Posted on 08/20/2003 6:34:41 AM PDT by ckilmer
The product name could be called "Soylent Green".
Saudi Arabia must be sweating bullets!
Hubby says when they pumped the septic tank they found Democrats down there.
It’s 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
Supercritical water reactors aren’t magic, it’s just tricky to keep the stuff from eating the plumbing.
Thanks for the links! I found the article at theoildrum.com especially interesting since it gave a sense of some of the real-world obstacles encountered. Although there appears to be a real technology involved and not a scam, the economics of it all are far from clear and the promises/hype in 2003-04 were nowhere near current reality. There was one very interesting comment below the article, from someone who seems (or claims) to know how CWT’s plant in Missouri turned into a fiasco (so far it’s still more of a pilot program/attempt than a real-world scalable economic success):
One problem they experienced was incompetent contractors during construction particularly the welders. There were so many bad welds that construction had to start over which threw all economic projections out the window. Next they ran into a rendering company that was willing to pay Butterball for the turkey waste which CWT was getting for free. This made the feedstock unaffordable. At the other end of the process no refiner would buy their product. So these amatuers got hit three ways from hell so they packed up and left town.
One part of the process which the Discover articles never mentioned was the use of sulphuric acid in the first stage of the process. Who knows what else was left out of the articles about the process.
For this process to move forward then the first thing that needs to happen is a committment from a purchaser for the product. Next is a good engineer to closely supervise construction of new facilities and to establish a standardized design for mass production of the equipment at lower costs. Finally is to select a feedstock with little alternative use like sewage. TDP is a scientifically sound process and is a case study in all the pitfalls of taking an idea from the lab to the marketplace.
Can someone with a chem engineering background comment on this? It reminds me of Segway, lots of flash, no substance. But, you never know...
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Its just a bunch of HydroCarbons. Hydrogen and Carbon. Rearranging the atoms just takes energy.
http://www.uic.com.au/graphics/reactormap.gif
According to the Discover article linked above CWT may be focusing its future on Europe where there are some major subsidies that make the economics work for the company (although whether such subsidies and credits make sense for a nation’s economy is a different question):
Which brings us to why Appel and his technology are likely to move to Europe. As the United States has crawled toward making its food supply safer, Europe has sprinted, eager to squelch mad cow disease as well as to stanch global warming and promote renewable energy. The result is a cornucopia of incentives for thermal conversion. Last summer Appel gave presentations to government officials and private investors throughout Europe, and the company is planning projects in Wales, Ireland, England, and Germany. Europeans are making the pilgrimage to the Carthage plant. In May Renewable Environmental Solutions ran 360 tons of beef waste through the Carthage plant for a visiting delegation from Irish Food Processors, the biggest beef operation in the British Isles. The Irish newspaper Sunday Tribune wrote that CEO Larry Goodman “is understood to be planning a biofuel facility . . . and hopes to have it built by next year.”
The transatlantic lovefest is no wonder. In Ireland, plant operators would get an astronomical $50 per ton to haul slaughterhouse waste away, another $30 per ton in carbon dioxide emissions-reduction credits, a guaranteed price of up to $92 per barrel, and a 20-year price guarantee. “In a 500-ton-per-day plant, our production costs would be under $30 a barrel, and we could sell for about $100 a barrel,” Appel says. “It’s just amazing.”
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