Anything Into Oil

Discover ^ | May 2003 | Brad Lemley

[zarf]

Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year

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.

http://www.discover.com/may_03/gthere.html?article=featoil.html

[gcruse]

The next Segway?

[EERinOK]

Next segeway, I think so.

Everything that goes in, comes out environmentally benign and useful.

That is utter BS.

I'd wager a paycheck that this gizmo has a net energy loss. the energy to torch the waste into oil, gas and byproducts probably is more than what comes out the other end. basic principles of chemical thermodynamics govern. you also have to ship the waste in, then ship the useful products out, more reduction in efficiency.

this guy's gonna get some investors that have no knowledge of science and disappear with their money. or he will turn it into a taxpayer funded boondoggle for missourri and philadelphia democrats, in the name of environmentalism, for the children.

[Dark Glasses and Corncob Pipe]

Ignore the scoffers; read the full article. Howard Buffet, Warren's son, is one of the backers of this process, via ConAgra.

Flame away, and have a good day.

[capitan_refugio]

This was just as good a read when it was posted, under the same title, three days ago.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/897667/posts

[FierceDraka]

I was hoping someone would post this article. I linked to it in a post to another thread yesterday.

If this really works, then this could be what finally breaks the Saudis and OPEC. BUT - I remember the big hubbub over cold fusion a decade ago. We'll see.