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Rare earth elements, yes. Oil, no. Oil is a complex molecular soup, yes, but made from fairly common elements - and we can in fact produce it ourselves: http://www.changingworldtech.com/ Oil is therefore not a finite resource, which is one more reason why continuing to be the only major country that doesn't try and develop its own resources, the Bakken reserves, ANWR, the Gulf deposits, and all of the other areas where we could be producing oil on our own land (and certainly cleaner than most other countries drilling processes), is purely idiotic, and religiously environmentalist.

Nah, we'll hear about them in a few months.

You know, after the company goes bankrupt from this guy embezzling the millions of investment capital they get from this announcement.

It's understandable that you'd be cynical. But there's definitely reason for hope. Another company has successfully done something similar at a turkey plant. The company is called Changing World Technologies and the technology is called thermal depolymerization. My understanding is that they're making money, but only just barely. Waste turkey parts are apparently in higher demand than expected, and the work doesn't qualify for an expected govt subsidy.

Nonetheless, the technology is real, it works, and does what's claimed - turns garbage (of a specific type) into oil. I have little doubt that with refinement, this technology and others like it could be made to work.

That doesn't reduce the likelyhood that this CEO is blustering snake oil that will never materialize - the fact that similar stuff has been proven to work may make it more likely that he's blowing it. But it's by no means a definite certainty.

We can already turn everything based on carbon molecules into petroleum.

Why are we wasting our time and wasting food and alcohol?

Please see this site:

http://www.changingworldtech.com/

An poster in an earlier thread mentions Changing World Technologies' Carthage, MO TDP (Thermal Depolymerization) plant as an example of profitably converting organic matter into useable fuels, and they are right in that combining these two technologies seems to have the potential to solve several of the nagging problems faced by champions of biofuels.

First is the infrastructure problem. Traditionally, biodiesel has gotten all of the attention as a replacement for fuel gasoline. The problem, of course, is that around the world, the vast preponderance of existing automobiles are gasoline powered, not diesel-powered. Now don't get me wrong, biodiesel is a great tech, but there is simply too high an initial investment to get everyone to convert to diesel without fuel prices going FAR higher than they are now. TDP produces a substance akin to oil that can be easily refined into gasoline using existing equipment, obviating any drastic shifts in consumer technology.

TDP has, however been plagued by several economic and technological problems. First, feedstocks have proven to be very expensive, as the previous poster noted. Secondly, practical applications of the technology show that high-lipid content feedstocks are by far the best for use in TDP. Unfortunately, plants, Municipal Solid Waste, and other potential feedstocks lose a large proportion of their carbon content through the dissolution of carbohydrates and proteins when the aqueous fraction is removed. Diatamaceous algae, on the other hand, are much "oilier", yielding a much greater percentage of fuel per unit mass.

The other problem faced by industrial-scale TDP is that the process loses a great deal of efficiency if it is not constantly running. By locating a TDP plant adjacent to a large algae farm, one could (assuming the yields mentioned in the linked article are correct) ensure a steady and constant input of extremely cheap feedstock to the TDP plant.

I don't have any hard figures with which to calculate the overall efficiency of such a setup - would any of the engineers working on these techs out there care to comment?

What we always do when we run out of one thing is to substitute another. When we run out of liquid petrolium, we will substitute agricultural wastes. http://www.changingworldtech.com/ If we could do that now, we would no longer need to import oil.

The oil from turkey guts thing seems a little over-rated right now but at the present cost of oil, it is profitable. We also have many energy from waste projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy We can also depolymirize coal. http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio .jsp?osti_id=10158212

I'm not remotely worried about running out of oil. I am, however, worried about greenhouse gasses. Fortunately, some of the oil substitutes are carbon neutral. In that regard, running out of oil might be a good thing.

Well, that's pretty close to what I'm saying. The "life cycle" of the product is defined regardless of the costs:benefits tracked in that cycle, but they must be measured against one another. And yes, they must be measured against both perfect maximum efficiency, and the alternatives - including doing nothing.

In the case of solar, 15% efficiency of energy production across a 20 year lifecycle does look like a losing proposition compared to the energy costs of manufacture, deployment, maintenance and recycling. But it's close enough that maybe 25% efficiency would net win.

