Discover magazine reports on a process for turning agricultural and human waste into crude oil, minerals, and water:
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.
It’s 85% efficient, and plants are already on-line that process 200 tons of turkey guts a day, producing 600 barrels of oil. Processing all 600 million tons of America’s agricultural waste would produce 4 billion barrels of crude, essentially what we import each year. Bad news for the House of Saud, good news for America. And oh, yeah, no more messy toxic waste either.
Bye-bye, Osama.
One of my readers has expressed skepticism, saying the numbers don’t work out right. 7 barrels equals a ton, and the math doesn’t seem to jibe with everything he’s saying. But this could simply be a misprint.
In any case, the conversion efficiency seems almost too good to be true. But if it really works, it’s going to change everything.
Of course, there will be those who point out that this will do nothing to reduce our dependence on oil. Can’t please everyone I guess.
600 barrels of oil from 200 tons of turkey guts is 42%. In the human example, gas and oil were 25%, so the difference may have something to do with the fact that the human example includes lots more muscle tissue than the turkey guts.
The numbers work out fine if you are thinking in terms of BTUs instead of grams. The 85% efficiency rating means that 85 BTUs out of every 100 that go into the machine come out as a usable product (light oil, natural gas). The remaining 15% is used to heat the process. In that sense, water and minerals are merely byproducts of the process, and shouldn’t be factored into the equation.
Not only does this give Big Agribusiness an even better “in” to the fuel business than ethanol does, it has benefits for Big Oil too, enabling the recycling of the asphaltic residue out of the bottom of their crackers into usable material.
Being able to make oil for less than current market price, means that there are big profits and quick paybacks for investors, not that oil prices will come down.
Remember the law of supply and demand? This is a LAW at nearly the same level as the law of gravity, however much governments wish otherwise.
If you can make a product which sells for $25/barrel for eight dollars/barrel you make a tidy profit and recover your initial investment quickly. If you increase production in excess of the demand which supports the $25 price, the price will go down, at which point the folks in Riyadh, Caracas, &c. will have to decide whether to cut their production to keep up the price or increase production and drive the price down further to keep up their cash flow. . .
This is definitely fishy. Just the issue of water content alone starts the warning bells: it takes a remarkable amount of energy to evaporate water- the company claims that they remove water under vacuum so it doesn’t require heat, but that is nonsense: water has a required “heat of vaporization” you must supply; there is no getting around the basic laws of thermodynamics. If you remove water at room temperature, you must supply energy or the substance will become quite cold. Another very bogus remark is that greenhouse gases won’t be an issue because “we can leave the oil in the ground. Well, duh: we only leave it in the ground becasue we’d be burning something in its place! A final concern: biomass that is protein (turkey offal) has lots of nitrogen by weight. If you somehow converted it to hydrocarbon, you’d also have lots of ammonia to deal with. Converting fatty acids to hydrocarbons is okay, but I don’t see how the proteins are handled.
Like many things that appear in popular science magazines, I get the feeling that this process might not get too far beyond pilot plants and specialty applications. Maybe I’m missing something, but there are so many questions marks here that my hoax-o-meter is flashing…
There is one thing in the whole article that truely peaks my interest. The pilot plant has already been built and different wastes have already been processed. They have already worked out the correct processing of the major different wastes, according to the article and the website. Finally, there is ‘big money’ investors that have poured over the initial research and put up the $$ to build a commercial plant. Im sure they have done serious homework before committing $20 mil.
Even if the potential oil recovery isn’t as good as it seems now, just the idea to effectively deal with problematic wastes (biohazard, tires, sewerage) is worth seriously looking into.
Definately something to keep an eye on!
I’m inetrested in this program. Can you send me more information about this TDT . Plus how much do we need to create this.