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AgroWaste Oil Plant Starts Production
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo, and others has a story about the first Waste-to-Oil plant going online, and selling the oil commercially. Using TCP (Thermal Conversion Process), the plant is producing 100-200 barrels of No. 4 oil a day, and has the capacity to produce up to 500 barrels per day. With the amount of agricultural waste in the U.S., and many more of these plants, we could possibly reduce our need for foreign oil."
Will a new RFC be coming out, for Oil over TCP?
Decrease our need for foreign oil, and increase our use of domestic oil. Doesn't anyone see oil as the problem behind CO2 increases? The economic short-range thinking sometimes disgusts me.
Wow, since daily US oil consumption is what, 20 *million* barrels per day, I'm
sure it will be no problem to set up another 10,000 of these plants, and there
will be absolutely no government or corporate resistance, and the oil will be
just as good as what comes out of the ground and just as cheap!
Seriously, the only way we will reduce our dependence on foreign oil is if we
reduce our dependence on oil, period. And that will only happen when the price
of oil goes so high we actually have to stop driving our SUVs once in a while.
Then maybe we can just fuckin' IGNORE the middle east.
shouldn't it be "from the texas-*tea*-from-cleveland-steamers dept."?
Ahh, thats too bad. . . I only by No. 5 or better oil. . .
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Crude oil still needs to be refined. Supply like this can be as tightly controlled as OPEG since the process is under patent -- unless someone ELSE finds a way that is not under the patent, and production can meet or exceeed OPEG -- not to mention REFINERIES need to be placed under more competition -- don't count on artificial crude oil to lower prices any time soon.
Karma whorin' since 1999
While these plants are all great in their own way (better to use the waste than just to let it rot), 500 b of oil per day is NOTHING. Worldwide consumption is like 20-22 MILLION b per day. The US is somewhere around 6? million....
Production on a MUCH larger scale will be required for these plants to have any real impact..
Kiss my shiny metal ass
The idea that this (even scaled) could cut our need for foriegn oil is absurd. We consume such vast quantities of oil that 500 barrels a day isn't even a drop in the bucket.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I wonder if it will turn out to be Thermal Conversion Process/Internationally Patented...
Seriously though, in theory, this seems like a fantastic idea. All that has to happen now is for the capacity to increase, cost of production to come down, and for OPEC (or similar group) to not kill it off.
There may, however, be a market in the "alternative energy" sector. To cite an example, another ethanol station just popped up to compete with the one existing already in my metro area (population ~550K). They seem to be doing pretty damn well, and maybe this waste-to-oil will start to make a dent in our gas prices, cuz we all know how bad we need it (I just paid 2.01 for 85 octane)!!
bash: rtfm: command not found
Human activity might indeed be modestly affecting global temperatures. In fact it might be the reason for the extended inter-glacial period we're currently enjoying. A little global warming is a good thing, as it may stave off another catastrophic ice age. The earth left to it's own devices has other ideas that we would find most inhospitable.
This sounds like a solution to 2 problems: overflowing landfills, and soaring oil prices. The question, of course, comes to down to the almighty buck. The article (yes, I read it, I'm new here) states that it such plants are self-sufficient in terms of producing their own energy to operate, but fails to state their initial cost.
In these times of short-sighted administrations led by politicians unable to see the big picture beyond getting reeleced in 4 years, how likely is this to be implemented en-masse in municipalities such as Toronto, for example, where it could be used to curb (apparently in an eco-friendly manner, while providing needed petroleum) exports of waste to Michigan?
But Maaa! Everyone else has a
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The biggest single problem besides raw crude supply is our environmental laws that have gone totally wild. Thanks to all the environmental regulations we have, there are currently only a handful of refineries capable of producing all these "boutique" blends of gasoline that are required in crazy places like California. (I should know, I live here.) Less competition and less refining supply means higher prices.
So why is there not more competition and more capacity in the refining business? Probably because there hasn't been a single new refinery built in over 17+ years. Why not? Probably because of these wacko environmental laws that make it ridiculously easy for all the Not In MY Back Yard (NIMBY) people to stop any progress from ever being made. Thanks to them, it is almost completely impossible to build any new refineries anymore.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you, NIMBY people, for making me pay more for my gasoline!!
The whole oil thing is just a big scam. Here me out, I've got proof.
You see, one day while driving back from a LUG^H^H^H my girlfriends place on I-64 my gas light came on. I knew I had about 20 miles before I ran out, and I if I booked I could make it home without having to refill in the middle of the night at some creepy gas station in the country. I figured I'd give it a shot and play gas tank roulette. I tripped the meeter and started watching the miles.
Well, it was pretty late and I was starting to get tired to I popped in a Gloria Est^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H KoRn CD to keep me awake and started letting the rythm get me. It wasnt until 5 miles past my exit that I realized my mistake. I looked down at my console and my gas light had turned off. Thats weird I thought. There was another exit I could take about 3 miles from my location and I could back track through town to get to my apartment. By the time I got close to my apartment I had driven almost 40 miles. The next day I woke up late for work and without thinking I got in my car and began the 25 mile commute to work. An entire day went by before I remembered that I needed gas. By then I had clocked in almost 100 miles and still my car wasnt thirsty. That was 3 years ago, and I've long since stopped counting how many times the meter tripped back over to zero. I laugh as my friends pay $2 at the pump while I whizz past in my god-mode oldsmobile.
Dont believe me? Next time you see the feed-me light come on ignore it and find out for yourself. Its a huge conspiricy I tell you. Fight the Man! Dont buy gasoline, drive 80 MPH down the freeway with your top down and windows up with the AC running. Drink 5 tall cups of coffee a day at starbucks knowing that you're still saving money not buying gas. Wash behind your ears and run linux... in the shower.
Let that be a lesson to all of you.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
They make biodiesel from used french fry oil and stuff like that. Runs in unmodified (or barely modified) diesel engines.
From the article:
In addition, it generates its own energy to power the plant, and uses the steam naturally created by the process to heat incoming feedstock, In addition, TCP produces no emissions and no secondary hazardous waste streams.
So we're getting 200 barrels of oil a day, for "free" (that is, no oil going in). That's critical, of course, since if it took 300 barrels of oil (or even 190) it wouldn't be worth it.
Fascinating. I hope it scales.
What type of oil is oil "number 4?" What is this type of oil used for? Is it usable in vehicles? And why does it sound like a French perfume?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
let's not kid ourselves. It'll take thousands of these plants to produce enough oil to reduce our foreign dependance. We use a LOT of oil here.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
100-200 barrels a day is NOT to laugh at, many privately owned oil wells produce far less than that per day. It still pays off to run them. And yes, it is realistic to set up hundreds or even thousands of these plants - I'd imagine many municipalities would be interested in using a plant like this to turn their waste into a resource rather than a drain. The process isn't just for turkey guts, it can convert plastic scrap, old tires, and other such refuse into oil as well.
So don't knock it just because the output seems puny - this can be used not only to reduce the dependence on foreign oil, it is also useful in creating a decentralized energy infrastructure.
--I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
Is Oil No 4 related to Biodiesil?
If not what is it used for?
I have a friend who is starting up a new business selling biodiesil farm equipment to farmers. I should probably RTFA, but if they are using stuff that is otherwise being thrown away as waste, it should be a good thing.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
In Victoria, Australia, one of the power companies is planning to do a similar thing with coal, except they're going to churn out enough of it to supply most of the local market. If it works, they're going to generate cheap, low-sulfur (and thus low-emission) diesel, run a whopping great electricity plant from the byproducts, and all the CO2 from the generation will be stuffed underground for a very long time. While it's not ideal, it's a heck of a lot better than the current situation (burn the coal straight into the atmosphere and import oil from overseas).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Biotechnology has several techniques (here is an example) to decompose waste. Overall, it sounds like a more sensible approach, doesn't it?
It's gotta be one of these: surely it's not possible for someone to actually misspell OPEC twice in one posting!
Have you ever been to East Texas, around Houston/Galveston? That's where a lot of the big refineries in the Gulf Coast area are, and that's where I went to college. Not a place where I'd want my children to live, frankly. NIMBY is a perfectly valid reaction to a plant that spews carcinogens by the ton into the land, water, and air. But it doesn't matter to you, now does it? Just discount poor people organizing to kick fat-cat polluters out of their communities as "NIMBY people", associate them with "wacko environmental laws", and imply that they are damaging the American way of life.
Give me a break. The crude supply is drying up - why else would we be invading other countries despite the human, military, political, and fiscal cost? The White House is full of oil execs - they're just trying to ensure future profitability.
</flamebait-response>
What about reducing the need for oil?