In the case of nuclear, especially considering the security risks and longterm maintenance costs, it's a net loss in energy.

Ethanol as used in the US is a losing proposition, but improvements in scaled economies and the more efficient local (only) consumption, combined with infrastructure upgrades like ethanol fuelcells powering DC equipment centers, show the potential for a more efficient alternative.

One of the interesting demos I saw at the Wired NextFest in NYC this week was a company that recycles mixed discarded appliances back into useful plastic stocks at 10% the cost of manufacturing new plastic from raw petrochemicals. Because their own waste fraction can be fed to processes like the CWT steam reformation into diesel oil. The plastic extraction seems to be 10x more efficient than current standard production, while the subsequent energy extraction produces probably somewhere around 4-5x the energy investment. Now, if someone could extract energy from the oil to produce plastic rather than CO2, we might be looking at a vastly more efficient process. Especially when factoring in the cost of currently emitting that CO2 (and other gases/wastes).

There are limits on how much energy you can store in a capacitor no matter what you do. The basic trick is to somehow increase the plate area while decreasing the spacing between the plates. You also need a material between the plates that will not break down due to the voltage. But no matter what you do, the breakover voltage goes down as you move the plates together.

A better approach might be to store the energy as compressed air. http://www.theaircar.com/ Of course the guys making the compressed air car seem to be stalled.

How about making fuel from turkey guts? http://www.changingworldtech.com/ We got all excited about them and they're sort of economic now.

How about desk top fusion?

So, I'm not holding my breath. One of my favorite sayings is: "There are liars, there are damn liars and then there are battery chemists." AFAICT that saying applies to this story.

This is just another idea to rid the world of gas to create energy. Changing World Technologies is also working to turn garbage into oil.

Those who are worried about gases being released into atmosphere. This technology is much much more then a incinerator. It breaks down the garbage into it's most basic form and broken down into elemental components. You should listen to the video at GeoPlasma . Any CO2 produced could be passed through a zirconia electrolysis cell to produce oxygen.

Well, with the right technologies, you could literally give blood for oil.

Thermal Depolymerization ... good stuff. The idea of taking true waste product, be it dead animal byproduct, human feces or recycled plastic and turning it back into something usable is wonderful. In 20 years time maybe the entire nation's oil can come from our own waste... and the campaign slogan for the environmental candidate for POTUS can be "Stop using this shit". FWIW, I believe these folks have done it in europe: Changing World Tech

Link:

http://www.changingworldtech.com/

No problem, man! The folks who can make oil out of turkey guts should be able to process lobbyists and fat, drunken wind-farm opponents just fine. (I don't know how many of the latter you could get, but the former appear to be a highly renewable resource.)

I assume this story is based on the above link, for those too lazy to copy and paste http://www.changingworldtech.com. They have been turning all organic waste into Crude oil which obviously can be refined into gasoline. We really should be supporting our home grown technology. BTW I don't work for them, I have just been following their story since the beginning and watching the moron bio-diesal people complain about it since its a far more efficient process that fuels itself.

Or this: http://www.changingworldtech.com/press_room/index. asp, or probably every other large landfill in North America.

Europe has begun licensing TDP tech and we have a full-scale refinery running near Kansas City.

If we ever get serious about putting domestic oil production the whole idea of oil from the ground will be beyond quaint.

CWT used to have a press kit on their site with a bunch of PDF's regarding the process (some of the same figures were in the original "Anything Into Oil" article in Discover). That whole press kit seems to have been removed (so much for transparency!), but I saved a copy of the file which has the yield figures. From 100 pounds of municipal liquid waste (which includes a large fraction of grease-trap waste, which you would not normally have) it claims these yields:

• 26 lbs oil
• 9 lbs gas
• 8 lbs carbon and other solids
• 57 lbs water

And this ... doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.

The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.

IIRC ethanol can be blended into regular fuel up to 15% and be used in cars already on the road in the USA, while an 85% ethanol/15% gasoline (E85) can be used in "flex-fuel" vehicles that can be purchased from most manufacturers on request. It's only a stopgap, because ethanol is currently expensive to produce. This may change with biotech to improve fermentation, as well as a shift in US trade policy to facilitate the import of sugar cane, a much better starting material for fermentation (or just import the ethanol!)

