected to the upper end of the container 28 and the solids fall to the bottom of the container 28 where they are removed by, for example, an auger 31. In the case where coal is fed into the processor, coke is removed and temporarily stored in a lower bin 32.

The container 28 of the HTLP portion is heated by a gas burner 33 mounted around the bottom of the container 28 within the enclosure 22. A tube 34 receives a gas product of the processor and feeds it to the burner 33. The container 28 and the burner 33 are mounted in the enclosure 22 along with the coil 24 and the pipe 21, and consequently the burning gas heats these components. The burner exhaust is discharged through a chimney portion 36 of the enclosure 22, the pipe 21 extending through the chimney portion to make maximum utilization of the heat.

The gas in the outlet pipe 29 is fed to the interior of the previously mentioned main condenser column 19 where the pressure and the temperature are regulated to cause water and oil to condense and separate from the volatile components which remain in a gaseous state. Regulation is accomplished by a heat exchanger including a first coil 41 mounted within the chimney portion 36 of the enclosure 22, and a second coil 42 which encircles the condenser column 19. Pipes 43 connect the two coils 41 and 42 and a regulator pump 44 circulates a heat exchange fluid (such as oil) through the coils to transfer heat from the chimney portion 36 to the column 19 as needed.

The oil and the water move downwardly through a trap 46 to a reservoir 47 where they naturally separate due to their different weights. A first pump 48 and tubes 49 remove the oil to a storage tank 51. A second pump 5 and tubes 53 remove the water and pass it through a sulfur removal unit 54 and a control valve 56 to the emulsifier 12, thereby recycling the water.

The relatively hot volatile gas moves upwardly through an upper portion 61 of the main or primary condenser column 19, the heat exchanger coil 18 extending around the upper portion 61 so that the slurry in the LTHP part of the system is heated by the gas leaving the column 19. Connected to the upper end of the main condenser column 19 is a pipe 62 which feeds the hot volatile gas to a series of secondary condenser columns 63, 64 and 65. The gas gradually decreases in temperature and increases in pressure as it moves through the secondary columns, and the pressure and temperature determine the condensate drawn off in each condenser stage. In this specific example, the gas is at about atmospheric pressure and 180 DEG C. entering the first stage 63 and kerosine is produced and drawn off to a tank 67. A condenser pump 68 connects the two stages 63 and 64 and gas enters the stage 64 at about atmospheric pressure and 110 DEG C., and toluene is drawn off and fed to a tank 69. Another pump 71 connects the stages 64 and 65 and the gas enters the stage 65 at atmospheric pressure and 30 DEG C., and gasoline is drawn off to a tank 72.

Any remaining gas is fed to a storage tank 73 from the last condenser stage 65, and the previously mentioned tube or pipe 34 is connected to receive gas from the tank 73 for operating the burner 33. Another tube 74 is connected to the tube 34 and the storage tank 73 and is connected to receive a combustible gas from a commercial source (not illustrated). By this arrangement, the processor may be started in operation utilizing gas from the commercial source. Once the processor is running and producing gas, the tube 74 to the commercial source may be turned off and the burner 33 operated by gas produced by the processor. Of course, if the processor produces more gas than can be utilized to power the processor, the surplus gas may be drawn off and sold commercially.

Thus, the system receives coal and, without producing pollution, convertsthe coal into a number of valuable products. The coke in the bin 32 is a valuable source of low pollution heat; the quality and purity of the coke is a function of the temperature in the heating unit 23, the purest coke being produced at the high temperature of about 500 DEG C. The sulfur removed by the unit 54 may also have commercial value, and the oil in the container 51 may find use as, for example, heating oil.

After the HTLP unit the coal slurry is chemically reformed and no longer has the physical attributes of the original coal. The pressure in the HTLP unit or container 28 determines the type of liquid-gas products produced in the main and secondary condenser columns. For example, a low pressure (about 0 psi relative) produces light oils rich in aromatic hydrocarbons; higher pressures (about 200 psi relative) produces heavier oils richer in asphaltenes. Because volatilization is the result of heat gain in the unit 23, the majority of the heat is contained in the volatile gas which flows to the main condenser coil, and part of the heat is given up to the coil 18 to heat the incoming coal slurry. The rate at which the gas travels up the main condenser column 19 is determined by the pressure in the container 28 which in turn can be adjusted by the operator using the pump-valve 26. The pressures in the secondary condenser stages 63, 64 and 65 may be controlled by the operator using the pumps 68 and 71. Higher pressure results in lower temperature required to liquefy the volatile gas components, thus requiring less energy for cooling needed in the liquification process.

While the foregoing specific example relates to the reformation of coal, any other organic or inorganic material may be used, which can be chemically reformed into other products by varying the temperature and the pressure.

As another example, instead of coal, soybeans may be used, and a lower pressure of less than about 100 psi (relative pressure) in the LTHP unit would be necessary because soybeans tend to absorb water until they are saturated. In the HTLP unit, the pressure can be adjusted to about 0 to 200 psi (relative) in order to control the molecular weight of the oil desired to be produced. The remainder of the system would be essentially as described previously with respect to coal.

When processing coal, the process liquid may be plain water or a solution of water plus calcium carbonate, sodium or calcium hydroxide. For organic material other than coal, one may use acid hydrolysis utilizing carbonic acid plus water. The processor may also be used to convert HDPE plastic to oil or a 50% mass to mass mixture of plastic and coal may be run in oil of five barrels per ton of coal processed.

It should be apparent from the foregoing that a novel and improved processor, which may be referred to as a thermal depolymerization processor (TDP), has been provided. The processor may be operated to convert a variety of materials into useful and valuable products. For example, products such as garbage, leaves and grass which otherwise would create environmental problems may be converted to useful products, thereby avoiding the need for landfills and incinerators. The processor may be built in various sizes such as a small unit for a single family home to a large unit for use by a municipality or a large hospital.

While a gas heater has been disclosed for heating the process materials, it will be apparent that other heat sources may be utilized. The valves, pumps, etc. may be operate by hand or by a computerized automatic control.
Data supplied from the esp@cenet database - l2

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