Posted on 09/17/2006 6:33:24 PM PDT by thackney
If oil is the gold of the modern economy, then Frank Pringle is a 21st-century alchemist.
Instead of turning base materials into gold, Pringle turns them into oil. His philosopher's stone turns out to be microwaves. Used in a vacuum chamber, the microwaves help him pull oil from tires or oil shale rock. He can turn oil as thick as molasses into free-flowing crude. And he believes he can extract much of the oil remaining in capped wells.
Geologists said about 65 percent of oil in the ground is unrecoverable with current technology because it is too thick. Deposits of tar sands in Canada, for example, contain billions of barrels of oil but require large amounts of water and energy to extract.
State environmental officials said they believe as many as 237,000 abandoned oil wells are in northwestern Pennsylvania. That is where Col. Edwin Drake drilled what is believed to be the country's first commercial oil well in Titusville, Crawford County, in 1859. Oil production in Pennsylvania peaked in 1891, and the industry moved to Texas and elsewhere.
Pringle is raising $15 million to do his first test well in the Keystone State. He has raised a few million and plans to seek more from private investors. His plan calls for putting an antenna into the old wells and blasting them with microwaves to soften and gasify the oil.
No water would be required, and he said the amount of energy used in the process, the so-called energy balance, will be economical. The process will be environmentally clean, he said.
"It has to do with the frequency, and it has to do with the vacuum," Pringle said. "That's where our patents are."
Or will be, he said. Mobilestream has begun the patent process but hasn't yet received one.
Pringle and his staff of seven scientists continue to test and refine the process at their laboratory in West Berlin, N.J. He is also conferring with Pennsylvania's Department of Community and Economic Development and Department of Environmental Protection about state financial incentives for a tire reprocessing plant he hopes to build at the former U.S. Steel site in Fairless Hills, Bucks County.
In a series of tests witnessed by a Patriot-News reporter on Aug. 31, Pringle extracted oil from shredded tires. He turned Valero slurry oil, which is pourable but thick, like cold Hershey's chocolate syrup, into lighter, useable oil. And he pulled oil from tan, slightly greasy-feeling oil shale rock from Estonia.
Not long afterward, Mobilestream announced it had successfully cracked resid oil, the heavy, tarlike substance that remains after the refining of crude oil. Tests in the company's mass spectrometer confirmed the results.
Pringle placed the substances in a beaker and set them in his vacuum chamber microwave, which looks somewhat like a home microwave but is far different. There are millions of microwave frequencies, and the key is to find the right ones for the right materials, he said.
Once the calculations are made and the microwave turned on, he sat back in a comfortable chair with his ever-present cigar. Pringle, 63, whose office contains ocean fishing rods and a military weapon collection, has been a mechanical engineer for all of his working life.
With a vaccuum pump. A big one. That sucks, and is supposed to. The RF Noise sucks louder.
/johnny
Ship it to Europe and the Carib, have them refine it and send it back.
Great, now the enviros can complain about stray microwaves frying us all.
Yuma is where the Colorado River empties into the Gulf of California. Water isn't an issue for the project.
And that is more affordable than doing it here?
O.K., I asked for that. What I really was wondering is, whether most oil wells are that much of a "closed system", without "cracks" and passages wandering off in all directions that would make it impractical to pull a serious vacuum?
ping for later
Except that every drop of the Colorado River is overallocated.
Some days you can pull a large vacuum. Some days, you can't. Most days you can.
/johnny
A somewhat related subject : growing mounds of old rubber tires. Once in a Popular Science(or Mechanics)article, I read about a couple of guys down south somewhere that had worked out this process : cut the tires up into small chunks, then drop them into a bath of liquid lead. The steel cords drop to the bottom and the rubber molecules, as froth, come to the top. Thus you skim off the froth as feed stock for new tires. Sounded like it might work as a rubber tire recycling process, instead of just burying them in these ever growing mountains of old tires. Recycling old tires, like old oil fields is GREAT, if it's economically viable. Does anyone here know any thing more about this idea?
-3 psi would pull this house to the ground. With malice aforethought. Here and now sux, but not that badly.
/johnny (happily single for several years)
Yes there is. Search "microwave oil shale" and you will find some companies working on tires as well as shale.
Thanks, I will. It's always ticked me off to have to pay $1 to just GET RID of an old tire when they should be either taking it away for free or paying you something like 25 cents for it. Some people grumble about these "tire mountains" as eyesores and mosquito breeding grounds but "microwave oil shale", as it refers to rubber tires, still has to be viable economically to work. Don't expect santa claus, the tooth fairy, the easter bunny to solve the problem for FREE.....Do you know about RIS(Resonant Ionization Spectroscopy)? It does with precisely tuned lasars/wavelengths just about what MOS technology does to "dead oil". It converts garbage into pure isotopes.
It is interesting. And it is more evidence that Yankee ingenuity will prevail, *if* the idiot guberment will just quit getting in the way.
The Gulf of California isn't complaining, yet
Geez. If commercial quantities of oil could be recovered from a majority of those wells, I would think we'd be looking at some significant reserves. Particularly if we extapolate that to include abandoned wells in the rest of the country.
Careful. Rubber, as in tires, is a vulcanized product, and is not able to be recycled back into rubber for new tires. Rubber is actually a Thermoset Plastic, rather than a Thermoplastic Plastic.
That means that as it is heated or aged, it becomes harder and harder, until it is brittle and useless for nothing but landfill.
Here's a simplified version of the process of making tires:
Raw Latex rubber (a milky coloured sticky mass like pine sap) is put in a mixer (called a mill) and mixed with chemicals (yellow sulfur, carbon-black, and other stuff) to form a less-sticky, soft, black substance.
That stuff (a measured amount) is then placed in a mold that has the shape of a tire.
The mold is heated to about 650 degrees F for a while, and vulcanization (solidification)begins.
The mold is then cooled quickly after a specified time, to room temperature, and the tire is removed for use. It's soft or hard, depending on the time spent at the hot temperature - short time=soft, long time=hard.
Vulcanization, once started, never stops, but only slows down. After about 20-30 years, a brand new tire is useless, because it will have hardened to being brittle.
That's why old tires get cracks in them, and the process cannot be reversed. Hope this helps............FRegards
Addenda:
Yellow sulfur-primary vulcanization agent
Carbon Black-UV protection, and it looks cool
They had to replace the road after 5 years.............FRegards
But not the Gulf of California and they have a desalinization plant, that they don't use, in Yuma to desalt the Colorado River.
Thanks so much for the info, I KNEW I'm not an expert on rubber tires. Have you heard about this new "memory metal" discovery : a rubber-metal alloy with the same properties as the crash debris found at the Roswell UFO crash site?
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