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Biodiesel
Alcohol fuels
Biomass
Thermal Depolymerization

All viable ways to "grow" sources of energy...

...and maybe if we give the farmers something useful to grow (Energy crops), we won't have to pay them to not grow anything (ween them off subsidies - Nearly $75 billion spent last year in the US alone to keep farmers employed because there isn't a market for the stuff they grow). May as well earn their money growing sometihng useful!

Not like the market for energy is going to be going anywhere anytime soon, and this might just put the US back-in-black in terms of energy production vs. usage. With the USA's crop production capacity we might even be able to generate a surplus and export it...
=Smidge=

With Thermal dempolymerization we don't have to worry about toxic waste anymore. We can take any waste and convert it to oil, minerals and water. Just throw those used batteries in with everything else and you'll end up with clean by products. By the way, one of the major investors of changing world technologes is Howard G. Buffett, the son of Warren Buffett so I don't think this technology will disappear. In fact I'm drafting a letter to my county representative to see if we can get one of these plants for our landfill and sewage treatment plant. I recommend that each of you do the same. If local plants can sell oil for half the price of opec then we are one step closer to energy independence and distributed energy creation.

Either way it totally unimportant because windmills just plain suck compared to Gyromills. There is no competition here. Surface winds are slow and irregular where the jet stream is VERY fast and consistent. I mean just look at a Gyromills. its 20 feet of square steel tubing and two electric motor/generators and a tether. Not a very big capital expenditure, in fact it's so elegant and simple and profoundly smart it boggles the mind but no one is doing shit about it. It makes me sick.

Its just like the energy bill, if they just put some money into these things, and Changing the World Technologies Thermal Depolymerization process we could stop importing oil, stop putting shit in our rivers, and taking carbon from the ground and putting into the air.

Dams? Dams suck but did you know that a array of micro turbines would generate more power without disrupting the rivers? It all about people not wanting to change because they spent so much money on building a wall of concrete that they don't want to admit that something better might have come along. Its Galileo vs. the Church.

Nuclear? Did you read the article in Wired some time ago that they now have a process where you expose waste to a high-energy gamma ray and speed up the half-life? It even generates waste heat that can be turned into power. When you're done you just have the results of the 60/40 split.

So in conclusion it's not how fast the rotors go, its price/dollar. Its antiquated-flat-world-no-such-thing-as-germs-desig n vs. elegant. It just happens that the most efficient, cheapest, and most easily deployed happens to be environmentally friendly too. Wow what a concept.

OK. This is a BAD practice.

1st Soybeans are terrible for the soil.

2nd We are converting farmland back into forest in the US and if we met domestic demand for diesel through vegetable oil we would be back to deforesting and depleting. Bad idea.

A far better option seem to be CWT
These guy say they can change any carbon into distilled water, balanced organic fertilizer and gasoline. This also has the benefit of getting rid of biohazard waste and increases topsoil rather than depleting it.

Check up on Changing the World Technologies or CWT
they seem to have a process called Thermo-Depolymerization that changes organic material (in this case Turkey offal) into gasoline using low pressure and low temp. If this is real and it works then you can just turn primary producers or waste into gasoline. If this is real it means you might want to sell you Halliburton stock. Thank god.

Discover has an interesting article on how current waste products are begin turned into Texas lite crude. Too good to be true?

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

Here is the company's link.

But I doubt consumers are as foolish as the industry hopes.

You've obviously never seen Josie and the Pussycats. It's not that far off.

I do agree with everything else you're saying, but if they get this working, we won't have to worry about garbage and landfills anyway.

But, corn CDs, or Thermal Depolymerization, that's the American way. Ignore the elephant in the corner and hope a technology comes along someday to take care of it.

And while you're at it, learn to make proper links:

Biomass
Turkey guts or Anything into oil
Gyromills

Excellent post.

My biomass numbers came from a longer non-/. email exchange about long term energy sources. The biomass numbers were in reference to an alternative of using ag-waste as feedstock to a chemical conversion process
changingworldtech.com, and came from a university class. And I see that between revisions I slipped a decimal - the article says 1/40th, or 2.5%, or perhaps applied a 10% conversion efficiency step somewhere and didn't back it out when I quoted the number.

The strength of materials numbers came from the Ryerson Catalog (except the strength of music wire, which comes from a music wire company). The Bamboo strength is the weighted results of various references (lab and university results weighted heavily and about 1/2 the strength value quoted by bamboo-centric web sites that apparently did not do primary testing). Aluminum costs and other data were checked against the admittedly biased aluminum association website (www.aluminum.org).

