Forgive me if this has been discussed previously. (I did a search and came up empty.)
May’s Discover magazine and yesterday’s ABC News had a report about a company (http://www.changingworldtech.com/home.html) that claims to be able to convert virtually ANY Carbon based substance (ie. old tires, computer components, poultry farm waste, excrement, etc.) into useable oil for energy.
It seems to me, if these claims are for real, this should be world changing news politically, environmentally and economically.
In the news report, the lone sceptic presented didn’t have a problem with the process itself, which he said has been around for some time, but more with the cost involved which to this point has made it cheaper to drill rather than convert waste products.
The company CEO, Brian Appel (formerly of Ticketmaster and Russell Stover Candies) says they’ve worked out the cost issue. HMMMMM.
Over-eager and early, I’d say. They may have some good ideas about solving the cost problems (which are huge), but putting those ideas into action will take some doing.
Yes, you can make “oil” (meaning “a substance which is mostly chemically similar to petroleum”) out of nearly anything that has carbon and hydrogen in it. This is not new.
If the cost “issue” were truly worked out, they’d likely be selling it competitively.
This is big news with some hype. (By the way, discover magazine is the BEST magazine ever!)
I think you may need to re-look at their ‘resolution’ of the cost issues. While it is true that they have got the production costs to a point where it is feasable and profitable, oil drilling isn’t in any danger yet.
IIRC the cost per barrel looking something like this (this is production cost, not sale on open market price)
Their Manufacture Process= $18/barrel
Drilling in Texas= $15/barrel
Drilling in Alaska/russia= $10/barrel
Drilling in Mexico/S. America= $8/barrel
Drilling in N. Atlantic= $7.50/barrel
Drilling in middle East= $5/barrel
Drilling in Iraq= $3.50/barrel
They believe they can get the process down to around $12/barrel by further industializing (going bulk) and sticking to certain ‘seed’ products that produce more oil than other carbon products (i think Turkey offal was one of the better ones they mentioned). Which could make it competitive enough to not need to drill in alaska any more, but with GW it’s still gonna happen. But it will probably not be competitive with Opec for a long time (until Opec’s costs rise).
From a purely science standpoint though. It’s awesome. And definately something good to do with all the CRAP we just throw away.
Stupid question: Why is there no enviornmental group going completely nuts over this? I never heard of this technique before, and I’m a relatively news-centric person. I would think that once the extremists knew that we didn’t have to rely on drilled oil that they’d be all over this.
What kind of efficiencies are we talking about here? You have to apply heat & pressure to the waste slurry to create the faux petroleum. How much energy (presumably from non-petroleum sources) do you have to apply to get a barrel of manufactured oil?
I would hazard to guess that many still don’t want cars to run on oil. It would help to stop for the drilling, but not for the pollution caused by the use of the fules.
If you’re looking for more info, search on Bio-diesel. The largest source of raw material is used vegetable oil (such as is used to deep-fry at McDonald’s). It’s basically free and 100% oil. The cars aren’t running on the oil, but on dielsel fuel refined from it.
One company that has made it an economic reality:
Recently on the radio they were interviewing a guy who was mixing batches of bio-diesel up in his garage and running his car on it. Put me in mind of “Mr. Fusion” from Back to the Future.
From the article and what I’ve read doing my own digging around, the machinery consumes 15 percent of the raw material to fuel the process. So very very roughly if you put in 100 gallons worth of oil and gas in chicken guts in one end you’ll end up with 85 gallons of useable oil and gas at the other… it more or less fuels itself. Evidently this is a huge breakthrough and is possible because this method of using Thermal Depolymerization doesn’t involve extremely high temperatures or removing the water content of the fuel in order to break it down. Previous methods were extremely energy intensive because you had to dry out the feed stock and use very high temperatures and pressures to break the dried feedstock into it’s component parts. If this iisn’t hype, and it is a real and refined process it’s world changing IMO. Distributed oil production. Sewer treatment plants become energy goldmines. Aggricultural waste and runnoff ceases to be an environmental nightmare and becomes an asset. We stop digging up carbon to put into our atmosphere and could possible attain a closed system. It just goes on and on. They’re building the first full scale plant to handle the turkey wastes, I’m sure many many eyes will be watching.
According to the article, the product can be identical to drilled oil (minus of course the occurance of dirt in un-filtered crude plus the occurance of turkey guts or whatever the seed product is in the produced unfiltered version), but the exact amount of end product is determined by the seed product. Some products, like I believe PVC pipe do not produce much oil, but will result in chemicals like hydrochloric acid and carbon black.
It appears that they will likely have the 1st full scale plant on-line by the end of this year. Look for them to start selling product asap. They’ve got some pretty heavy batters behind it, so they’ll be pushing as soon as they can. However, due to the nature of the product (raw material) you and I won’t knowingly see it any time soon.
Oh, and you might want to recheck the Altoids next time you look, they come wrapped in plastic in my area.