Still, I believe the biggest limitation is, even assuming moderate improvements in conservation and efficiency, there isn't enough land available to produce the corn/beets/sugarcane needed. Plus, the biggest consumers are commercial (i.e., diesel) vehicles -- we might be better off investing in carbon-neutral catalytic solutions like Changing World Technologies or AlphaKat, which can use a wide variety of biomass as input and produce diesel fuel.

What you're speculating upon is an inevitability. Those investors are smart. They see valuble mineral deposits in the trash. Check out this company's website. Although the company's current projects focus upon waste from meat factories and sewage plants, the splash screen implies that they are interested in landfill reclamation. They obviously have plans to deal with the heavier stuff in the waste stream, like refrigerators and so forth. I have been excited by this potential ever since I read about the dump-mining entrepreneuer in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, in which the author described huge machines devouring the formerly abject contents of landfills and profitably spitting out the sorted and purified constituents. Reclaimed landfills...purified soils...now that's the kind of world I want.

The super-labor-intensive Chinese practice of manually breaking appliance cases and PCB's to get at the little bits of metal is, as the parent said, inefficient and environmentally destructive. This is ruining entire towns over there with high concentrations of heavy metals and the solvents required to isolate them from nonmetal components, and what such exposure does to the workers over the course of a few years... It's a dead end job in more ways than one.

Now, with a depolymerization process on a correct scale, you could feed old wiring into a hopper and just let the heat and pressure strip away the polymer insulation, break down the hydrocarbon molecules into constituate elements and get your copper back. The other remains are mostly saleable: light petroleum, water (of what purity I don't know,) carbon black, and whatever trace elements. Maybe that's why Changing World Technology has been so tight-lipped of late; they know that with their process, they're sitting on a potential fortune and they don't want to give any clues to industrial pirates (Chinese upstarts.) We'll see.

There's also the potential for wide scale human waste and garbage conversion (lookit: http://www.changingworldtech.com/ ) to provide a larger patch. It provides a good deal of diesel fuel.

The problem with this is that adpotion of the tech is moving slowly; the demand for diesel in consumer vehicles is pretty low. Still, I have high hopes for it; it would reduce the amount of carbon being liberated from underground.

'Course, I have a pretty odd vision of the future - hundereds of cities full of huge archologies and the rest of the world being farming constructs (huge buildings with efficient hydroponic agricultural systems within them). solar coating all of these and supplemental "walk-away safe" multifuel nuke plants (multifuel types are the sort that can run off of both fuel-grade and 'spent' uranium).

Yeah. And bureaucracy will be reduced to computers and be quick and efficient. Never happen, but it's a nice dream.

With such technology in place, demonization of petroleum would then be less justified. The efficiency of hybrid vehicles would obviously still be relevent, but the issue would cease to be environmental and become purely economical.

With current technology it's hard to beat the convenience of liquid fuel. Hydrocarbdon recycling technology would not require such a dramatic change of infrastructure as electric or hydrogen power - that in itself would have enormous economic and associated environmental benefits. It would also present a parallel avenue of development for existing oil companies, creating incentive for them to actually support an environmentally friendly technology rather than to thwart it.

This is very relevent to those of us living in California, for example, where the government is spending billions in an initiative to roll out a hydrogen-based transportation infrastructure. That is CRAZY in light of Thermal Conversion technology.

look here http://www.changingworldtech.com/
Oil from biomass.

You are thinking of Changing World Technologies. They built their first plant next to a chicken farm so that they can run it on dead chicken leftovers.

Or turkeys. Petroleum products as fuel may become less common as alternatives become more economical, but there is not much risk of running completely out.

I thought it was "Angus MacGyver" :). I like what they're doing with chicken shit and 50gal drums over at CWT.

Ah but there are loads of things that they could do but won't because politicians in Canada are a bunch of puppets:
-Make Gas with Methanol for Cars madatory (cost $0)
-Or tax Gas with Methanol less than gas without (Cost 0$)
-Make license plates for SUVs and Trucks cost more according to their age. (Cost: Profit center!)
-Make cheap wasteful appliances illigal (Cost $0) -Mandate that all new Gov. fleet cars be hybrids of better (Cost: $0)
-Allow farmers to collect Methane gas from animal waste so that then can burn it and make electricity.(Cost 0$)
-Allow Pig farmers to put animal waste in this machine http://www.changingworldtech.com./what/index.asp to make oil and electricity.(Cost 0$)

It's quite silly to dismiss the power of (ahem) alternative power.

