[ivanhoe116]

"Changing world technologies" industrial plant employs a process called thermal depolymerization which creates enormous heat and pressure and breaks up long carbon chains into short carbon chains or oil.

Hate to burst the ol' bubble, but exactly how much energy is required to "create enormous heat and pressure".

Smacks of the perpetual motion machine, what? The answer is in fossil fuel burning efficiency.

[kevkrom]

Hate to burst the ol' bubble, but exactly how much energy is required to "create enormous heat and pressure".

The conversion process is 85-90% efficient with regards of the total energy put into the system -- that energy includes the energy stored in the "feedstock" (in this case, turkey waste). From my understanding, once the process is kick-started, it is pretty much self-fueled by the products generated (while still producing additional oil and natural gas for sale).

[kevkrom]

For more deatils, see this white paper. From the energy balance description on page 8, the total inputs into the carthage system per hour are feedstocks (122.9 million BTU) and outside electricity (3.6 million BTU). Outputs include natural gas (1.4 million BTU), light crude oil (99.5 million BTU), and carbon (6.4 million BTU). There's also additional natural gas produced that feeds back into the system.

The total energy input into the system is 126.5 million BTU/hr, while the total energy output is 107.3 million BTU, which is 84.8% efficient. (They have additional plans to use water vapor to help heating that could increase efficiency to 90%.) However, when substracting the energy input from the feedstock, we get 2980% efficiency as compared t the amount of outside energy added to the system.

[AntiGuv]

You must've missed these parts of the article:

Thermal conversion generates no pollution, and requires no energy beyond the electricity the plant produces for itself...

...production costs are low enough that the plant's income is outstripping its operating expenses.

This is hardly a perpetual motion machine. Once the waste products are used in this manner, they are gone forever. It is merely a far more efficient means of harvesting the full potential from the resources we already have available.