Reducing dependency on fossil fuel is certainly a great improvement, but we're still talking about oil byproducts getting in the environment.
Isn't it time to maybe -maybe- think about making cars and other combustion engines a tiny bit more efficient, particularly say... in North America for instance?
What are some of the better resources (ie. web)available out there where I can find more information?
And that will only happen when the price of oil goes so high we actually have to stop driving our SUVs once in a while.
What amazes me is the horsepower ratings that are coming out lately. 340HP in a family sedan (DaimlerChrysler 300)?
There's lots of oil left (if you know where to get it), but this amount of power is just silly and reeks of "mine is bigger than yours" insecurity.
It really amazes me how nobody here seems to realize that oil is not JUST for burning; it has other uses. Many products, like Vaseline (petroleum jelly), and even some synthetic materials used for things like jackets, are derived from oil.
You people really make me sick the way you think oil is only good for burning.
Ok, but what happens to the soil the plants would have been 'mulched to'? We get gas for our cars for a little while at the expense of our already depleted farmlands.
Why not produce fuel from 'people waste'?
...then what would your military do?
How about reducing the need for oil as a whole?
Invisible hand, baby. Get those pesky market externalities under control, and people will decide for themselves whether they need a SUV.
Some good starting methods for making SUV owners bear a more proportionate share of their vehicles' burden on society:
- Increase gas taxes.
- Safety surcharge based on vehicle weight/height. (My personal favorite!)
- Increase emissions standards for vehicles.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Hear Hear. No doubt they would continue to er.... spread good and promote peace like they usually do.
It turned out to be very lucrative, and became a major cash producer for BP. When oil income was down, they counted on Chemicals to keep cash and profits up.
One of their earliest less complex chemicals they produced happened to be nitrogen, used to create fertilizer. Later, they produce a lot more complex chemicals, and even sold their nitrogen facilities in the 90s. Their acrylonitriles business was booming, the last time I worked for them.
The bottom line is that a business created to reduce the cost of waste, and possibly even make a profit by processing it turned out to be a major industry success. Thus, I believe that since they are not merely producing oil through an unconventional means, but using the savings from waste management to drive the business, this could be a huge success and create a new industry.
Open Standards Portal
Jesus, if organizations like OPEC or what-not were THAT bad, wouldn't someone have just gone on a killing spree and wiped out OPEC?
If not, I'm free tomorrow.
You seem to care quite a bit about the environment given that you're typing out your little rant on a computer which, the byproducts of the production of all the materials for are far worse than vehicle emissions. But, a liberal just wouldn't be a liberal without being a hypocrite. Shame I used my last mod point to mod the grandparent up.
Some have theorized that no new refineries have been built because they take some time(15 years I think?) to break even, and that oil companies know they don't have 15 years worth of oil that is easily accessible. Thus, why bother making refineries that will never operate long enough to be profitable?
What's scary is that if you read between the lines and look closely, most of the OPEC nations are pumping oil at their "full capacity" levels- in other words, we're getting to be rather tapped out.
We'll find other ways of getting around, but what concerns me more is plastic- virtually everything we make needs something plastic, and guess where plastic comes from? That and as we get more and more desperate for oil, it'll be harder to fight off those who want to drill in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, etc.
Please help metamoderate.
Longer carbon chains, such as waxes and tar, are the "heavies" in Petroleum-Engineer-speak. The shorter carbon chains are "lights." The best gasoline is isooctane* (eight carbons) but most of the stuff in crude oil is heavier. So these distillation towers are actually catalytic crackers, splitting up the carbon chains into smaller (more valuable) gasoline while separating the reaction products via distillation. The "catalytic" part is where patents come in, and there are a few companies that own most of the useful ones regarding catalysts and operating conditions. UOP comes to mind.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
1 plant down, only 20,000 to go to replace all need of foreign oil for the USA ;)
Error. You ignore the fact that the rollover risk is partly under the driver's control, by avoiding driving in ways that are prone to rollover. The heavier frame, on the other hand, helps in accidents caused by other people that the driver could not avoid. ...and not incidentally, kills other people in accidents that the driver causes.
As for driving in ways that are prone to rollover; if you drive at highway speeds, you are prone to rollover if you have to avoid any sudden obstacle. Unless you're planning to avoid driving over say, 35 miles an hour, there's not a shitload you can do to actively avoid rollovers other than drive with reasonable caution.
SUVs are bad mojo from a safety perspective. Arguing that they'd be safer than cars if everyone drove a certain way is absolutely asinine in light of clear evidence that people don't drive that way.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Ummmm while it is fairly global, the biggest issue remains the US, which is also the only country not doing anything about it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I still want to know where this vast amount of agro waste is... U.S. farmers, in general, make use of everything they possibly can, to reduce their costs. What some classify as "waste" is reincorporated into the soil to replace nutrients that would otherwise require use of chemical fertilizers, which cause money. Farms don't have manure spreaders just because the farmers don't want a large trash bill! There have been farmers working with municipalities for decades to recycle our post-sewage-treatment crap as fertilizer, when the goverment will allow it.
That's not to say there isn't bio waste that could be recycled. Consumer food waste, for example, after you separate out the inorganics that don't fit municipal recycling rules. But that isn't free - someone (i.e., consumers) is going to have to pay the additional cost to do the separation, or make sure that those costs are less than what landfills charge to accept the waste. The aforementioned output of sewage plants, when blocked by government regulation from being incorporated into the soil, is another source.
The fact is, we don't have enough farm land under tillage in the world to supply both our food and energy needs. And I doubt environmentalists would enthusiastically support any efforts to correct that. This article describes an interesting side note in energy history, and it does point a way towards a way to truly incorporate "solar energy" into our current environment that does not require repaving our world with solar cells.
But (and this is where my hotbutton is triggered) the source of the "waste" used isn't going to be farms as we think of them today. Unless, of course, we find (or design!) a fast-growing plant that doesn't leach away the nutrients needed for food plants in the process, preferably one that can be used to reclaim land by breaking up "bad" soils, and working like legumes to reduce land erosion and add nitrogen to the soil for later food crops, yet provide plenty of biomass for production of fuel. Maybe something socially acceptable enough to turn any vacant city lot into a "fuel farm", rather than using grass. Oh, and it can't kill off any exotic bugs or slugs in the process!
Gee, I wonder if the future biomass fuel companies will make it worth my time and money to take my 3+ acres of grass clippings for fuel production, rather than me just composting them?
We use about 19.7 million barrels of oil a day. Interestingly, thats only an increase on 2 million barrels a day since 1973. Given our massive infrastructure growth in that time, I'd say our usage is actually very controlled.
World Oil Consumption
Thanks Google
Everyone just ate 5 more Turkeys a week, we could elimate eliminate the need for foriegn oil, eat Turkey for the USA! M
Oh, they'll find a reason to bomb you, same as now.
In fact, we won't bomb you for oil... we'll bomb you for your garbage to produce oil we can sell back to you!
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
That's not interesting, it's just ramblings from the official liberal environazi pamphlet. Oil producers are nowhere near capacity, they simply say that all of the time so that they can control the price of crude oil; much like DeBeers does with diamonds. Proving that once again, the dissemination of information out around the tree that's being hugged on any given day is rather poor.
...except they're afraid to in case the US government invades them.
If you won't let people build new ones, NOT EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPLACING existing ones, then you make the danger WORSE, not better.
The old plant is going to become "dangerous" regardless of whether a replacement is built. If you build a new one, eventually it becomes an old one and will be "dangerous" itself. Nuclear power plants cost as much or more to decommission as they did to build, and those costs were never factored into the economics of them. That's a good chunk of the reason it is pointless building new ones.
Infuriate left and right
A bit of contemplation would reveal that transportation includes trains, planes, and ships, in addition to cars, trucks, buses, and of course the ever popular SUVs.
Infuriate left and right
747s average about 0.2 miles per gallon for a reasonable-distance flight. When you figure in their larger passenger capacity, it costs significantly less fuel to transport a passenger in a 747 than it does to transport a passenger in even a fully-occupied SUV.
To burst your bubble a little more, diesel-powered trains are significantly more efficient than planes or cars. A representative example would be the aggregate fuel efficiency of Burlington Northern, a large freight railroad. 751.2 GTM (gross ton-miles per gallon) in 2003 for their entire fleet of trains. We'll stick with the previous poster's comparison to the Cadillac Escalade EXT. With a gross curb weight of 3175kg (3.5 standard tons) and highway fuel efficiency of 16 miles per gallon, the Escalade weighs in with a whopping 56.0 GTM.
So, freight trains are 13.41x as fuel-efficient as Escalades. Now that must be a surprise...
