New Fuel Source Grows on the Prairie: With Oil Prices Up, Biomass Looks More Feasible

My wife and I drove a diesel wagon through Germany, Czech Republic and Austria in 2000. I estimated we got 45 miles to the gallon.

That's with a lot of city and small town driving as well as 90 mph on the Autobahn.

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"Why is it necessary to go through the intermediary of producing alcohol, when it is possible to make kerogen DIRECTLY from biomass? Take just about ANY kind of organic material, put it in a sealed retort in anaerobic conditions, and heat it up to about 900° F., for about two hours, maintaining a pressure of two atmospheres. The product is the aforementioned kerogen, a precursor of most of the fractions which are extracted from crude oil, and some slightly brackish water."

How much energy would that take? How much energy would it take from the time you prepare the fields to plant the biomass up to the point where it is finally converted into the end product you can pump into your vehicle? You can produce more energy from ethanol than it takes to make it, but not by much, and you don't have to get the temperature anywhere near as high as 900 degrees, especially if you distill your "beer" under negative pressure, in a vacuum.

That sounds like a lot of work....

his is just a very rapid acceleration of the process that goes on, continuously, in nature. Petroleum IS a renewable resource.

Your process is basically the same as the oil-from-turkeyguts (and potentially a lot of other feedstocks) being done in Carthage, MS by Changing World Technologies. The process was called "thermal depolymerization", but now they just call it "thermal conversion". Find the April 2006 Discover magazine for an update.

TKDietz, see post 25 and below.

Anything Into Oil

(this looks like the complete article)

Yeah, I read about thermal depolymerization (sp?). It sounds really interesting, but the company behind it is being very secretive with regard to particulars on things like energy balance and production costs. I know there is a Butterball turkey plant in Missouri operating an experimental thermal depolymerization plant right now where they are turning waste material from the turkey processing plant into some kind of oil that can be used in place of diesel, but there is no information out as to how well it's working, how much it costs to do it, how much energy it's taking, how much negative impact it has on the environment, or anything like that. When you look at Changing World Technologies website everything they say is rosy and positive, sounding almost too good to be true, but real details are seriously lacking. It may be that they have viable technology that will help us fulfill a major portion of our fuel needs with fuel made from waste material, or it may be that what they have is technology that isn't environmentally sound and that will never be cost effective enough. They have a really interesting concept, but there just isn't enough known about it to know if it's going to amount to anything of great importance with respect to our energy concerns. We'll just have to wait and see.

Did you read the article? It seemed to be fairly presented on both the pros and cons of the process.

I must admit that I read that after I made my post because I thought I had already read that particular article and didn't realize I hadn't until I clicked on the link after I posted. This is interesting stuff, the kind of thing we should be looking into. I'm glad to see they'll be experimenting with it in Europe as well. New technology tends to get better the more it is put into use.

It could be that this ends up being a great way to produce fuel that turns out to be cost effective and provides the added benefit of helping us deal with the mountains of trash and other waste materials we produce. This type of thing along with things like ethanol and biodiesal might go a long way toward reducing some of the dependence we have on foreign oil. I don't know that there will ever be one single replacement for petroleum based fuels, at least not in the next few decades. In the next few decades I see us diversifying into several different fuels that work with existing engines, even if in some cases they require slight modification. We'll still be drilling for more oil and using the dwindling reserves, but more and more we'll have to rely on alternative fuels, none of which thus far seem to be a perfect replacement for petroleum based fuels, both in terms of costs and on terms of production capabilities. We could never grow enough feedstock for either ethanol or biodiesel to replace petroleum based fuels, and neither of those is anywhere close to being as cheap to produce as petroleum based fuels. Fuel produced from oil shale will be more important in the future, but like ethanol and biodiesel, it is costly and requires significant amounts of energy to produce, and with existing methods of extraction of fuel from oil shale there are serious environmental concerns.

This thermal depolymerization or thermal conversion process is also very costly. If it really is only costing them $80 a bbl, that's still high. That's 42 gallons, and I don't know how many gallons of gasoline equivalent they could get out of that. It varies with crude oil considerably, and the more gasoline they try to get from a barrel of crude, the more complex and costly the refining process. I've heard the average is 19.5 gallons of gasoline from each 42 gallon barrel, plus several more gallons of heating oil, tar, asphalt base, etc., but I don't know if that is true. Anyway, that $80 42 gallon barrel is not going to turn into 42 gallons of something you can just put in your standard car and drive, it's going to be significantly less than that. On the other hand, $80 a barrel is not that much more expensive than crude from the ground and if that $80 is the costs without subsidies, that's not too bad because as they perfect the process they might be able to bring costs down even further and be more competitive with petroleum based fuels, especially since they are now able to actually get subsidies. I'm still taking a wait and see stance on this because it all seems a little too good to be true. I don't know that I trust their numbers just yet. We'll see how things pan out over the next few years as more and more of these plants get up and running.