Your references on biomass conversion are far better and and quite helpful.

As for the other energy flow references, they were taken from my own emails, but the primary references are:

climate forcings (greenhouse contributions)
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/ forcings/altscen ario/

Useful energy quantities (also in m&ms as a unit)
http://newton.umsl.edu/~philf/energies.gif

Total vegetative consumption
http://newton.umsl.edu/infophys/lsp.h tml

Solar irradiance and variation thereof:
http://spaceresearch.nasa.gov/sts-107/10 7_solcon3. pdf

Albedo and reflectance
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~avallone/at oc3500/lectur es/lecture23.htm
http://eetd.lbl.gov/HeatIsland/P avements/LowerTemp s/

Detailed ref on solar data: http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/

Detailed data on solar panel efficiency in real daily light:
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/26909.pd f

Retail Solar costs http://www.wholesalesolar.com/

energy consumption data
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iea pdf/t0 6_02.pdf

Energy consumption
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/ infocard01.ht m
Energy reserves
http://www.usgs.gov/public/press/public_ affairs/pr ess_releases/pr1183m.html
http://www.iea.org/g8/w orld/oilsup.htm
Carbon capacity
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.af. biocapacit y.html
Carbon output
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming. nsf/Uniq ueKeyLookup/JSIN5DQT4A/$file/ORSummary.PDF
Solar Costs
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:3P2Cj2 FoBIEC: www.ncsc.ncsu.edu/fact/10body.htm+photovoltiac+cel l+cost&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Solar Availability
http://courses.washington.edu/me342/ hw2sol.htm
Hydrates at SciAm
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID= 0009ECC C-3F88-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21
Hydrates at DOE
http://www.fe.doe.gov/oil_gas/methanehydrates /
Hydrates at USGS
http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydra tes/ti tle.html

Well, take the idea a little further. Imagine any object can be physically created with this device. Organics, electronics, you name it. I ask you then, what happens to the economy?

1. Manufacturing would cease to exist in the traditional sense. People would simply replicate whatever was needed.

2. Shipping would no longer be an industry. The only substantial shipment (after replicators were distributed) would be people.

3. Agriculture would be patently unneccessary. Assuming this mythical device produces matter from energy, there would be no need for any production other than energy.

4. Energy production would skyrocket. The energy consumption of a single city would likely dwarf that of the entire planet now. This would not necessarily be a bad thing assuming energy could be produced safely and efficiently (read: fusion).

In other words, major sectors of our current economy would simply vanish - *poof*. The resulting unnecessary equipment could simply be liquidated with depolymerization techniques and reintegrated into housing or whatnot. But what about the people who rely on those industries for a living?

I imagine there would be an enormous amount of turmoil if this were to happen. In fact, I am reasonably certain the technology would face opposition from all threatened industries and would only become a reality after a great deal of conflict. However, it's clear to me that if this device were to exist, quality of life would be dramatically increased for anyone who owned the device.

There's clearly an analogy to be made, but I think the argument can simply be reduced to a fairly clear assertion: While technological innovations benefit mankind, they can also threaten the livelihoods of people that rely on existing economic models by rendering those models obsolete.

It will be a long time before we see the distributorships carrying "biodiesel" as opposed to good'ol number 2 diesel. The downward pressure that the oil companies could apply to the market would make petroleum diesel cheaper to purchase than biodiesel.

Vegetable oil is not the only option for "alternative" fuels. Offal from poultry can be used to generate gasoline. Does this spell the end of petroleum dependence? Will this increase the popularity of Chick-fil-a [copyright]? Who knows! I at least enjoy having other options.

As a side note, I am prototyping a business model for commercially producing bio-diesel. I'll let you know how it goes!

Since Changing World Technology installed their "turkey" depolymerization pilot program, we're swimming in oil. The dramatic upturn in oil revenue, combined with the sudden, unexplained drop in the number of homeless people (and now pigeons) has left the city coffers flush with funds in an economic downturn. And let me tell you, Con-Agra's Soylent Gold runs with less pinging than any of those premium over-priced gasolines.

For those of you that still believe this to be an april fools joke, check out these links:

www.joplinglobe.com/archives/2001/010729/regional/ story1.html
www.changingworldtech.com/mfceo.html

The process is not only designed for turkey waste; it can also be applied to other carbon-based materials. The Discovery article gives examples like tires and plastic bottles, amongst other things.

At the web site of Changing World Technologies.