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
I thought the Chinese ride a lot of bikes everywhere all the time, but it seems they still drink up a lot of the world's oil.... maybe it's the whole urban culture... all the electricity running into computers while we type replies on slashdot....
If individual plants can become profitable, then more plants will be built - and larger. This is of course the first generation here.. from the FAQ:
:(
"the next generation of plants will be larger"
and also:
"Future plant size will depend on the volume of source material available."
Why couldn't there be thousands of these scattered across the US & Europe? Plus, this is one area where the advantage isn't going to go to developing countries... shame on them, but they just can't produce enough (otherwise) worthless junk.
Although looking at the small print there could be trouble:
"Does the RES plant release any by-products or emissions? The only by-product is processed water."
Water! Terrible processed water!!! Kevin Costner has so much to teach us
Afterall, they *are* profit centers. Once you get past the price of building one of these out (which is currently unknown), it's all reconstituted gravy .
Seriously, I bet theres enough of Doc's fuel factories (solid waste producing factories/farms) to fuel thousands of these already, infact they could simply augment the factory and help each companies bottom line. Imagine of instead of companies throwing out all their shit (literally in some cases), they all start building out these TCP factories as part of their business unit, which would eventually turn a profit. Everybody would be happy.It's probably going to happen sooner or later. I can just imagine when people start opening up old land fills to "extract the fuel".
Oh who am I kidding.
Because TCP utilizes above-ground organic waste streams to produce a new energy source, it also has the potential to arrest global warming by reducing the use of fossil fuels... ...TCP produces no emissions and no secondary hazardous waste streams...
Assuming that the world is warming (as opposed to just rebalancing the heat in the ecosystem) and that warming is due to the humans burning fossil fuels. It's not just fossil fuels that cause the supposed greenhouse gasses, burning wood and other plants also produces many of the gases as does simply decomposition. The fuels produced here would do the same as they make direct reference to them being hydrocarbons.
That is just absurd. If the plant has no emissions then what's all this talk about steam and a fuel product, are they not emitted by the plant? Of course the article author misquoted, going back one more step to the original text: TCP produces no uncontrollable emissions
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
The "invade Iraq for oil" thing is cute and I know how much stupid people like saying that over and over again to rally other stupid people to their cause, but it just doesn't pan out. There are quite a few countries other than Iraq that produce oil, such as these:
Albania
Algeria
Angola
Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Benin
Brunei
Cameroon
Canada
Colombia
Congo, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Republic of the
Cote d'Ivoire
Ecuador
Egypt
Equatorial Guinea
Gabon
Guatemala
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Kazakhstan
Kuwait
Libya
Malaysia
Mexico
Nigeria
Norway
Oman
Papua New Guinea
Peru
Qatar
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Sudan
Suriname
Syria
Trinidad and Tobago
Turkmenistan
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
For that matter, the amount of oil that we get from Iraq is infinitisimal, making it hardly worth invading. On the other hand, if you consider that it was controlled by a dictator who supported terrorists (giving money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, etc) and has quite a lot of money coming in via kickbacks from the UN Oil For Food Program (the countries who benfitted the most from this were France, Germany, and Russia, by the way...not that their media will ever mention it); then you start having problems.
"Doesn't anyone see oil as the problem behind CO2 increases?"
In this case, no. The waste would decay on its own naturally, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere upon doing so. At least through Thermal Depolymerization, we are harnessing the energy from that process. The reason fossil fuels in general cause global warming is that by drilling and burning them we are taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air. Carbon from conventional petroleum has been sequestered in the ground for millions of years, while carbon from turkey guts has been part of the closed carbon loop, and thus does not add to the total amount of carbon in the cycle.
While getting a new source of oil is a Good Thing, we can't depend entirely on this one, since it's really about increasing the efficency of the existing process(it takes gas to run a farm too!).
Our needs are going to keep increasing, and oil can't possibly cover them all, especially not if the predictions of Peak Oil come true. With several alternatives for production and mobile use almost or currently market-ready(wind, solar, biofuels, fission, fuel cells..), we should - hopefully - be able to get off of oil entirely within a few decades.
The drip is the design of American cities (particularly in the West) that force people to drive to meet basic daily needs. The bigger bucket is measures like this to increase the production of oil. Fixing the drip is building cities like they do back East, in Europe and in Asia. The anti-urbanist streak that runs through American society is one of the root causes of this problem. See my journal, I've written quite a bit about this.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I also hear people say "the oil industry has too much power here for anything to change." This is also the wrong view. Sure, the oil industry does have a lot of power, but the result of their machinations is that our entire economy is dependent on a commodity which we must import from politically unstable and hostile parts of the world which are far away. There are plenty of other powerful industries in the US that have nothing to do with oil that must see this as a hazardous situation, one which should be remedied by moving the US to having multiple energy options to choose from, including cost-competitive domestic solutions. Is the oil industry in the US more powerful than all the other non-oil industries? I don't think so.
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Create a WAP server
Shouldn't this be modded funny?? How is this insightful?
Your assumptions are false, anonymous one.
To be charitable, I will assume that you are considering only bodily injury liability, since most other insurance coverage is directly related to a vehicle's cost.
The actual costs to an insurance company from an SUV accident are masked by the following factors:
In multiple-vehicle accidents:
Responsibility: The cost of the accident is covered by the insurance of the party who caused the accident. Which vehicle caused the most damage or which vehicle is unsafe has little to no correlation with who pays.
In single-vehicle accidents:
Rollover accident spread: In rollovers, the typical range of injuries is far more narrow than in the aggregate of auto accidents. Typically, either the passengers remain in the vehicle and do not sustain serious injuries, or they are ejected from the vehicle and die. Dead people cost the insurance company significantly less than ongoing hospitalization for serious/chronic injuries.
In a microcosm of the SUV concept in general, the overall increased insurance cost of having SUVs on the road is distributed across the entire spectrum of auto owners.
Look back at historical examples of unsafe vehicles and you will see a similar trend. The risk posed by one model of vehicle has very little relation to the cost of insuring a person driving that vehicle.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
While these plants are all great in their own way (better to use the waste than just to let it rot), 500 b of oil per day is NOTHING. Worldwide consumption is like 20-22 MILLION b per day. The US is somewhere around 6? million....
Any trend towards erosion of the status quo, carried long enough, destroys the status quo.
Linux has already hit the "spiral point", where it has reached enough market and mind share to pass the threshold of long term survivability and relevance.
Now, so long as Linuux gains a little marketshare every year, the result is inevitable.
Driving to LA? Do you start complaining 5 minutes into the drive because it'll take hours or days to get there, or do you just keep driving, knowing full well that if you just keep going, you'll get there?
The march of technology of recent seems to be heading towards renewable and consumable resources, rather than continuing to favor squandering precious non-renewable resources.
While gassing up my diminutive Saturn SL2 (which gets ~ 35 miles to the gallon) I struck up a conversation with an SUV owner next to me, and was shocked to find that she got around 23 miles to the gallon. 23!!??!?
That's *alot* more than I would have guessed.
Technology is marching forward - the main concern isn't to "solve the world's problems tomorrow" but to solve more problems than you cause.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I saw a fully functional solar car today. It was all terrain, homeostatic and self-replicating, environmentally friendly to boot!
It is sometimes called a horse.
The idea that we are going to meet our energy requirements via agriculture output is to essentially put us back to pre-industrial age. It is based on ecomomics of scarcity, which is not only an unpleasant idea, it is also not likely to happen.
There is no energy crisis. There is only environmental hand-wringing.
There are a couple of ways are going to make energy on a large scale in the future, and its not going to be based on recycling! We will first move to non-oil fossil fuel economy (which we largely are now), and then, to nuclear and extra-terrestrial solar. This will happen purely based on the fact that consumers wont tolerate less. When lifestyles start to suffer because of true power shortages, to a noticeable degree, the kid gloves will come off and "hard" decisions will be made.
Because TCP utilizes above-ground organic waste streams to produce a new energy source, it also has the potential to arrest global warming by reducing the use of fossil fuels,
Aren't we still burning the fuel that results from the process? Isn't burning oil what has a negative environmental impact? If this stuff's just like oil, why doesn't it hurt the environment when we burn it?
Can someone please explain this?
There's another company that does something similar, except they call it 'Fast Pyrolysis'. I'm not qualified to make a full comparison but it sounds similar on the face of it.
This is the first bit of sensible news to come out of USA for a long, long time, for several reasons:
1. 500 barrels is of course nearly nothing, but this does has the potential to become significant - see other posts.
