My question is, what with the coming decline in oil production and all, and the press toward alternative technologies, why haven’t we heard about this before? They’ve been testing this since 1992. Why isn’t this splashed across the front pages of the newspapers, is there a catch - is it too good to be true?
Turning garbage into fuel seems so obvious, and the process described seems very simple.
According to the article, this technology could supply all of our energy needs and more. Why spend all that money on hydrogen fuel cells, if you could just use garbage?
Any links to critiques of this technology would be appreciated. I couldn’t find any, and it appears this story hasn’t made its way into the mainstream press.
It sounds like that discovery article is more of a “this is what the inventor claims” rather than a process that has actually been tested and monitored by outside interests. I wouldn’t be surprised if #1, the inventor is overstating the efficiency, and #2, there aren’t quite a few more challenges to bring the Oil Cost per barrel lower than what it costs the Oil Drillers now, but thats all really IMHO. I don’t know if you can get much of a factual answer unless somebody here has actually been involved with the development.
None of the articles that I skimmed (note that - I skimmed so I could have missed it) mentioned when this will go main-stream. This leads me to believe that we are still many years away.
What I’ve been gathering from reading about this process is that the first practical attempts to put it to use are only just beginning, so the actual efficency is probebly in doubt. It appears that, in general, the process they are using isn’t all that new, but that they modified it to handle wet waste (like sewage or, in the case of the pilot plant, turkey bits). the previous attempts to do this work with dry waste, but the energy needed to run the process was more than you could get out.
What I find interesting to consider is, even if the process turns out to be half as efficent as claimed, it would still produce fuel oil at market prices. Better still, it would eliminate the need to fill landfills up with agricultiral waste, and might be a way to treat animal sewage (like hog farms) or even municiple sewage. In a region like the Northeast, that could potentially mean that you’d have a souce of home heating oil locally, which could keep prices down, or at least supply.
What I’ve been wondering about myself is, how well would this work as a potential way to clean up or eliminate the need for landfills. I find myself wondering about setting up a massive plant at a current landfill site, and all new garbage going into this machine to be processed out into oil, gas, water and heavy metals. If it works, then why not start dumping existing waste from the landfill into the thing 24/7?
Obviously, the Discover article facinated me. I’m a big pie in the sky person, where “someday” a tech will come around that will change something for the better if you wait long enough. If this works as advertised, I like to imagine a future where a huge chunk of waste products are not an issue anymore.
It seems that it’s already in some sort of testing in Philly, and just about ready to go at that poultry-processing plant in the midwest. Cool if it works as advertised.
Probably, until a serious working model had been put into operation, everyone would have thought these people were crackpots (like 90% of the alternative energy promises). That point has only now been reached, and they’re just now testing the true operational efficiency (i.e., real-world, running it all the time at full volumes … do the economic projections still hold up?).
Sure, everything seems simpler once it’s been done… But they point out that they turned the basic refining process on its head, by (a) keeping the water in the hydrocarbon-rich material for a long time, instead of driving it out early on, and (b) using multiple steps, instead of some one-stage, high-heat, “magic” process.
Well … it always pays (society) to develop multiple fuel sources/technologies. After all, look at all of the options we have just for central home/H2O heating (oil, natural gas, LP gas, electric, passive solar …). There’s room for plenty of options. And likewise, we have multiple sources for crude oil (Texas, Alaska, offshore ocean drilling, foreign nations in multiple locations) that smooth out problems in any one sector. Finally, this thing isn’t in operation yet. Who knows how long it will take to go into effect? Will the large-scale economics work out? Will it suffer a lukewarm reception like methanol, biodiesel, and other greener fuel sources have? Will every farm in the USA really dump their ag waste into this? Maybe fuel cells (an old technology) will come into play first, or maybe the oil retrieved from this process will even be used to provide the hydrogen for fuel-cell cars. No one knows the future yet.
BTW–maybe the coolest thing (if the device works): no more greenhouse gases.
Yes, we’ll be continually burning hydrocarbon fuels and producing carbon dioxide, but we won’t be digging/drilling up any more carbon sinks from underground (coal/oil) to add to the amount we’ve already dumped out in the last century. So the total amount of carbon above ground should remain the same.
I wonder if something like this could be licensed for disposal of human corpses (- I’m not thinking Logan’s Run or Soylent Green - as an alternative to cremation after natural death; I’m sure some people would think it a good idea)
Something tells me that it won’t happen, if just because of normal human squemishness about the idea of using home heating oil that used to be your neighbor.
That being said, it sounds like it could be a huge boon to getting rid of large numbers of animal carcasass. Since the Mad Cow scare in Europe, one article on this pointed out that there are large numbers of animals that have died that used to be rendered into animal feed, but that’s not happening anymore, so it’s basically off to a landfill or burned. If you can turn them into oil, water and sterile minerals, then it’s a problem solved.
I read the article when I got the print version, pretty interesting. Past attempts had failed because of the large energy input needed, but they seem to have found a loophole of some kind allowing much improved efficiency. I don’t remember the details, but I guess if it’s online you can all read it. It’s currently in an advanced state of R&D, they can do this with tons at a time and I think the production volume is projected as something like hundreds of tons. They seem to have proof of concept, not clear how far off commercialization is.
Mad Cow is caused by prions, which are not considered to be living organisms, and survive cooking. So I don’t know how or if you can sterilize it out. I would be suspect of water resulting from processing a mad cow.
IIRC, Prions are little bits of mutant protein that fold the wrong way, causing a sort of domino effect of mis-folding when they get joined up with other protein chains.
I would think it almost certain that this process would utterly destroy them.
Dude, prions survive cooking, but this kind of molecular reforming ain’t cooking – 500 ºF, in the aqueous step, and 600 “pounds” pressure (I assume he means psi). Prions are just a carbon source to a process like this.
This has been discussed on my Board a little bit. Some of the claims made by the company on their website are disturbing, and some are just plain inaccurate, such as the ones dealing with coal and tires going through the process.
A friend at EPRI who studies these sorts of things has said to me today that “they’re interesting from a pilot scale; their cost figures are highly, highly extrapolated and rely on a lot of assumptions. Ask them for a complete levelized annual cost analysis, including capital cost for the plant and see if it’s still under $30 a barrel. I’ll bet it’s not…sometimes these people rely on Green Power Tax Credit assumptions that don’t actually exist, sometimes to the outrageous level of 10 mills/kWh.” (paraphrased from phone conversation)
I deal with these sorts of technologies all the time, and I have at least 3 projects where I have evaluated them in pilot to actual “usable” scale (5-50 MW). There’s always some catch - such as, “cost figures don’t add up”, “bench or pilot-scale doesn’t scale to usable figures”, or “doesn’t account for real-life problems sufficiently”. So, not to slag on their idea, but I’ve read everything available on their site, in Google, and in print, and there’s not nearly enough information to make any sort of really qualitative judgement as to whether it works, or can come even close to the price figure they mention. So I remain “unconvinced”.
In one of the posts about this subject i pointed out the fact that the Carthage Missouri plant, which cost $20 million and which is talked about heavily in the article, would only produce about 1400 barrels of oil & diesel a day. America uses around 18 million barrels of oil a day. You’d need a thousand plants just to put a dent in foreign oil imports.
But from a waste handling position, it might work out for them. They no longer have to pay to have waste hauled away, and then can sell some of the product. In the end, there is (theoretically) no trash.
As for the size of the plant, it’s probebly a matter of scale. Assuming that the process scales up without massive cost increases, I’d think that a single, factory sized facility would produce a lot less end product that one, say, that is designed to handle municiple waste.
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