From Turkey Guts to Fuel Oil

Untimely Ripp'd writes "The latest issue of Discover Magazine reports that any day now a plant will go online in Carthage, Missouri that processes turkey guts into high grade oil, natural gas, some minerals, and water. Unfortunately, the Discover article isn't online yet, but here's a newspaper article. The system, developed by Changing World Technologies uses thermal depolymerization and apparently works on almost any and every kind of organic waste. They assert that applying it to 100% of the US' agricultural waste would produce about 4 billion barrels of oil per year -- about the amount we currently import. It sounds too good to be true, it sounds like one of those fly-by-night-in-the-face-of-the-second-law deals, but it isn't happening in somebody's basement -- it's happening in a multi-million dollar facility developed with Con-Agra."

Comments

Bad day for a good story...

[ObligatoryUserName]

I wonder how many people will write this off as an April Fools joke. I've only skimmed The Discover article, but it is an extremely optimistic piece, and the writer seems chagrinned that he couldn't present a more skeptical case. If this technology was widely deployed it could almost eliminate foreign oil dependence.

The article also talked about no increases in carbon in the environment because oil isn't pulled up from underground, it's created from biological waste (carbon already in the environment). I believe there was a quote in there along the lines of "every living thing becomes a little carbon sink".

Warren Buffett is an investor (via ConAgra) and the field tests should be done by 2005.

Not a Joke.

[blunte]

A friend reported this story to me in detail 2 or 3 days ago in great detail.

There are two plants either in operation now, or just starting up. One is right next to a Butterball Turkey factory.

The process breaks organic materials down thru some process of super-hydration, 500 degree heat, some moderate amount of pressure, and then results in various oils and water (clean enough to go into normal treatment plants).

Also, oil companies reportedly support this because the novel approach is actually easier and cleaner for processing crude oils than existing refineries. So they stand to gain from this as well.

There's a lot of good info on this, so don't discount it just because /. posted it today.

I hope it's a huge success.

More info

[lub]

At the web site of Changing World Technologies.

Good but overrated

[einhverfr]

There are some substantial differences (good and bad) relating to this method.

1) Using biomass means that all carbon embodied in the fuel is from CO2 relatively recently removed from the atmosphere. Petrolium products when burned dump carbon into the carbon cycle (CO2->Plant Biomass -> many possible steps (optional) -> decomposition -> CO2. This is good because biomass fuels don't increase CO2 levels in our atmosphere as fossil fuels do.

2) On the negative side, there is a lot of fuel involved in raising, the turkeys (equipment relating to feed, transport of feed, raising the turkeys, transporting them, slaughtering them, transporting the guts to the factory, etc).

My suspician is that we will see it use less fuel than transporting the guts of the turkey to the factory, processing them, etc. and since these parts are currently unused, it will ge a good thing. However, I suspect that we will not see a net fuel gain from this process (more fuel will go into raising/transporting feed, etc. than you will get out of the turkey) and so it can only subsidize the fuel cost of raising a turkey, not completely even mitigate that.

That being said, I am all for it. I think that if we looked at methane digesters for manure of all marge animal farms, this sort of project, etc. it would reduce our petrolium consumption and allow us to leave a smaller ecological footprint.