2. The primary aim is to solve a waste problem, which this technology seems to do in a brilliant way.
3. It may also help reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. When you burn farm waste, you release CO2 into the athmosphere, true, but that's where it came from - the plants have taken CO2 out to build up carbohydrates. Contrast this with fossil fuel, where you produce CO2 that was taken out many hundred million years ago, which can only increase the levels of CO2. On top of that, when the farm waste isn't left to rot, less methane is produced, which again can make a big difference.
All in all - this seems good and sensible through and through. Which makes me fear that some narrowminded and greedy idiot with too much money and power will want to kill it off.
While the americans are debating wheter to drive a 2-wheel or 4-wheel SUV, I'd like to point out that this neccessarily doesnt have to be a good thing.
Our demand is decided upon access. If we have a low oilprice, we WILL use more oil. If we use more oil we will have more exhaustion. This merely means we will be using _more_ oil than before since we have a larger pool of it.
Its an catch-22 argument, but when we humans find new resources to exploit we always increase the surrounding effects on environment. Lets say we succeed to create efficient fusion-power. Yes! Instant o-rama deluxe flying cars with jetpacks. Great thing dr Wilchenstein?
We'll have to build new skyroads, new cars, new jetpacks. Using this new resource will allow us to build other things from the resources we are now already using. With new energy-resources we will be able to do "new things" like going to the moon,
flying more, generally travel more. All of this might sound good, but it will in the long term put more and more strain on the resources we use from earth.
The solution is to just make a big ball of garbage and launch it into space.... and then porn will happen too. ;-)
Wikipedia has a great article about this:
t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
US oil demand is not even close to 11 million barrels per day. It is in the 20 million bpd vicinity. US domestic production is around 7 or 8 million bpd. Imports make up the rest.
0 3/ [ChevronTexaco's Annual Report - includes details and numbers on all their various activities]
4 &c ontentId=2015020 [BP's Statistical Review of World Energy - excellent compilation of stats, START HERE]
u bl ications/Corp_P_FO2003.asp [ExxonMobil's Operating and Financial Review - ExxonMobil is the world's largest energy company by revenues, they're the biggest of American oil and they do a hell of a lot more than refinining]
o cu ment_id=111082 [Petroleum Intelligence Weekly Ranking of world's largest oil companies, including state owned companies like Aramco, Pemex, Sinopec, etc. PIW is the bible of the oil industry, and it's really expensive to subscribe, but you can look at a few things for free.]
o cu ment_id=86451 [PIW's glossary of oil industry terms.]
American oil is not "mostly in the refining business." American oil companies are engaged in all aspects of the oil business.
Some links if you're looking for a clue:
www.eia.doe.gov [US DOE's Energy Information Agency]
www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/petro.html [EIA's monthy
petroleum numbers]
www.iea.org [International Energy Agency, which is an organization of oil consuming countries and based in Paris; many more statistics.]
http://www.chevrontexaco.com/investor/annual/20
http://www.bp.com/subsection.do?categoryId=1010
http://www2.exxonmobil.com/corporate/Newsroom/P
http://www.energyintel.com/DocumentDetail.asp?d
http://www.energyintel.com/DocumentDetail.asp?d
--
Back to the Future showcased "Mr. Fusion". Could this be "Mr. Petrol"?
It mimics the earth's system by using pipes and controlling temperature and pressure to reduce the bio- remediation process from millions of years to mere hours.
The process entails five steps:
(1) Pulping and slurrying the organic feed with water.
(2) Heating the slurry under pressure to the desired temperature.
(3) Flashing the slurry to a lower pressure to separate the mixture.
(4) Heating the slurry again (coking) to drive off water and produce light hydrocarbons.
(5) Separating the end products.
TCP is more than 80% energy efficient.
This calculation appears to not include the parasitic energy, including the energy needed to actually produce the crops.
Pimental concluded that even if all renewable energy forms, including biomass conversions could be implemented to their maximum (accounting for all parasitic energy needed for fertilizers, harvest, conversion to alternative forms, etc.) they would still only replace less than half of our annual fossil fuel use.
...what the price for those barrels of oil was? It's good to know that we can do it if necessary, but I don't think it will happen in a large scale unless it is economically viable. So, is it? I been through the ConAgra site, the res-energy site, the CWT site and a lot of the little green guys' sites. No luck anywhere. Either they don't want to release the figures or I'm really, really dumb. Or maybe both.
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
etc.
It's easy to do; you get a clue.
Parent poster has NO IDEA what he's talking about.
I dropped a line to Changing World Technologies some time back, but they never responded. I've yet to see any corroboration of their results... but then again, there's a plant in Carthage, right?
I'd really like to have one of these in my town. (Willimantic, CT.) There's a variety of paper-pulping business nearby, there's a landfill in town that's rapidly filling... plenty of organic carbon ready to be thrown through the process, a process that reputedly spins shit (literally) into (black) gold.
So why haven't I gotten even a "fuck you" back from CWT? Has anyone actually seen the Carthage plant? Is anyone here a chemical engineer and can vouch for the feasibility of the process on more than a "I'm a Slashdotter and enjoy talking out my ass!" level? What are the relevant patents? Peer-reviewed journal articles? Anything other than vacuous press releases?!
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to respond here. I've had no luck trying to contact them directly. (No pickup on the phone either.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Say $41 at the moment on the open market.
The plant produces 500 barrels per day, that's $20,500 per day or $7.5 million per year turnover. They are very cagey about the costs and payback period. This kind of thing has been possible for years, it just has never been economically feasable. It all depends on how much a plant costs to build, how much the waste costs and what the running costs are.
Definitely a good idea to see your waste as a resource though.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
See:
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I suspect though that getting suitable waste to process is going to be the biggest problem.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
There is plenty of oil. There are just sitting on it like DeBeers is sitting on the diamonds.
Nothing new here. This technology is decades old. Several plants have been build allready but all failed on the front-end principle:
How to pump a solid containing mixture to 100+ bars
Still it lacks details. The organic fraction (the oil) still contains high oxygen contents is is inmiscible with traditional fuel oils. It's viscocity and high flash point makes it unsuitable as a fuel. Either you upgrade or burn it.
I have yet to see a commercial high-scale and economical attractive biomass process. So far only fast pyrolysis seems to be the option. Alcolhol/ester oil production is economical unattractive and large scales can not be reached.
I live in the UK and petrol / diesel prices are over $6 per gallon. In light of this, and the fact that petrol consumption is the cause of all kinds of environmental devastation (my girlfriend comes from Northern Spain, recently wrecked by the Prestige spill) and war, I have decided to make my own diesel fuel from waste vegetable oil.
Biodiesel and associated technologies can only ever be a part of truly sustainable glabal energy policy, but it has a large part to play in these early stages as it uses existing technology.
Not many people know that the original diesel engine ran on peanut oil!
I bought a cheap diesel car and built an oil refinery from scrap metal in my shed. I have made friends from my friendly, local, Kurdish kebab seller and I am well on the way to fuel independence.
Check out my project at:
Dan's biodiesel
Peace and grease!
does anyone have any idea as to the cost per barrel or the oil produced? maybe the recent price rise in oil made it viable, maybe theyre producing over cost with subsidies from researchers, etc... just wondering
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
In the words of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, former chief economist at the World Bank, former head of Clinton's council of economic advisers:
'The reason why the invisible hand is invisible is that it doesn't exist'.
a) The automobile and oil lobbies in the US are too large and powerful to allow these kinds of externalities to be internalised
b) Even if you were to try, what makes you think people wouldn't simply sacrifice something else (say, hamburgers) just to keep their SUVs? If it's important enough in American culture, people will spend the money for it. Not just a question of higher or lower indifference curves, but of a cultural necessity for some people.
Why not just outlaw them altogether? In fact, why not threaten to cripple the automotive industry unless they radically reform their entire way of doing business?
Of course, the answer is that the US government at many levels is in the pocket of the automotive industry. As long as it continues like that, you won't see any real reform.
Here's another article snip (from a Newsday article):
"Right now, he said, the Carthage facility produces petroleum at the equivalent price of $15 per barrel -- about $5 more than what it costs a small oil company to find, extract and refine petroleum the conventional way.Appel said those costs will go down as the plants get larger and more efficient. He talks of a utopia in which technical breakthroughs will allow even very small waste-to-oil plants to be profitable, thus spreading the wealth to family farms.
The secret to the technology, he said, is that it doesn't have to be as cheap as traditional oil refining, it simply needs to make high-quality products at a reasonably competitive price. The biggest savings will come, he said, because companies won't have to pay high prices to bury their waste in landfills, burn it in incinerators, or pay renderers to truck it away."
http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2004/Changing-Wor
It remains to be seen how true the guy's claims are, but it does sound interesting.