For example, the Freedom Tower now under construction in NYC, USA will generate a significant amount of its own power. (as much as 20%!)

I'm a supporter of Nuclear technology, but only if it's open. The current "don't ask, don't tell" nuclear regime is stupid, stupid, stupid, and will never result in an industry that's truly safe. Nuclear technology should, like cryptography, be open, and should only be trusted when it's withstood significant, public, peer review.

Have you ever heard of Changing world technologies and their plans to convert garbage into crude oil? I've been following this one for about 2 years, and I think it's the "real deal". It's still in its infancy, but it's viable in many places now, today!

They're taking their time to refine things, and if I were them, I would, too. When I get the chance to invest in their technology, chances are, I will.

If anybody's done it, it's these people. Their pilot project involved the waste from a turkey processing plant combined with various mixtures of discarded plastic. The investors included agribusiness and petrochemical companies, and they poured a lot of capital into the technology.

Granted, breaking down simple polymers and animal guts into water, carbon, oil, and trace elements is a lot simpler and less energy-intensive than breaking down metals and PCBs, but recycling technology is in its infancy. Resource scarcity, driven by economic development and a rising population, combined with the worldwide growth of environmentalism, will drive the technology forward. Note that their website features a landfill--to me, that's a hint that they see a market in the materials buried there. As the technology--especially nanotechnology--progresses, it will become profitable to dig up old trash.

Whatever these guys are up to at present, I suspect it's working, as the new site is greatly expanded from the old one, and they no longer appear to be focusing only on the animal by-products. Imagine applying thermal depolymerization to municipal water treatment.

The weak link, as everybody else has already mentioned, is finding an energy source to run all of the machinery.

Unfortunately, it looks like the company no longer exists (as far as I can tell).

Ha, oops! With Yahoo's origional story down, I couldn't find the company name and assumed it was Agro or AgroWaste or some such...

Changing World Technologies, Inc. is the company in charge here.

Turkey oil. CWT's biomass reactor is 85% efficient in turning agricultural (and other) waste into barrels of fuel oil. America's agricultural waste could totally replace imported petro fuels. And simultaneously reduce the amount of wasted land in landfill, which also reduces the Greenhouse gases that are wasted in that slower composition. Unlike other sustainable energy carriers, their fuel can also be refined to plastic and other petro products.

You don't need nuclear power or a federal program to eliminate the United State's dependence on foreign oil. From an article on thermal depolymerization:

"Changing World say that converting all of the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4bn barrels of oil, roughly equal to the volume of US oil imports in 2001."

That's just the agricultural waste. Add municipal waste, and all the carbon locked up in our landfills. The process was developed by Changing World Technologies. They have a demo plant at a Con-Agra turkey processing facility in Missouri, which is producing 100-200 barrels of oil a day. At a price of about $15 a barrel to produce, it seems to me that freeing up the carbon in our waste stream is a cheaper alternative.

Guess it depends what you mean by zero pollution. Bio fuels have almost none of the sulpher in the fossil fuels, and close the carbon cycle. That's good enough for me.

The only problem up until now has been finding a cost-effective solution.

Changing World Technologies offers one such solution.

I don't see any reason why dewatered sludge couldn't be fed through an anything-into-oil plant and converted to energy more cleanly than by incineration.

Or, you call Changing World Technologies and they show you a way to make the oil.

I'd say that is extremely optimistic. In fact, I could easily conceive a number of realistic scenarios in which you'd be lucky to break ground in 5 years. You'd be better off subsidizing something like this (crude oil from industrial waste). I'm not sure what kind of cost per barrel they're getting, as it is primarily being marketed as waste disposal rather than energy production. Combine legislation favorable to that technology with serious increases in mandated fuel economy (CAFE) and you could put a big dent in our reliance on foreign oil.

The only thing left is to make converting grandma socially acceptable. Something tells me that religious leaders would have a problem with this.

