Oil from Trash and other stuff.

Discover Magazine ^ | 4/24/03 | Brad Lemley

[scouse]

million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
By Brad Lemley
Photography by Tony Law

Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil.

Really.

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP.

The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores.

According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock.

If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.

[scouse]

For educational purposes only. Rest of story at address shown.

[org.whodat]

Ok, have that got that lead into gold thing worked out yet???

[RLK]

This is the kind of environmentalism I can live with.

[lmr]

Being in the waste business myself, I can see all the possible benefits from my company's perspective. However, 'Waste To Energy' or Waste to Useful Products seems to be distant from us at this point. I always hear uneducated goofs claiming that we can turn trash into electricity and coupled with recycling that one day people will get paid to dispose of their garbage as opposed to paying someone to haul it off.
Not much energy exists in a pound of garbage. Much More Energy exists in an ounce of oil and even more so in a microgram of Uranium in a Nuclear Fission reactor. There is a simple matter of physical science in play here. By the time you hire enough people to sort various toxic wastes (Chemicals and other pollutants) out of waste streams that go into the Waste to Energy "converter" and pay enough technical experts to build the device and to convert the stuff into a usable substance or usable energy, the costs are so high that it is cheaper to drill the desert in the Middle East and as a result has far greater return. A pound of garbage is exactly that, A pound of garbage.
Perhaps the Turkey what-nots are more easily converted to whatever it is that they produce that is useful. If so, then I say that is effin great. However, the whole thing sounds like a pipe dream to me. The Only exception to this is the proven profitable production of Ethanol from various grains.

[zeugma]

I understand your warranted scepticism. I've been looking into this a little since it was first posted though, and it looks like they may very well have come up with a new process for converting most carbon-based waste to fuel. Their website is somewhat sketchy on some specifics, but they already have an industrial plant in operation. It would appear that this isn't just some fellows who claim to have an idea. It is actually being put into practice. I've got some reminders in my calendar scheduled to pop up to look at this every three months. I think it is something to keep an eye on. If their claims are only somewhat accurate, this is a pretty important deal. Just the ability to recycle tires at anywhere near close to the efficiency they are claiming will be big news as far as landfills are concerned.

[Iwentsouth]

Ethonal is not profitable or else they would not have taken over 7 billion of our tax dollars.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

And it only takes 1 barrel of oil to convert a 175 pound
man into 38 pounds of oil.

[lmr]

One more thing to bolster my case about this being a pipe dream then. Sometimes tax incentives and grants can be used to promote commerce, but most of the time they end up being pork barrel.

[lmr]

A New way for the mafia and Bill Clinton to dispose of unwanteds? LOL. ;-)

[lmr]

Tires are required to be recycled now anyhow. As far as I know, unless a landfill has an exception, those tires must be recycled. I believe they are put into asphalt and other things.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Much cheaper then owning a judge.

[MattAMiller]

I'm very skeptical, but if it's a scam it's a very sophisticated one. They actually have plants. And it appears they've brought ConAgra on board, and they're a legitimate operation as far as I know.

Very interesting.

[The Red Zone]

Put a turkey in your tank.

[TheLion]

If this system works as described, it will be incredible for specific uses, i.e. coal, turkey parts, oil refining.

The only drawback I can figure is that you can't just throw everything in there. It looks like they are throwing in things that produce a specific result. A lot of time would have to be spent breaking down trash into different components to come up with different results, unless I am reading this wrong.

One of the most facinating things I have read in a long time...thanks for the post.

[TheLion]

Suprised this hasn't gotten more bumps.

[TheLion]

Ping! Have you read this?

[TheLion]

This is very interesting...Ping!

[sweetliberty]

Sounds like the modern day version of spinning straw into gold.

[TheLion]

Exactly what I thought initially.

Are you still up? My computer crashed earlier and I had to get another one out and on line....a pain.

Did you read the whole Discovery article?

[sweetliberty]

Got up for awhile and of course had to check in. Hehe... No, I didn't read the rest of it.