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

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.