Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts…
http://www.discover.com/may_03/gthere.html?article=featoil.html
So… will this work? If it does, what does it mean? Is this going to put a kibosh on Fuel Cell production? Seems pretty darn important to me.
I read the article in the paper version of the mag. The really cool thing is that it not only produces fuel, but it also disposes waste.
I do get a “too good to be true” vibe from it though. Hopefully some Dopers with a chemistry background can confirm how plausible this is.
I thought it was already proven. However, the plant they tout in the article only produces about 500,000 barrels of oil & diesel a year (rougly 1370 barrels a day). Considering that America uses about 20 million barrels a day that is not too big of a dent. Even the alaskian wildlife oil reserves have around 6 billion barrels, enough to give 2 million barrels a day for 8 years.
We’d need 1000 plants up & running (at the rate of the Carthage plant) to even dent foreign dependence on oil or equal the oil we get from Venezuela.
It would be interesting to see the plants use up waste products and landfill materials to make oil.
By that i mean the process already works and i’m referring to the plant in Carthage, Missouri.
In other news, President Bush announced his plan today for Turkey.
This would be so cool if it works like it’s supposed to.
Once the patents expire, I would think these type of facilities would crop up everywhere. Municipal waste handling is a huge cost drain, and any chance to recapture even a little bit of money would definitely be exploited. I could easily see thousands of plants in the US alone.
What I hope would happen eventually is that waste/sewage becomes a viable commodity. This would give financial incentives to countries with poor waste/sewage handling systems to come up to speed. Win-win for a lot of people since raw sewage is a potential environmental and health threat.
I really hope this technology lives up to its promises.
If I may intrude, and if this is interesting to you guys here:
Right now I just heard vaguely from a talk forum in BBC that the U.S. military is now touting a new line about its war on Iraq.
No, it’s no longer liberation but an actual invasion and a consequent occupation.
(Because the Iraqi peoples are getting more and more loud in demanding the departure of U.S. troops, even the U.S. Arab allies neighboring Iraq.)
I might be wrong though.
So the plot thickens.
Once you do something from supposedly a noble purpose, but in fact for a less than noble one, them you keep on proceeding by trial and error.
And lose all credibility in the process.
Susma Rio Seo
Susma
that was very…uh,…interesting…
getting back to the OP, it reminds me of an old R. Crumb comic strip where he predicts that in the future, “all the old stuff is ground up and made into new stuff!!”
Yeah, okay. Read the OP, Susma. So we’re going to see more and more of these plants, if they work. Oil goes to 15 a barrel.
What does this do to the middle east? Greenhouse?
How does compare to biodiesel and similar technologies being used now?
Well, Biodiesel is an oil-like substance. Works in diesels. This appears to be honest to goodness light sweet oil. The kind you really want.