You just need to use a different process.

Something more like thermal depolymerization.

Changing world technologies

The original article I read over on discover claimed that in addition to turkey offal, they can use sewage, medical waste (including needles), etc, etc. Shrink those landfills and turn oil into a renewable resource.

You can build a nuclear plant in about 3-5 years. Quicker if you're willing to pay the overtime. Meanwhile, you leave the other plants operating, use renewable sources where practicle.

I think that thermal depolymerization might be a source of fuel for vehicles in the future. Combine this with electric/hydrogen for short range vehicles, and you just let market forces dictate the number of plants built.

This PDF document has a fairly detailed explaination of what the products are, and is where I got the information from in the first place.
=Smidge=

Well, no. Not that way. But thermal deploymerization seems likely to work rather well. It uses significantly higher temperatures plus high pressure to break down almost anything into short chain hydrocarbons useful for fuel, plus minerals (useful for fertilizer) and water. Here's an example. I believe it has not been specifically tested for destroying prions, but the chemistry indicates that it will.

Changing World Technologies is the company behind the "turkey guts" thermal depolymerization (TDP) plant in Carthage, MO, USA.

Running some back of the envelope calculations shows some interesting figures. First establish what we use today. In 2002, the United States used an estimated 19.7 million barrels. Per day.

A plant of this size produces 180,000 barrels of oil per year; it is claimed that this is over and above the energy it uses. That works out to 493.15 barrels per day out of 200 tons each day. There are 160 million tons of wood waste per year (1998 figures) alone. That works out to 1,080,876 barrels per day if we assume the same conversion rate of 200 tons of organic matter to 493.15 barrels per day. 5.4% of our daily total oil demand from wood waste alone. Enough to affect prices at the margin, where it counts. At current rates, we will import 68% of our oil by 2025. This same reference cites DOE figures that say we currently import about 50%, or about 10 million barrels. If we put this in place today, the percentage of imports this represents rises to 10.8%.

Pulling our focus back a bit, we find that agriculture produces about 1 billion tons of waste per year. Remember, agricultural waste streams are not the only feedstock; some manufacturing waste streams are also eligible. But for the sake of back of the envelope calculations, let's assume that all eligible waste streams for TDP amounts to 1 billion tons per year. That works out to 6,755,479 barrels per day, or about 67% of daily import demand today.

Even if we project out increased demand for petroleum in the future, the potential for this technique to affect prices at the margin should not be dismissed out of hand. It is highly unlikely that we can use this technique (assuming all the engineering, business and logistical details are worked out --- the reaction chambers need to be calibrated for the feedstock, and they don't have many "recipes" worked out yet, and don't even know what is or is not feasible) to supplant import demand. Fortunately, we don't need it to wholesale replace imports: if we can make it affect the marginal price, that's still a useful tool in our national assets.

If the Changing World folks really are on the up and up, and they produce a small net of oil from these big brother versions of the pilot plant, then this is a strong piece of evidence for the school of thought who contend that market mechanisms will produce solutions as the need arises. As others in this thread have already pointed out, we certainly have nowhere approached the theoretical physics-imposed limits of available energy that can be gathered from the sun.

Not really. The maximum price for oil is limited somewhat by the fact that renewables (solar, wind, biomass, etc...) will become more and more cost competitive as oil prices rise. If scarcity occurs too quickly, there will be some pain in the transition, but since people are already taking steps to reduce fuel costs (e.g. hybrids and other high mileage vehicles) I doubt that will be a significant problem.

what they always forget is that this oil stuff is a finite resource, we cannot make any more of it.

Isn't technology great? Another slashdot article recently described a new process for converting cellulose (e.g. straw, paper, wood chips, and all kinds of plant waste) to ethanol more efficiently. Things aren't as bad as the gloom and doomers want you to think.

SkyCar

It has 8 engines, that curently have a better power to weight ratio than a Rotax 2 stroke and a lower emission than a Honda four stroke. Burn some CWT TDP oil in it made from plants and we can use the large self regulating fusion generator that we orbit to power our computer controller no green house gas flying cars.