Kill, Tux, kill!
The US imports roughly 20 million 42-gallon barrels of crude oil every day.
500 barrels/day is a drop in the bucket. Not to say that it isn't a good piece of news, but...
Like that big plant from Little Shop of Horrors? Does it sing?
They should probably use UDP, it won't be as reliable but it will be be much faster.
I've been watching a similar Company
bring a waste oil to diesel fuel concept to market here in Canada.
The current process to treat waste oil (ie. your 5,000 Km oil change) is to ship it halfway across the country in trucks, filter it, add chemicals, and sell it as refurbished motor oil. This is expensive and polluting.
Process Capital Corporation's process involves putting micro-refineries near to the sources of used oil, and converting at a much lower cost to diesel fuel. No new oil enters the system, and no oil leaves the system.
Now if we can just get governments to look at and mandate the ramping up and use of some of these technologies, in the way that California (okay, perhaps not exactly that way) started mandating certain minimum pollution standards, on cars.
TCP over IP (international petroleum)!!!
If everyone who drives a car here and all drivers of trucks and deliver vehicles drove the way they do in, for example, Sweden or Germany, we would reduce our demand by 15%:
Turn you car off when stopped and never leave it idling.
The crude supply is drying up
Indeed it is, in 100 years or more.
why else would we be invading other countries despite the human, military, political, and fiscal cost?
Are you suggesting we invaded Afghanistan for oil? We invaded Iraq because it was run by a genocidal maniac who reneged on a previous surrender agreement. The Clinton administration showed us once again that you cannot allow threats to national security to grow unchecked. Clinton's dereliction forced President Bush to clean up the mess.
The White House is full of oil execs - they're just trying to ensure future profitability.
I would say that they are trying to insure future prosperity for America. That is their job after all.
an ill wind that blows no good
... so I shouldn't stop eating donuts if I'm fat. And pizza with extra cheese is only 5%, so I certainly shouldn't cut down on the pizza. And boy howdy, I shouldn't start doing more excercise. That would only help by about 30%! What a waste of time that would be. Until we get the 100% solution, it's nonsense to try anything!
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
The question is whether $15/barrel is operating expense or if it includes depreciation of equipment as well. If the latter, then I can certainly see it being useful, as oil prices only occasionally dip below $15/barrel, and presumably he's right that costs will fall somewhat as the technology matures. If the former, then the operation might be ridiculously impractical: the plant cost is clearly well above $10 million, and at 500 barrels per day, a $20 million plant cost depreciated over 20 years adds almost $5.50/barrel.
As you say, we'll just have to wait and see I guess.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Not at this rate
This would only be a fair comparison if you had either:
(a) an Escalade that took 15 minutes to go from a dead stop to full speed and took 3 miles to stop
OR
(b) a train that could go from dead stop to full speed in 20 seconds and execute a full-speed brake maneuver in 300 feet.
- Tony
You can read the abstract here out of Nature Magazine.
Try to get mentally naked for a second and strip off your political hat and think with me. How do you measure the temperature of the earth? Take a measurement of the air? Or, take enough measurements from the ocean's bottom, away from geothermal zones, to create an overall picture of the ocean's temperature.
We might be spicing things up with the atmosphere, don't mistake me about that, but we are not substantively warming the planet. If you want to talk air pollution, think back to the fires in 2003 in California, or 2002 in Colorado/Arizona. Or, my personal favorite, one kick-bang volcanic eruption. I had the distinct pleasure of discussing this very topic with a park ranger (the unforgettable, effervescent Ranger Chet, or something like that) at Mt. St. Helens last year. As a species, we cannot compete with the pollution of a catastrophic volcanic eruption.
I have thought for a long time that global warming was bunk. The only reason to get off of oil (in America) is that it isn't exactly renewable. I suppose the same argument could be made for nuclear energy, except for the fact that we can manufacture the fissive material. Hydroelectric (dam kind, not ocean current kind) is clearly an environmental disaster, and solar still uses noxious chemicals in its production, and is about as unfriendly as a traditional circuit board to the environment. If we can get energy efficiently from biology, then that's the way to go, because it is renewable and scalable. I am left to wonder how efficient this 80% via turkey fat really is, though. They heat and pump, heat and pump, but what is the energy intake to energy output here?
Mobil Vactra Oil No. 4 is the normal recommendation for large machines where way pressures are high or good precision is required. It is also recommended for vertical and inclined slideways where drain-down can be a problem
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
So now when your friend asks what octane you put in your ride, you can say in all honesty "the cheap shit"
Honestly though, how much potential refinement can we hold for this stuff? It seems hard to believe that petrol can be produced from this oil without being a little "dirty" (yes pun intended). My question then is, will it be good enough to put in my car without it choking up on me in the middle of the highway?
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
...At least in terms of a long-range view. Assuming that the ultimate goal is to GET RID of oil as an energy source, since it is environmentally "dirty" and not readily renewable, such plants could reduce the motivation to find clean and renewable energy sources.
Consider this as a vicious cycle: Emissions from gasoline-burning cars are partly responsible for acid rain, which is destructive to agriculture. Too much acid rain = reduction in available plant matter, which ultimately means less agro-waste for the reprocessing plant and less CO2-to-oxygen conversion for our world. Given enough time, we're right back at square one, possibly even worse off than before.
I don't pretend to have all, or even some, of The Answers, as it were, but I'm not going to start celebrating until I know quite a bit more about this system, and whether ALL the long-term risks have been adequately considered.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I had no idea that the fear mongering and the people susceptible to it had reached such epidemic proportions! I'm going to go set myself on fire and run through the streets right now!
My perscription for you is to radically reduce your pamphlet intake, and replace it with science as is feasible.
The approaching iceage is a few thousand years overdue. The more recent global warming is a nearly insignificant blip in a large global cooling trend which seems to be due largely to the earth radiating away more energy that it takes in, and the sequestration of carbon. Our primitive models are more opinion than insight at this point.
FWIW. As long as an interglacial period lasts one would expect the glaciers to on average retreat. Those in your native land were once a two mile sheet of ice. I don't hear you lamenting their loss to global warming.
But if you're so worried about it, feel free to stop using electricity and instead bide your time wandering the wildes of europe planting bamboo and kudzu (since time is of the essence). But, as a parting shot, the Earth is not static. It just isn't. It's beyond our means, even had we the wisdom, to make so. To presume it should be for our benefit is the same sort of arrogance that might lead lesser men to claim that the sun revolves around the earth, at the center of a universe which was created in six days six millenia ago. Which of course is a folly you're more than welcome to pursue. But don't expect me to entertain it.
It's a relatively fair comparison, when you consider that heavy rail for other purposes (such as transit lines) get at most an order of magnitude difference in efficiency, and the same goes for the cars.
But this example doesn't even scratch the surface. When you compare freight conveyed crosscountry by trains versus trucks, (both of which are very much in common usage), the tonnage efficiency of the trains grows to a full 500 times that of the trucks.
The reason that the trucks remain in use is because the entirety of their system maintenance costs are bourne by the public at large via taxes. Depending upon how you count and when you look, road maintance is between 7 and 20 percent of the entire GDP.
-josh
We're having a debate about whether these plants stink. There's currently a proposal being fought near where I live to make a plant that burns tires. My guess is that this would be a bit nicer on the nose. Anyone live by one of these things that can speak to whether people are going to just to have one of these in they're back yard?
Also, wouldn't it make sence to just start pumping sewer waste into one of these things? While this does produce oil (which is't exactly evironmentally friendly) I'm thinking that this has got to be better than burning tires, garbage, etc. Even if you're not looking at the power generated, I'd think you'd want this over an incinerator. Am I wrong on this?
hmmm. maybe we can use human remains to process?
Outside of the insensitivity, think of all the oil and urban space we save (less cemeteries)...
Then again, this would almost be a Matrix/Soyent Green thing...
araghghghghgg.... soyent green donut...
They don't make money. From the faq, it doesn't appear that a 500 barrel/day plant will make without tax credits.
Bah. Call me back when you're ready to offer me an SUV that gets 20 miles to the giblet.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
I designed the controllers they use for their heater jackets.
It's interesting tech -- I read an article about them sometime last year and sent it around the office saying "hey that's cool!" -- about 5 months later I got a call saying that equipment from the place I work at was in there and it wasn't working, and to please get my ass down there over labour day weekend. Neat trip, really cool technology, great bunch of guys.
