People- Any organic material,when heated to about 850f
 unzips the molecules,which will zipup again,as the energy
 level is reduced " cooled down ". The problems to be
 solved are the mechanics of handeling the chars,piches,
 and tars,which develope in the process. Water can be
 cracked to H&O,which will be part of the process.
 The CWT system at Carthage is a rendering plant. CWT will
 not gave out any information. Top secret-have recieved
 17 million from GOV and have no real " mass-energy "
 information. dbaker73@mychoice.net

  Wow, I'm really enthused about the potential for this new technology. Just think - your local landfill can now be a NATURAL RESOURCE! But don't worry, Sierra Club and Greenpeace will be right there to stop the "drilling" of this established habitat for vermin.

I've got a really bad joke in reference to the fact that you could stick a person into this thing and to the film "Soylent Green". Ahem:

"Peeple...Thermal depolymerization machine oil is made out of Peee ple...Peee plllle...!"

Thank you. You're too kind. I'll be appearing at the Funny Bone all week...

Philip Shropshire
www.threerivertechreview.com
www.majic12.com

That 'environmental accounting' thing has a partner that we use in the Architecture/design industry called 'total cost' or 'lifecycle', where basically you look at the total amount of energy something will consume over it's entire life. For example, common bricks are an environmental nightmare when looked at in this way, for they take a lot of energy to make; a lot of energy to transport; are not very strong (takes a lot to do anything), and you can't reuse them (structurally) & they take a lot of energy to dispose of.

Or, on the other hand, steel has a smaller 'total cost' than brick and is therefore somewhat more environmentally sensitive; it takes a lot of energy to make; Holds up a lot while using a little; is cheap to transport (due to small amounts go a long way & it's easy to move around); can be reused over and over; and can be disposed of easly. Heck, Buckminster Fuller thought that steel should be the 'coin of the relm', rather than the gold standard, because steel was infinately useful.

So, if it's possible for these Oil plants to be built and operated in places that are far away from major refinerys, there is less transport cost; also if they can be used to process/recapture something that was prevously waste, then your reducing the 'total cost', for that was something that you had to use energy for to get rid of.

It's an interesting way to look at things in the world; for, 'total cost'-wise, my 1968 Coronet is more environmentally sensable than a new SUV. SUV: takes a TON of energy to make, gets poor gas milage, very complex to make, very complex replacement parts (big tires, complex alloys & plastics), hard to fix (just wait until all those electronics start to give up), short life span (5-10 years), very hard to get rid of (alloys and plastics hard to recycle). Coronet: Took a lot less energy to make, gets same to better gas milage as an SUV (I get 20 mpg on the hyway- and that will go up once I get the headers on!) very simple design, very simple replacement parts, very simple to fix, long life span (30+ years), very easy to get rid of (other than the seats & dash, everything left is easly recyclable- it's all steel or rubber!).

It's not the whole picture; but it's a fun way to think about thing's total impact, energy-wise, on the world. :)

Hmm.. I'm not sure I belive it's "adding carbon..at a slower rate" but I'll have to think a little more deeply about the ecocycle and see if it adds up. This is sort of like "environmental accounting" which is a new method of applying double-ledger bookkeeping to chemicals used in manufacturing processes. If the books don't balance, if the quantity of chemicals-in doesn't exactly equal chemicals in the final products, you're leaking pollution into the environment. It's a brilliant idea.
MMD, I didn't know that city gas was methane, I thought it was LP gas. See, there's already a methane infrastructure in place!

Edited by author 04-17-2003 12:34 PM
Shakusa, you are right. The carbon is not being reduced using the new process, it's just that it's no longer being increased. We are currently adding carbon to the ecosystem by pumping oil up out of the deep underground reserves. With the new process in place, we will be pumping less oil from the ground and therefore adding carbon to the ecosystem at a slower rate.

The stuff piped into houses is methane. LP is used when you cannot get that service and have to store cooking/heathing fuel in a tank in the yard.

