Posted on 07/15/2009 7:14:27 AM PDT by Freeport
“Unless they grow their vegetation on site, it is too expensive to drive people’s yards clippings to their refinery and make a profit.”
This looks to me like the critical hole in this type of fuel source.
Here in the Midwest, there are a lot of cornstalks available in the fall. But they have to be baled and hauled to a plant somewhere.
Then you have to dispose of the spent corn stalks after they have been processed and fermented.
No, it works. People just complained about the smell and local regulators keep preventing expansion.
The most creative use of that technology would be to rid a city of solid waste in order to produce oil, minerals and distilled water. Get rid of sewage and produce power? A win on both accounts.
But it will take more time to get it working. This company is a big red flag for all of those “green” companies who have an idea which works, but not at a commercial level yet.
Even with a working, profitable site, Changing World Technologies still hasn’t been able to get a second site approved and built in the U.S.
You've got it backwards. You put the refinery where the city landfill is. I've often wondered why big cities with major garbage disposal problems weren't gasifying the waste. There is a LOT of fuel value in "trash".
So, now instead of paying my lawn guy to mow my lawn, he will pay me for the grass and sell it to Valero.
How about let’s not burn up a world food source anymore.
“Can’t you just picture God in heaven, looking down on us? He must be saying, “Listen, you losers. I put your energy IN the ground, so it doesn’t bother anyone. I put it UNDER the coasts, so it’s out of the way. I hid some of it BENEATH the ice, so I’d know Sarah would keep an eye on it. I also put it INSIDE your rocks, so even if you missed My first 9302 clues, at least you would break your neck on it, while walking through the parks. I figured a few broken bones might get your attention. But no...........And then (as a last resort) I gave you the recipe for nuclear power, and provided the ingredients to MAKE it! You people are hopeless. Lots of luck.”
Any of these turkeys ever heard of switchgrass?
They’ll just mandate everyone must bag their clippings and set them out for pick up on garbage day. The expense doesn’t matter, they’ll just pass it along to the taxpayer.
Yep, but you must admit that it *does* seem kinda obvious. Hell, the stuff is covering huge portions of the southern states. Barns, billboards, fences, slow-moving cows - all tangled in that green mess.
If they won't process it into fuel, there's an alternative. According to Alton Brown, the leaves are edible. Just don't pick them from near a roadway where herbicide may have been sprayed (as if anything short of Agent Orange would make kudzu flinch). Something to keep in mind, if times turn really tough.
Hey, can I get a home distillery so that I can make my own gas? I know we can’t but wouldn’t that just pi** a whole bunch of liberals off if someone came up with a way to make gas at home out of lawn clippings? I bet inside of two weeks we would see a bill making growing a lawn illegal!
Whoop!
Actually, a few years ago someone produced a cook book for Kudzu. It had jams, jellies, sauces, salads, etc. It might could still be found online.
I had heard that CWT’s problem was in turning a profit, even at the high prices for petroleum over the last few years.
Apparently those who produced the waste that became CWT’s feedstock jacked up their price once they saw something useful could be done with it.
Made no sense; there’s lots of waste that currently has to be thrown away - salmonella-contaminated recalled food, plastic water bottles, pine-beetle-killed trees, CAFO manure, and so on.
Yeah right! Just like the processes that promised to make diesel out of turkey crap, saw grass, and other bio-wastes, this one will not pan out either. These are all net energy losers and therefore will always be nore expensive to oil based products. If they truly lived up to their promises, we’d be independent of foreign oil
Heheh, pretty soon we'll be hearing about robots that find and process biowastes. In fact, they will probably be military robots that operate on the battlefield. And, BTW, since they are battlefield robots, they will probably "utilize" animal and human corpses, since there will be so much of that on the battlefield..
Yuck!
Who would ever have dreamed about that? I mean, unless you were a Sci-Fi movie writer or producer or something. Now THAT is so unrealistic....(shudder) Imagine if THOSE robots went wacky.....Wow!!
But what about all of the evil fertilizer and pesticide residues in the clippings? We will all have to have “organic” yards. Because of fire ants, my yard would be classified as a Superfund site.
Nah,the ants in grass clippings provide higher octane.
This is a development of the MixAlco process of anaerobic fermentation to generate mixed primary and secondary alcohols. Further processing apparently converts them to something similar to conventional gasoline.
No, I am talking about all of the pesticides and Round-up to kill crab grass, etc.....
Fertilizer is just another oxidant, and pesticide residues are just more carbon in a gasifier. Zero problem from either.
Actually, the process works. The issues they ran into were:
1) Environmental -- right or wrong, local residents complained about foul (no pun intedned) odors coming from the plant, and
2) Cost -- they had expected in the wake of "mad cow" issues that the feedstock would essentially be waste that would not cost them anything, but restrictions on feeding animal parts back to animals never happened. Additionally, they were never able to get the language changed that would have allowed them to claim biofuel tax credits.
Is that with or without taxes ???
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