I got my stuff working correctly and now I see they're in production. Amazing stuff, I wish I had heard about them earlier, I would have definitely invested money in them. They seem to be at the point now where they can pick and choose their investors and I'm afraid I haven't got the kind of money they'd be seeking as a minimum investment from "new money". *sigh*
Can I invest in RES? RES is a privately held joint venture of Changing World Technologies, Inc. and ConAgra Foods Inc. Shares of the company are not available to the public.
Just be thankful that gas prices are so high; its the only reason research into these alternates become financially attractive.
So, if these plants can process ANY bio-waste, imagine the possibilities...skim the late-summer algae bloom off of a reservoir and process it...process used diapers instead of sending them to the landfill...process raw sewage, medical waste, and old lawn clippings, for that matter. And, for the ultimate recycling, process corpses; imagine being able to burn your loved one's decomposed and refined remains in your Chrysler. I can see the TV ads now...Charlton Heston in front of a gas pump shouting "Soylent Gas, it's PEOPLE! PEOPLE!"
Sounds tongue-in-cheek, but I think the possibilities are pretty cool..though Biodiesel and true renewable alternative energy is definitely cooler.
So how much oil does it use to treat the waste? I mean it has to get it's power, somewhere. I bet it's a sink, just like other recycling.
Don't Vote for Norm Dicks! http://www.nodicks2008.com Another nutless dirtbag that voted for the FISA bill!
So, according to the article(s), these plants are roughly $20M to set up. Imagine an enterprising company telling muncipalities, landfills, etc. the following: "We'll give you a plant, you give us the oil for 10 years"
At the current price of crude (roughly $40/barrel IIRC), a 500 barrel/day output would pay for itself in 3.5 years. The other time is profit for the company.
It's a huge upfront cost, but hell. Imagine the long-term benefits. Landfills. Large communities. Municipalities. Car graveyards (how much of a car is plastic? Probably enough to make it worthwhile). Sewage treatment. Heck, you'd probably have a hard time putting *enough* of these plants up.
*very* exciting!!
The moderators might not necessarilly agree with a post but mod it up because they think it will make for interesting discussion or it raises a question they feel is faulty but widespread and common and would like to see a good rebuttal.
This is actually the mark of a good mod because the points just aren't supposed rewards for good writing, they're ways to bring interesting ideas, questions and answers to the forefront.
1) the 500 bbl/day thing:
It's a Pilot plant , people. They're producing ~21,000 gal(us)/day. That's fairly respectable, for a Pilot plant , imho.
2) US oil consumption:
according to the DOE, the US goes through ~19.6 million barrels of oil/day, of which ~10.5 million bbls/day are imported.
The US has ~659 million barrels in their Strategic Oil Reserve, at this time (adding 264.4 of "sweet" and 395.1 of "sour" -- based on sulfur content) if you add in the estimated 13200000000 bbls of oil which the Bu$h admin. "estimates" is hiding under protected land, in Alaska, that gives about 13.9 billion barrels, total
(coincidentally, this comes out to exactly 1000 days worth... hmm).
This process is unique because the feedstock does not have to be dried. This has been a huge problem (cost) in other processes.
One way to tap solar energy is to have shallow ponds which grow algae & other water plants in large quantities, then harvest and feed the biomass into one of these plants.
The government should make any profit from this business tax free, its just too important to get this up and running.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Does it take to run the TCP machinery, transport the waste to the plant, provide electricity to the building? How much of the workers' salaries do they spend on goods or services, such as transportation to work, that require oil derived products?
IOW, is there a net gain in energy or is this just another shell game whose primary purpose has far more to do with propaganda than energy production?
Feeding pigs requires particular foods and a lot of time and energy. Why bother? Why not just use the Thermal Depolymerization on the crops directly?
It would be more efficient to pick plants that grow as quickly as possible or required relatively low amounts of fertilizer. Maybe industrial hemp, bamboo, or just plain old grass.
Right now they're using what, Turkey poo? How about all of the chicken poop that has to be disposed of so carefully to prevent runoff? Same with cow poo. How about the grass clippings that are disposed of in so many urban areas? We have recycling programs in many areas now (mine takes grass clippings BTW), would it be so hard for people to seperate out things like bannana peels into a 3rd container? There are bound to be TONS of different industries that could feed these plants instead of having to pay to send their waste to a dump somewhere.
:-)
Not having enough waste to feed these plants is a problem I'd personally LIKE to see us have!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
747s average about 0.2 miles per gallon for a reasonable-distance flight. When you figure in their larger passenger capacity, it costs significantly less fuel to transport a passenger in a 747 than it does to transport a passenger in even a fully-occupied SUV.
Yes, I too enjoy comparing apples to oranges. Try taking a 747 to your kid's soccer game.
So, freight trains are 13.41x as fuel-efficient as Escalades. Now that must be a surprise...
Where are your stats comparing, say, a farmer's combine to an escalade? or maybe a deep-sea vishing vessel? How does the Space Shuttle compare?
http://xkcd.com/386/
I first read about this company in Discover Magazine. The Discover article makes clear that this first small-scale facility is more a test bed than a final example of what depolymerization is ultimately capable of. For example, turkey guts is just one possible "feedstock". Plastic, and many other things that currently end up in landfills, will work.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Population control, extra oil, additional land being freed from being used for burial grounds. All good, right?
emt 377 emt 4
To be honest I think this is one of the best alternatives I've seen in a while. Electric cars and hydrogen powered fuel cells are fine but there are millions of cars on the road today and millions of people aren't going to want to trade in their investments on another car, not only that, there are a great number of people, myself included, who enjoy a classic automobile and want to keep it running. What we need is a synthetic fuel that will burn in existing engines, carberated or fuel injected, with little or no modification. Even though the Internal Combustion engine is over 100 years old it's still what we depend on. Cars, Lawn Mowers, Chain saws, power generators, trains etc. all have gas burning engines. So what we really need is a Gasoline we can make without oil from the ground because not just the US economy, but the world economy can't handle a sudden shift in technology from gas burning engines to something electric or Hydrogen powered.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
I'd love to use this stuff. High octane and cheaper! The only thing my fuel system would require to run this is an anodized fuel rail (can do myself) and some different O-rings on my injectors. Unfortunatly in my area (northern VA) there is only ONE station that sells it. WTF?! This stuff ought to be everywhere in an urban area and we only have one station? That sux! I drive a high performance car that could benefit from the octane and I'd love the lower cost. The more frequent tank fillups would suck but I could deal with that.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
This is the first full-production depolymerization plant. The second will be better. And they should be much better long before 1,000 plants are built. Also, it won't have to completely replace other sources of oil to have a dramatic effect on prices, just as other new processes - like refining bitumen into oil - have affected prices.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Its all well and good to find a use for all that agri-waste.... ...but it would be tons better to just not use as much oil.
As a country, we need to stop being the consumers of the world.
Mod parent up, contains information!!
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
lowering our price since cheap gas from OR will become a possibility
I read this, and just about fell out of my chair.
If you know where cheap gas in Oregon is, could you let the rest of the Portland Metropolitan Area know?
(Hint: Average price of regular unleaded in Calfornia last week was 2.26/gal, and Average price of regular unleaded in Oregon was 2.27/gal for the same period.)
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Misspelling intentional.
emt 377 emt 4
If those plants were very cheap, I'd guess they'd cost about 300-400 million, putting your figure of oil independance at 3-4 trillion $, just to build the plants
Which, if it is spent to end dependence on foreign oil (and reduce the environmental footprint of our economy as a side effect) would be cheap at the price. It's not an expense, it's an investment with potentially huge benefits economically, evironmentally, diplomatically, and militarily.
For comparison, the Manhattan Project cost $20 billion or thereabouts in 1945. In 2004 dollars, that's about $1.25 trillion. Add in the expense of our nuclear arsenal over the years, and it comes to about $6.4 trillion. (In 2004 dollars.) We're talking about a similarly large strategic and economic benefit. If this process really works as described, it's worth the investment.
Remember also, this process can be used to reform practically any organic waste, including plastics and even PCB's.
So here's a private business plan for you: Aquire the mineral rights to a huge old landfill. Build one of these plants nearby. Mine it to feed your waste-to-oil converter, seperating the metals and other inorganics as you go and selling what you can as raw materials.
Continue until the landfill site is empty, then keep digging and processing to clean the contaminated earth under it. Cover it with remediated or remanufactured soil, and open a park or a turkey ranch. Meanwhile, keep operating your plant with waste from the city that created the landfill in the first place.
Sure, you're left with a pile of nasty heavy metals and inorganics that no one wants, but now they're in some much more pure form and can be appropriately processed and sequestered.
If this technology is any good at all, it should be possible to turn at least a modest profit over the long haul.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Won't somebody please think about the turkeys?
Seriously, what is a turkey loving, fossil fuel hating vegan to do?
