Posted on 04/21/2006 7:03:48 PM PDT by Copernicus
Anything into Oil
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
By Brad Lemley
Photography by Tony Law
Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.
In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.
Really.
"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."
Any experts on Free Republic care to comment?
Best regards,
While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock.------??? SOILENT GREEN????
The forum has had many articles on this subject. Generally they, and also the rest of the assortment of threads on Peak Oil, oil shale, tar sands, solar, some musician who stops at every McDonalds for used cooking oil, and various solutions ranging from nationalization of the oil industry to eliminating taxation, and 'gas is at $x.xx at my local station' appear when the price of oil has recently moved upward, which seems to be happening frequently now.
I'm not an expert, but this thing has been postd a bunch of times. It's a really old story. The Carthage plant was built and it immediately stunk up the whole town. Evidently, the process produces a putrid smell that required a bunch of additional investment to try to eliminate. It still stinks. Also, the efficiency predictions were wildly optimistic, and the process to this point, from the last I read, is still a net energy loser. If I remember correctly, the investors are now looking to gov't to bail them out.
This has been around for a few years as they refine an dperfect their process. If it economical, then in the capitalist system, you can bet that it will become reality.
Now, if each turkey yields 10 lbs of offal, 600 million tons of turkey offal [every year] would mean 120 billion turkeys - and are there that many?
Who will block production or use first, the GOP or the RATS?
Many thanks. I used several search terms but found nothing.
Best regards,
Huh?
And that offal is offal smelly.
Tons... not lbs.
Here's the story on a previous thread, but with photos:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1611689/posts
Kind of like Back to the Future with the portable plutonium producer that converted garbage to plutonium.
This is the real deal. The Warren Buffett family has invested well over $1 billion dollars in this technology so far, they expect to invest another $3 billion in the next several years. Warren Buffett's son, and heir apparent, is personally managing this technology.
This was first shown nationally in a Wired magazine article. Don't know where that is, but the following was written up in the weeks following the first Wired article:
Newsday
http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2004/Changing-World-Technologies4apr04.htm
"If it sounds to good to be true,...."
I've heard of many similar cheap energy sources, they all seem to end up costing more than projected, but they all are feasible.
We simply have to wait until the cost of crude oil increases enough to make them viable.
Terrorists, ambulance chasers, unscrupulous defense attorneys, environmentalists, Charles Schumer, Ted Kennedy, Hugo Chavez, Child molesters, rapists, murderers, activist judges......
Each could finally do something useful which would benefit humanity.
Coal to oil is already economic at $35 per gallon. See SASOL, a multi billion dollar south african company that has been doing this for 20 years. Of course, that means we would actually have to mine the coal. To do that, we will have to battle thru the hoards of greens and dems who don't want our country to use any energy, ever.
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