Changing World Technologies with their Thermal Conversion Process seems like a much more effective solution than fermentation and processing into alcohol based fuels. My guess is that ADM and the other huge corn/ethanol agri-businesses are fighting tooth and nail against this technology.

As for TD oil playing a larger role as oil prices rise, I completely agree. I have done some reading on it and I feel completely down with its "cool" factor. It solves an entire grip of environmental problems and some consumptive problems. But as for providing all of our energy, I have to disagree with you.

Lets look at the US We have a quick look at the animal waste side. Animal waste accounts for 130 times the amount of waste compared to a human. So the human component to the bio-waste system seems negligible. (But let's get these TD toilets installed asap. It sure beats a septic tank!!!!)

• The US animal industry produced 1.4 billion tons(us)[5] of waste.
• Oil makes 45 GJ/ton roughly[6,7].
• 8.9% of mass can get extacted as oil. [8,4]
• The system boasts a 15% inefficiency.[4]
• So we have 1,270,417,422waste*ton_us * .089oil/waste[8,4] * .9(ton/ton_us)* 45GJ/ton * .85 Efficient [4] =
• 3892336657GJ(10^9J) or 3.89EJ (10^18J)

(and does this include the inefficiencies for central processing and removal of solid wastes?)

Take this against a US energy requirement of 100EJ[2] of which about 35EJ(10^18J)[9] of which absolutely has to be in the form of oil. (90% of all transportation is oil, oil is needed for fertilizers, you only get 10th as much energy from the natural gas, etc)

Needs vs Production by TD
35000000000000000000 J == 35EJ
3892336657000000000 J == 3.9EJ

So it could cover perhaps 1/10 of our oil requirements. So we will have to turn to marginal lands, forests, and perhaps even replace arable land that produces human food with gas food. And we have no data to show that this amount of conversion into oil and burning of our ecosystem will not irreparably harm it. Nor do we have any data to show that we can get 10 times as much out of Agriculture solutions than our horribly inefficient livestock industry. (All non agricultural conversions work as non-renewable resources, so I'll leave that out of the discussion.) So we still don't have enough energy and we have to convert the environment into oil to make up any losses. And if we only begin building this infrastructure after oil prices rise to dangerously high levels, we have no assurance that we can build it fast enough to prevent systematic collapse of economies, especially given the inefficiencies outlined above. And we would have to start making food for oil instead of people.

It just doesn't seem reasonable to estimate its ability to produce more than 100 EJ of energy on a global level. So it at maximum has the ability to delay the inevitable for a very short time. Especially given that world energy use will rise to 800EJ by 2020[8]. You may have found security in thinking TD will save the human race, but the numbers don't seem to back you up.

And please note, the efficiencies I quoted were from studies done of real biomater TD [8], not the hypothetical human conversion rate of 21% oil.

References

1. http://www.changingworldtech.com/
2. http://www.cpast.org/Articles/fetch.adp?topicnum=1 3
3. http://www.uce-uu.nl/showproject.php?id=3
4. http://forums.biodieselnow.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID= 829
5. http://lists.justnet.info/pipermail/asc-media/2003 -August/000391.html
6. http://me.queensu.ca/courses/MECH430/Assets/Files/ Recommended%20Reading/Power%20Table%20.pdf

There's a pilot plant outside Philly, and another in Montana or Missouri (don't remember).

With this available, I just wish we were far sighted enough to pop these up all over the country to process any and all recoverable waste. With this as an option, the need to drill for oil becomes greatly reduced if not eliminated.

It has absolutely nothing to do with being spoiled children, it's that our taxes on fuel use are not at the obsurd levels applied in many parts of the world. Just how much better would it be if the mostly hidden tax on gas wasn't there. Federal gas tax is 18.4 cents a gallon, MD tax rate is 23.5 cents a gallon. Someone come up with a single reason why gas should have a 26% tax on it?

If you stop the knee jerk reaction, why are fuel prices in Europe so much higher than the US three times in some cases? Taxes. $2.82 out of every $4.07 gallon in France is tax. It's just insane.

Yeah it was the thermal depolymerization (TDP) process...supposedly perfected by some company called Changing World Technologies...

I thought that plant next to the turkey-processing place was supposed to be running by now..has anybody heard any follow up on that? You'd think it would be bigger news if it was operating as well as they said it would...

