Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is really just fossil fuels for the extremely impatient.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I was expecting that evil 'bit' story...
Something like this could really help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I betcha the oil industry is going to try to discredit this breakthrough in energy technology.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
I'm so paranoid, I can't tell if this is another April Fools or not!
Why bother with a plant for this? I can already turn chili into ah, "natural gas". :-)
The date on the article was Dec. 4, 2002, so I think this one is legit.
So does it mean we'll have to invade Kentucky next?
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
My guess is that the Slashdot eds thought it _was_ an April Fool's joke or they wouldn't have posted it today. If they repost it a second time within the next two hours though, we'll know it must be true.
This is just a plan to let President Bush take care of all those PETA wackos. You see, by making oil from turkeys, he'll surely upset any self-righteous PETA member. They'll boycott the new oil and continue to use oil from the middle East, and consequently they'll be supporting terrorism. Thankfully, the Patriot Act will allow the government to lock up these proponents of terrorism for an indefinite amount of time at an undisclosed location.
Now finally, we may all eat meat without fearing harrassment.
This wouldn't happen to be an expansion of the "Little Lisa Slurry Factory" would it?
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
that's "fowl."
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.
(1) Club baby seal
(2) ?
(3) Oil!
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Wow. Back in college, I didn't realize so many of the guys in my dorm had biodiesel engines in their room.
A friend reported this story to me in detail 2 or 3 days ago in great detail.
/. posted it today.
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
I hope it's a huge success.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
At the web site of Changing World Technologies.
But [James Stoffer] added that while the plant may be a "tough go" economically, it's worth the investment because of what it promises for the environment.
If such companies actually paid fines for breaking environmental laws by polluting with livestock wastes, they would not find reprocessing a "tough go" economically. Unfortunately, the EPA doesn't have the balls to go after even the most blatant of violators, and thus the food-processors get away with murder.
When Con-Agra rolls out such zero-emissions factories everywhere (As William McDonough writes of in Cradle to Cradle) I will happily invest in their stock and buy their products.
There are a lot of biomass reduction techniques going on to produce combustible fuels. As the article states they all run into the same problem - economics. Nature did all the heavy work on crude oil for us - so naturally from the perspective of in the ground to a watt or a mile or whatever, the price of oil is hard to beat, particularly given its enormous infrastructure advantage. Even if you're using "free" feedstocks (i.e. wastes) the processing cost can be a killer.
So, for these fuels to make any impact, they generally need to be subsidized somehow. The article makes it clear that the economics of this fuel source are far from proven.
There are little startups like this all over the place. So far none of the techniques developed have made a serious impact on our use of oil. Without real public and government support for changing our energy base, this one probably won't either.
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Automobiles, upon filling the tank with turkey-petrol, tend not to be drivable and prefer to doze on the couch watching NFL football.
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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.
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