Ringo, I don't understand how you claim this will reduce emissions. All we're doing is substituting one source of energy for another. It all ends up as greenhouse gases when you burn it. Methane is easy to transport, most houses in the USA have piped-in LP gas, it could just as easily be methane. Sure methane is expensive, unless you make it from sewage and then it's basically free. It isn't so efficient for cars, but there are plenty of methane-fueled car designs that work well enough. The 1960s Whole Earth Catalogs had huge chapters on the subject of Methane fuel, cars, home heating, electric power generation, etc. And that was just from a bunch of lotech hippie communes running the stuff.
I don't get your concept of removing carbon from the ecocycle. Carbon isn't being lost or destroyed, merely converted in form. It's either turkey guts in the landfill rotting and releasing CO2 slowly, or else it's oil in an engine burning and releasing CO2 quickly. Either way it ends up in the ecosystem.

Regarding the question of methane or oil: Gas fuels are expensive and difficult to capture and transport. This is why oil refineries burn off gases generated when refining oil.
Regarding the question as to how this process benefits the environment: the article suggests that by processing ALL agricultural byproducts in the US would result in 4 billion barrels worth of energy per year. That would mean 4 billion barrels of carbon-rich oil staying in the ground per year, rather than being released into the biosphere. The process would essentially recycle carbon which plants and animals have drawn out of the biophere.
The process is little more than the application of a little ingenuity to well-established technology. It is neither "bad science," nor particularly high-tech.

jleader, you're right about the high concentration of heavy metals. They used to sell an "organic" yard fertilizer made from sewage, it was called Milorganite. It was eventually withdrawn from the market when they discovered it had extremely high levels of heavy metals.
But anyway, this all reminds me of seeing articles in the original Whole Earth Catalogs about sewage-to-methane systems. I don't see the point in this guy's hightech method for making long-chain polymer oil when all you really need to make is a simple hydrocarbon like methane for fuel. Lubricating oils are a miniscule market compared to energy-rich fuels, and burning methane works about as well as burning kerosine or fuel oil, if your engines are engineered right. Methane harvesters are a simple homebrew technology that has worked efficiently for many many years, it's about as high-tech as a compost pit.

It's an amazing process, but after reading the article I am more resolved than ever to go vegetarian.

I'd like to see it put to use cleaning up human waste, most of which is basically just dried out and dumped into landfills.

Was looking at the math and thinking that they will probably only produce 240 barrels of oil, instead of 600 barrels. (I'm basing calculations on turkeys having approximately same chemical composition as people.) Maybe ConAgra will be importing turkey guts so they can run the converter at capacity.

Even at capacity -- 600 barrels -- they probably will only make a half a million dollars a year. Not a great return but probably better than most mutual funds.

Then again if you otherwise had to pay to get rid of your turkey guts this would be an improvement.

Funny side effect of this: if they really can produce Gas anywhere for less then it costs to mine-refine-transport it, and gas prices go down to what they were in the sixties, and I can afford as much gas as I want- then I'm gonna put a Hemi in my Mopar, and ditch the small-block. :D

But does that mean I'll have to eat more turkeys to contribute more carbon waste to the system to make up for my Hemi?

All we want from Turkey are their guts!

I know Turkey voted against having the US use their country as a second front against Iraq, but liquidating them into oil is not my idea of fair play...

Stefan, liquid pig waste is exactly what I thought of when I read this too.

I'm sure that says something (that I don't want to think about right now) about us!

The efficiency question is a good one. Of course, if the stuff is really petroleum-equivalent, you could still use it for plastics, lubrication, and the like that might have a great value than a mere fuel.

I'd be surprised if this process didn't result in SOME nasty byproducts. Something equivalent to the (possibly) carcinogenic stuff that forms when you fry food. Or the nitrous oxide that burning hydrogen produces. "It's always something." But you've got to compare it to the nasty stuff produced by petroleum refining.

I'd skip the turkey guts and start converting liquid pig waste.

