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?
Even better. Because the process worked on pretty much anything that contained hydrocarbons, it could be used on an incredible range of waste streams. Plastics, old tires, food-processing byproducts, raw sewage, etc. For one of my classes back in college I wrote up a paper on why it should be used as part of municipal wastewater treatment systems.
If handled right, this thing could have changed sanitation as we know it, while helping make the US a little more energy-independent. But the business decisions the company made were bad enough, I later used it in a business-management class as an example of how having a great product does NOT equal having a great business.