Posted on 12/08/2004 9:30:48 AM PST by ckilmer
You need to tie half your brain behind your back to think like a California City. Grant money does not go into the General Fund, and would certainly not come in the same Fiscal Year as the hire. The procurer's salary comes from the General Fund, which is already running a deficit which means layoffs. If you hire a non-Union employee while laying off Union Employees you're not gonna get the City Council of a California municipality to agree.
Until another City, like Philadelphia according to the article, works out all the kinks and demonstrates a track record, our City Council will view this as Pie-in-the-sky. They want short term solutions, and just don't understand how much revenue this will generate.
Unless you get a grant to hire the grant procurer...
We do have enough managers that write grant applications that we may still see this happen, it's just not quite as easy as snapping fingers.
Thanks for the link but that still doesn't make sense. 6,900 million tons/yr of dry sludge would mean that every US citizen would have to consume at least 130 pounds of groceries every day.
Where is all this crud coming from? I think somebody slipped up by a few orders of magnitude.
I did a little research and it looks like the numbers at the source you cited were off by a factor of a thousand. The EPA report that it was based on claimed 6.9 million tons per year for the US, not 6,900 million tons. I couldn't get the original EPA report but I found about three other links that cite the same report:
http://mailman.cloudnet.com/pipermail/compost/2000-March/006446.html
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:XkBQDW6phI4J:www.environmental-expert.com/magazine/destech/jrst/Regulations%2520for%2520Biosolids,%2520Iranpour.pdf+%22EPA530-R-99-009%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.safewatergroup.org/whats_new/synthetic_organic_pollutants.htm
So, anyway, that figures to be about 1/3 of a pound of dry sludge per person per day. You can't run your car very far on that.
Yes they are; it is about 85% efficient, or so the claims go.
If they can turn sewer waste in water/oil then every city will be a Dubai.
Is the "wood" in wood waste inclusive of construction demolition debris?
Precisely. Rural areas of the US could become oil exporters from the agricultural waste alone.
Then they'd have 50K whole turkeys to run through the machine.
Sucks don't it!
Good old Yankee ingenuity is at it again - I'm all for it!
Get Duncan Hunter off his azzz and get a line item in the federal budget. If they can waste money on the Corp for Public Broadcasting they can help with this.
Actually offal is guts and the inedible stuff.
Hope this pans out in the very near future...
Is the "wood" in wood waste inclusive of construction demolition debris?
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likely that would be the last place they'd go. the concrete plaster sheetrock iron and nails wouldn't work. the wood would be ok but it would be too expensive culling it from the other stuff.
I'd guess asphalt shingles would make decent feedstock.
Anything into Oil (Change trash & sewage to oil for $15@barrel)
DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 5 | May 2003 | Brad Lemley
Posted on 08/20/2003 9:34:41 AM EDT by ckilmer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/967192/posts
It’s nearly 4 years later (since this article). Anyone know what the current state of progress is? Found the following in Wikipedia but it doesn’t really give an updated progress report:
Thermal depolymerization
Main article: Thermal depolymerization
Thermal depolymerization (TDP) is an important new process for the reduction of complex organic materials into light crude oil. These materials may include non oil-based waste products, such as old tires, offal, wood and plastic. The process mimics the natural geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, long chain polymers of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons.
Conversion efficiencies can be very high: Working with turkey offal as the feedstock, the process proved to have yield efficiencies of approximately 85%. That is, the end products contained 85% of the energy contained in the inputs to the process - most notably the energy content of the feedstock, but also accounting for electricity for pumps and natural gas for heating.
It has been estimated that in the United States, agricultural waste alone could be used to produce 3.7 billion barrels of oil per year. The USA currently consumes 7.5 billion barrels (232.5 billion US gallons) of oil per year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
In the last year sometime, there was a Pop Sci article about research using electrical plasma bursts to process waste into gaseous fuel (the inorganics settle out, that includes the metals and such). But anyway, check out the link to “Anything Into Oil?”, and the subsequent links in that topic.
How does a 3 year old post become breaking news?
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