Hey, this reminds me of a great story from the comic 'transmetropolotain': in the future, everyone's got machines that can fabricate anything out of trash or raw materials. So nobody's got any trash, because everyone feeds it into thier machine to make more stuff. So middle-class folk, who can afford the fabrication machines, but can't afford the raw materials and don't have any extra trash sneak into the slums to steal trash from the people who are too poor to afford the fabrication machines. The city hates this, because it wants the trash for *it's* fabrication machines. Oh, and the fabrication machines are AI, and as such, fabricate wierd machine drugs to get themselves all loopy.

It's not so much being able to make turkey guts into oil; it's being able to do it and break even. I've read about this kinda stuff before; and it's kinda like Fusion, in that the problem to solve isn't *how* it's how to break even, energy-wise.

Kinda like this project I saw ten years ago; my dad's a mining engineer, and we were at a friend's mine where they were testing an organic gold removal process. Bascially a bactira that ate ore and pooped gold; keep the tank warm and fed (and keep other critters out, as well as flush the tank when the little bastards mutate on you), and you got gold comin' out the other side. Problem was, you couldn't make enough gold to pay for the set-up and upkeep, for they didn't make very much gold very quickly: hense why, for now, ore processing is still a very inorganic (and toxic) process.

Does it burn? Then it's got energy to...well...burn.

--Dan

Joe:

There must be loopholes. Sewer sludge laced with heavy metals (from carelessly discarded batteries) is used as fertilizer in some states.

There's a Rucker / Sterling story where artificial-life jellyfish get loose in Oil Country and begin turning Texas's petroleum reserves into more of themselves.

If we could reverse engineer petroleum into turkey guts, then that would be ideal. Eventually everything would be covered in visceral membrane, a vast network of organic Slip-N-Slides. A few months ago I backed over a flock of cornish hens while entering my car port and I can attest to the success of this brave endeavor.

1. Lock the guy in the guarded warehouse with his machine, a ton of turkey guts, and some empty barrels.

2. When he yells "Finished!" Come in with a petroleum engineer and the necessary assaying equipment.

Then I'll believe.

Assuming the process really does work, there's a legal problem: in the USA, any product derived from hazardous waste is also hazardous waste, and must be treated as such. Even if that product is chemically identical to pure mountain-spring water (the law may have changed since I learned this).

Alex, regarding the CO2 issue, you have to compare it against what's being done today with waste, and where our fuel is coming from today. If most of the waste is getting buried in landfills, and given that most of our fuel is extracted from underground, this just leaves the status quo of the CO2 balance mostly unchanged. However, if waste is currently disposed of by incineration, this is probably an improvement.

I too am a little dubious about some of the byproducts. One of the arguments against using sewage sludge (the solid output of sewage treatment plants, after biological breakdown and removal of most of the water) as a fertilizer is that some sludge has unacceptably high levels of toxic heavy metals. Now if this process concentrates the non-hydrocarbon components, it might make it commercially viable to recover and refine the heavy metals (and other contaminants, such as sulfer, chlorine, etc.).

Edited by author 04-16-2003 05:09 PM
1. Show me it work.

2. Take it apart in front of me and then reassemble it. Then make it work repeatedly for four hours.

Then I'll believe. Maybe. For the right price.

Sounds kind of like Mr. Fusion to me!

BTF-Mr. Fusion

Hmmm. If it works as billed, it obviously has some incredible possibilities.

I'm skeptical about two claims, tho': that all the byproducts are benign (seems unlikely) and that this is somehow an answer to global warming (that's still oil, it still produces CO2 when burned, CO2 is still altering the planet's climate - I don't see how that's anything other than a bad thing).

I dunno, tho'. Whattya y'all think?

Edited by author 04-16-2003 04:57 PM
Wasn't the May issue published on April 1 2003?

Z.

Whoops... Looks like it is legit... Dang, you'd think responsible journalists wouldn't put such obvious hoax stories into their April issues... :-)

Z.

I dunno...smells to me like bad science.