-Peter
Since this plant makes oil, does this synthetic oil pollute the air when it is burned?
If not, why?
Steve
There is a tremendous amount of inefficency.....and fuel usage....in US livestock production?
I wonder if it would be more efficent( yes, its not practical ) to reduce consumption of livestock and localize agriculture rather then raising what we do to be later converted to oil.
Also, lets face it, American's are wasteful.
If American's think that oil can by synthetically produced from agricultural waste ( shit, dead animal parts, some plant parts ) they will use a lot more energy.....with impunity.
Our current agricultural processes are burning out our land.
Steve
Trains are efficient because they run on rails (much less rolling resistance), a single engine can pull thousands of tons, and they can go from one city to the next without having to stop.
If trains were to entirely replace trucks, they would require building orders of magnitude more track than is current extant, they would ony be pulling less than a hundred tons at a time, and they would have to start and stop quite frequently. All of these would drastically reduce the efficiency to well below that of trucks.
Seriously, do you really think that maximum efficiency is all that matters? I mean, large (100,000 tonnes) container ships have 2 or 3 times the efficiency of freight trains, so why not use those to replace trucks?
aQazaQa
Washington (Reuters) June 5, 2043 -
Global cooling is being seen as a real threat to the future of the earth. Since the total ban on fossile fuel put in place by the United Nations (News - Website) in 2014 most countries have resorted to the use of TCP (Thermal Conversion Process) to satisfy their demand for energy. TCP is blamed as a major reason not enough CO2 is being recycled back into the atmosphere. The TCP process uses bio material to convert into oil, solid waste and other biproducts. In effect taking CO2 out of the air and converting large portions of it into solids.
Harry Sweltering of Hemispheric Organization for Technology or HOT (News - Website) states, "we have seen a drastic reduction of carbon being introduced back into the air. This reduction has caused the ozone layer to become exceedingly thick. If we do not come up with a new form of energy soon we can expect our oceans to sink drastically, the ice caps on the poles extending down into the northern parts of Canada, Scandinavia and parts of Russia."
A few people in Congress is calling for drilling in the ANWR (Artic National Wildlife Refuge) (News - Website). Samantha Coolridge, D-Minn, stated "We are at a crossroad. Either we start drilling now or we will see a natural catastophy on a scale never before seen in the history of mankind."
A bill is now being sponsored by Frank Lukewarm, D-Ala, under heavy lobbying from Sierra Club (News - Website) and Americans for the Environgment (News - Website) to open up ANWR to oil companies.
Who runs Bartertown?
That's really all I wanted to say.
+++ATH0
Just a little question... when the article states that the TCP process is 85% efficient, does that mean that you get 15% less energy out than you put in?
In other words, is this just another way to ultimately increase energy consumption, whilst seeming environmentally friendly? Like adding ethanol to gas?
As in all things, it comes down to the bottom line. If you can't turn a profit from it, you probably won't get to keep doing it for long.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Over the past year, I've fueled my showroom-stock 2002 VW New Beetle TDI with 100% biodiesel, which I purchase for $2.50/gallon, (road) taxes and delivery charges included. At 45 miles per gallon, I'm actually paying _less_ than the vast majority of gasoline-powered vehicle operators.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
6% of the land area of the U.S. is huge. Consider there are 50 states, so each state, on average consumes 2% of the land mass. You're talking 3 state's worth of land here. Soybeans, mustard seed, and especially algae would be preferable to hemp, as they yield more biodiesel per acre than hemp.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
Constructing and operating tens of thousands of these plants would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.... USA jobs.
Just something that crossed my mind.
Here in the UK, because of the lameness of the tax laws, you have to pay tax on *ANY* fuel used to power a road-going vehicle.
Cheap diesel, known as 'red' diesel, because of a chemical dye added to it is available, and is used by farmers - however, it is NOT allowed to be used by road-going vehicles (the reasoning being that the money to maintain the road network comes in part from the tax added to fuel).
Have you considered this in your scheme?
David
You keep talking about the oil industry, as if this will put them out of business. Did you not read the part about this process where it MAKES OIL? This plant takes waste that people will pay you to haul away, and turns it into oil! For an oil company, this means that instead of having to pay for extremely expensive drilling, pumping, and importing, only to have to deal with oil filled with crap like coal tar, sulfur, and heavy metals, they can now make their own oil to their own specs. And instead of being the company people love to hate, they're being environmentally friendly (turning landfill waste into fuel, not adding carbon to the atmosphere).
Quite frankly, oil well owners and workers are the only people who wouldn't like this process.
aQazaQa
regulations?
(also another Vonnegut quote I like: "Do you know why I think Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra.")
The energy source is a tad bit different. Animals instead of humans and they do not need to be alive to serve their purpose.
:)
:) though ANI here stands for animal not animation.
I am not sure how well this will bode with the animal welfare groups, when the time comes and these plants start to grow poultry and livestock just to slaughter and feed to the plants. In which case they do not worry about what types of hormones they use to make them big and plump in 2 weeks
As I said, welcome to the ANImatrix
Noble idea but in corporate America we all know that, it will end up this way one day in not too distant future.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Currently, crude barrels are valued at around ~$41.00 per barrell.
This plant will produce 500 a day.. How much are they planning to sell those barrells for? It mentioned in the article that it derives much of the energery to run the plant from the oil and natural gas it produces by itself.
If plants like this crop up all over the country, whats to stop them from drastically undecutting OPEC once they start expanding and making more oil?
I seriously doubt they will sell barrels for $41 since there is no costly drilling and shipping, and security and insurance issues associated with its oil production... This seems to me as though big oil has left a vacuum in this sector.
I'd predict that even though the production volume is low for now, but since it will be competative in the short term you will see them selling a higher margin product thus higher profit. This could get big unless big oil lobbies to restrict it on a governmental level. (who knows, they might get some RIAA lawyers to lobby for them. heh)
....move along....nothing to see here....
For fuel economy (and therefore less consumption) diesel kicks the crap out of gasoline engines. This 85% of non CO2 emissions targets diesel engines for elimination.
In reality, diesel emissions are much safer than gasoline emissions. They are less noxious and contain much less carbon monoxide and less particulate emissions. Unfortunately, the particulate emissions from diesel are an order of magnitude larger than that of gasoline engines, and therefore visible to the naked eye. "Because we can see it, it must be bad" is faulty logic here, as gasoline engines produce more particulate, and you can't see it.
CARB (the originator) has setup a misguided policy, that will make us more dependent on foreign oil, and keep the rate of consumption unchecked.
-- Len
Why don't you read about the technology before you drag it through mud.
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First, while you have to put energy into heating the feedstock, a lot of the energy that you put in is reclaimed in the process to heat the new feedstock coming in. The rest of heating energy actually comes from the gas produced through the process.
Second, the organic waste has to go somewhere anyway. It can't stay at the turkey processing plant. Actually, since the TDP plant is built next to the turkey processing plant, in this case transportation costs of the feedstock if probably lower that the alternatives.
Third, looking at profits of this pilot plant based just on the value of the oil it produces is as incorrect as ignoring operating expenses. Currently plants that produce waste such as turkey offal used in this TDP plant HAVE TO PAY to dispose of this waste. Paying the TDP plant to process this waste should also be taken into account. Besides, this is the first commercial pilot plant. I don't know how much this technology will scale, but it will certainly be beyond this example.
Finally, the city of Carthage (where the TDP plant is located) is already looking at local applications of the oil produced by the plant - I believe heating is the primary application they are talking about. So costs to transport the oil to market do not need to be high at all if the market is local.
I certainly hope this technology is nurtured and succeeds in its objectives.
A lot of info about this can be found through the biodiesel discussion forums at
http://forums.biodieselnow.com/topic.asp?TOPI
(17500 miles / 1 hour) * 15 days * (24 hours / 1 day) / 4270000 pounds * 8.33 pounds / 1 gallon in mpg
Wow, this is the first one of these "renewable energy will save us all!" stories that I've read and thought "Hey, this thing actually does have the potential to be important and good!"
Okay first things first, it costs money to build these plants. It's all well and good to say it produces oil at a commercially viable price, but if I'm paying X/barrel now, with an opportunity to spend 10 million building a plant which will produce oil for X/barrel, I'm gonna stick with my current source. This isn't an insurmountable obstacle, since there's an obvious national interest in achieving it, so the government could be counted on to help out some. (I say some, not all. Attempts to compare prices with the cost of the Iraq war are fallacious, since they assume the only purpose was oil dependence, which is not an assumption that either the government or the majority of the population grants.)