PS: There is also a new industrial process for "agricultural waste processing" which gets >85% efficiency when converting stuff like turkey renderings to barrels identical to crude oil. So sugarcane->ethanol efficiencies of much greater than 50% appear to be obtainable.

The next step is to begin working to genetically engineer plants that produce more of the kinds of materials that benefit the distillation and catalysis of ethanol. Corn is a poor energy source when you consider what it takes to grow it, and how devastating modern agriculture is to the soil.

Not to mention the fact that agriculture is essentially owned and regulated by Big Oil, who also own the companies that make seeds and the companies which make nitrogen fertilizers. No serious progress is likely to be made in agriculture or energy technology as long as the interests of Big Oil remain paramount.

The smart direction, I think, is to look at aquatic plants, algae, bacteria, and the like. If a bacterium or yeast could be developed to produce ethanol in sufficient quantity, and a closed system could be developed that takes in sunlight and produces all the kinds of things bacteria and yeasts produce - ethyl, nitrogen, methane, etc., it would go an amazingly long way towards improving the efficiency of these processes.

The trouble with our current crude methods is that they are simply unsustainable and produce far too much pollution and waste.

Recently a technique was developed to convert any kind of solid waste into constituent materials, including a rich form of oil. This project was undertaken with support from ButterBall because the costs of waste disposal for their turkey abattoirs are hilariously high.

Now imagine a similar kind of energy plant, except instead of slow-heating wastes and so forth, it has a chain of vats containing various forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms, simple plants, etc., in a closed ecosystem. Wastes and other materials from one vat are leeched out and channeled to the next vat in line. Nitrogen and CO2 are funneled to the plants, and their oxygen is fed to some single-celled creatures. Round it goes, probably feeding back into itself in a closed loop. Except, of course it isn't a closed loop. Free materials like oxygen, CO2, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., are constantly being added to the system along with plenty of sunlight. The result is that you end up with a huge abundance of excess which can be siphoned off.

The grail of energy will be to engineer or discover bacteria capable of freeing hydrogen itself. Maybe some of those deep-sea hot vent varieties have some creative genetic ideas!

We are so used to thinking of energy in terms of limitations, and so there seems to be a rush to knock energy out quickly and with great force. The fact is, slower, gentler, more methodical methods are available using the power of living cells. We only have to learn how to utilize and program these molecular machines to do our bidding.

I have a friend who is utterly convinced that Free Energy Devices (also known as Zero-Point Energy Taps) are possible, they exist, and they are suppressed by Big Energy interests. I am naturally skeptical of the idea, but at the same time I'm open to the possibility, if only because at the atomic level everything is going a million miles an hour all the time. If you could tap that energy at the molecular scale I believe you could produce - essentially - a perpetual-energy device.

For example, if you were able to build a device on the nano-scale which captures electrons - like a cashmere sweater - and then instead of just forming a diffuse cloud of electrons were able to channel those electrons into a medium and hold them... well you get the idea. We know static is real, and we know a little bit of it can produce a pretty impressive shock. If a trillion of these devices could fit into a square foot then I imagine you could extract a pretty impressive amount of electrical energy.

There have to be thousands of ways to efficiently borrow excess energy. Another method that occurs to me is to layer materials in a manner such that electrons are caused to flow in a specific direction. I'd be interested to know if layering materials - let's say nickel and copper - can produce energy flow passively, or if a catalyst such as acid or NaCl is always required to "pull" electrons out.

This is not a hoax, as they do have a plant operating for ConAgra's Butterball turkey plant in Carthage, MO. It produces oil (convertable to other petro-based fules and plastics) from turkey wastes!

Changing World Technologies

Now, sit back and imagine that this type of facility could be used to recycle are landfills into commercially useful products.

Its also useful to purify and reduce other waste products from current petroleum and coal supplies (think sulfur and mercury).

That's the beauty of the plan...

To make the transition now from gasoline to hydrogen not only improves emissions from vehicles, but creates a powerful demand for more hydrogen. The process that extracts hydrogen from refined oils doesn't have to release the pollutants into the atmosphere, I'm sure that it could be used elsewhere.

Besides, once the infrastructure is built, there are several alternatives to getting oil from the ground.