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

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.

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?

Sounds kind of like Mr. Fusion to me!

BTF-Mr. Fusion

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.

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.).

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).

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.

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.

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.

Joe:

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

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

--Dan

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.

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.

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.