Okay, so the government might help out a bit, but we've still got to make these things more economically viable than conventional oil sources, or else there's no way to find the startup costs. I think this can be done, although not necessarily this year, or even this decade.
As I understand it, most agriculture in the US is run by huge corporates, like ConAgra. This is actually a really good thing here, because while Joe Random Farmer is just trying to make ends meet right now, an ubercorp will have funds which it can sink into million dollar projects which won't be profitable for ten years. They can afford to build plants like this at many of their farms. They just need to be convinced that it will make them money.
Again, the government helps a little, somehow. I'm not crazy about "tax incentives", because far down the road, when this industry is profitable, you aren't gonna be able to take the tax incentives away from the ubercorp with all its influence. I'd suggest something like loans or grants, but this isn't my area of expertise, so I leave that implementation up to someone better. Let's just call it "a bit of government help."
Conventional oil prices are rising, and will continue to rise almost indefinitely. This is obvious to all the economists out there, so I leave it to them to explain it to the environmentalists and the SUV-owners anxiously awaiting the return of gas prices to "normal". As the price of conventional oil rises, the new synthetic oil becomes more competitive. If we can get significant synthetic oil market presense, that's half the battle already. Rather than the 30 year off catastrophic halt in energy supply predicted by environmentalists, we just get a gradual transition from natural to synthetic oil.
The only issue I would still worry about is scale. Is there really enough waste being produced to fuel the entire nation? It seems contradictory to me, since I don't imagine there being that much energy coming in via sunlight, which is really the only energy source, until we work the kinks out of that pesky fusion. But assuming my intuitive estimate on sunlight is wrong, and we really do have enough organic waste, does my analysis seem valid? I don't think this is too pie-in-the-sky, but if I missed something important, speak up.
If all the other industries teamed up on the oil industry, sure they'd create a lot of pressure. Until their vehicles all run out of fuel and they have to walk to Washington to do their lobbying.
no way! it always changes pitch when i yawn, how do you figure it speeds up?
http://www.geoexchange.org/ - a way to significantly decrease the cost of heating (in winter) and cooling (in summer) of buildings.
Even on the level of individual homes it can pay for itself in 7 to 10 years in many areas.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I talked to a guy on the biodiesell company's booth during the last Oregon Country Fair, and he told me that the price of biodiesel if produced in large quantities from crops will be about $3 per gallon.
Also popular is the 20% bd to 80% regular diesel mix.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Not sure if you have any idea what your talking about. The 300 series with the big ass engine V8 new hemi get 26MPG on the highway.
The 300 series with a V8 gets 17/25 and that is only because the engine normally only runs on 4 cylinders. Technically that unimpressive average mileage of 17/25 isn't V8 mileage.
That is about average these days, and the "econobox" cars like the Civic (not including hybrid) get about 30 - 35MPG on the highway (the high end civic si being 30MPG). a whopping 4 - 9 miles per gallon increase.
The manual civic HX ($14k, not a hybrid) gets 36/44. That's a difference of 19 and about twice as much.
Not to mention you can't tow a damn thing with a civic
Straw man.
and forget about merging onto the highway with four passengers as well.
You are the first person I've met with such problems. And I live in DC, the second worst traffic in the US. My anecdotal evidence trumps yours.
more HP != worse gas mileage. It can if the car is geared towards performance, but thats not always the case. Any car thats in the 22MPG + range is fine. above 32MPG is outstanding.
There is pointless - SUV, and there is slight overkill (350 HP) which would you preffer ? (oh and the reason most SUV's get bad mileage is because the engines are typically underpowered.)
There is a negative correlation between HP and milage. To say other wise is simply delusional.
The first 27 models of SUV's with the best mileage are all 4 cylinders. The last 62 models of SUV's with the worst mileage are all 8 cylinders.
I suggest you go here. You are a clueless tool.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
All of the sudden, kids will be dropped off at soccer practice by rappeling from Mom's combat aircraft. Look what you've started. Now I have to imagine what flying would be like with people on the roads in rush hour.
Hmm, didn'r figure /. to be full of conservatives or republican fans. :P
Maybe if I had said something like "There is so much BS at Microsoft that we could fuel an entire city" I would have gotten a better score
Karma, We don't need no stinkin' karma!
These are just a few of the questions I'd like to see answered before I make any conclusions.
We used to run all our servers in our office. When it was too cold in the wintertime, I would joke that we needed more athlons in the office to keep it warm.
In the summer, we would keep the AC on full blast 24/7 and it was still 32C and the servers were overheating.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I agree :)
was meant as 'tongue in cheek'
The appeal of hemp is what comes with it. Paper, textiles, building materials, composite fibers, and so on. Algae doesn't make good houses, last I checked.
And 6% of the land area is not that much if each state did its partial share to produce its own power and textiles and etc from the fibers of the hemp plant, making jobs and stimulating all local economies in the process. They would then be energy-independent, have a renewable source of paper, clothing, and so forth, and that wouldn't really be all that bad, would it?
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
>SUVs restrict vision...
;-) )find that people who generalize to be intolerant. You have proven this with your uneducated rants about SUVs. BTW, I find people in BMWs, Mercedes, top-end Lexus and wannabe sports cars (including the high-end SUVs) to be the worst drivers, or at least the ones who:
I had MUCH better visibility in my Isuzu Trooper than I currently have in my Hyundai Elantra. Espescially checking the left lane and blind spot when changing lanes. Awesome visibility all around. Normal blind spots that need to be visually checked. Larger rear blind spot, just like with any larger vehicle.
>are more dangerous to smaller cars in accidents...
Which is why I wanted my wife to drive it. Safer for her and the kids (in the back seat) than an econobox.
>and generally seem to promote bad driving.
You use an unfair generalization here. I generally (
a) zoom up in the right-hand lane of a merge
b) fail to allow drivers to change lanes by speeding up once your blinker is on.
c) Drive on the shoulder or exit the marked lane to the turn lane prematurely (big fine here)
d) Drive in the turn lane and expect to be let over at the front of the line.
To provide a contrast, I find that Porsche drivers generally DON'T speed excessively, and are generally courteous.
>And I do dislike vans, and pickups, for exactly the same reasons.
Because nobody would EVER need a truck or van...
You seem to be sick of traffic, and seem to have fixated your anger on the objects you see in your vicinity. Objects that are different from what you are driving. I am not a doctor, but you may need some therapy. Or maybe Lithium.
If I haul stuff every weekend, am I allowed to have a truck that I commute in? What if I have tools that I need to lock up, but I need with me whenever I go to a job site; can I have a van?
I am currently looking for a small SUV (Honda Element, Honda CR-V, Scion xB or similar) that is:
1) Reliable
2) Has good cargo room. I haul computers, monitors, lumber, decorative rock, topsoil and other stuff (usually not all at the same time.)
3) Gets decent gas mileage for a vehicle with said cargo room.
4) Will be used by me (alone!) as a commuter vehicle
5) Will be used to pick up kids (and their gear) and transport to activities, family outings, etc. Something I do at least two to three times per week.
BTW, My Hyundai Elantra doesn't get the mileage I expected. While listed at 25/33 mpg (AT), it gets 21/25 mpg, and never more than 25 mpg, even on a long trip. The Scion xB is listed at 30/34 (AT). Any of the SUVs in that class will get comparable gas mileage to my current ride, with a significant upgrade in vehicle use and flexibility.
Can I have one, please, oh Kiryat Malachi (177258), judge, jury, and mighty god of who_should_drive_an_SUV? Should I bow and tremble before your lower Slashdot number? Oh, all seeing, all knowing traffic watcher, hear my pleas and know that I do not just commute alone; I also haul people and stuff.
Nevermind. You're always right, a clear sign of psychosis. Or in your language "God".
--
Trapped in the body of a VM
Good point. Hemp is quite a useful crop.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
slurry? don't u mean little lisa's slurry? :)
My Gawd WTF...
Diamonds are no longer a non-renewable resource, petrol is next. I've always been inspired by that Twilight Zone episode where a band of gold thieves time-travel with their booty to the future only to find out gold is easily produced and valueless there.
Because of mad cow disease, using offal in animal feed is facing restriction. When there's no other use for offal, meat processors have to pay to dispose it. Depolymerization seems like a great way to reverse that cost. Although this first plant only uses turkey offal (blood and guts), the process can works with many other materials, plastic for example.
The work behind this first commercial facility has taken longer than a couple of years. The process has actually been around for decades. The breakthrough was making it efficient enough for commercial application. This plant's production is paltry, but if it's an effective test bed, we should see bigger and better plants in the future.
I'll challenge your skepticism with my optimism: $1000 if the (inflation-adjusted) price for oil hasn't fallen by 2014?
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"