The “turkey guts to oil” facility got shut down due to multiple complaints about the smell. There are strong indications that the odors were coming from someplace other than that facility, but they were fined for it anyway to the point where they couldn’t keep it running.
The guy who developed the process may have been a decent inventor, but he was a terrible businessman. I actually started following his progress back in the 90’s. The system he created could be scaled down small enough you could haul the whole machine on a single semi truck. But, he focused entirely on large-scale facilities the size of a city block. I really think if he’d put more effort into the smaller machines he would have done great. But he didn’t, and he went bankrupt some time after the turkey guts facility got shut down. The patents were bought out by a company in Canada that claims to be working to clean up the environment, but which has a history of sitting on patents that would actually accomplish that.
A lot of those patents expired over the last few years. I keep hoping someone will pick the project up and run with it.
Interesting info about the turkey to oil thing. I actually had a reminder on my calendar program to take a look at the site once a year, because it sounded interesting, and surely could have been made more general than just turkeys.
I agree that it might have been better to focus on smaller scale processing. If you had a complete process that could fit on a semi, you could easily go to where the resources were. Also, something that small could easily be installed on-site at rendering plants. Why do everything centrally when you don’t have to?