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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."
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
BTW, 20,799 more of these plants all running at full capacity and we could satisfy our dependency on foreign oil (approx. 10.9 million barrels a day). Assuming there's that much waste to convert.
This site http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/ene_oil_con lists the US at 19.7 million barrels a day, and this site http://mwhodges.home.att.net/energy/energy.htm lists a similar figure and pegs our foreign oil daily usage at 10.9 (4 billion in 2003 divided by 365 days).
They make biodiesel from used french fry oil and stuff like that. Runs in unmodified (or barely modified) diesel engines.
500 b4rre15 of gasoline can fu3l ab0ut 33 SUV's.
A barrel is 35 g4ll0nz.
It's a standard grade of heating oil. If you live on the West Coast of the U.S. you have no idea what heating oil really is since we use electric or natural gas, but on the East Coast and in the Midwest it is still widely used.
- Let's put EVERYONE in SUVs and make them safer.
SUVs are not safer than cars. Here's some information if you'd like to get educated. The higher rollover risk negates the benefits of the heavier frame.Note: it isn't 85 octane he's talking about, he's talking about E-85, a totally different beast.
E-85 is an 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline fuel that can be used in certain vehicles (mostly late model Big 3 pickups, but also most Tauruses since 95, some Dodge minivans, and even the 03 Benz C320).
Lots of info at e85fuel.com
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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.
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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
Tell me where you're finding this 20%. I have a Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality transcript for the 2001 Energy Policy (specifically our policy on oil) that says that the transportation sector accounts for 69% of total oil consumption.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
You don't know who ConAgra is do you? These are the people who are just about solely responsible for the addition of ethanol to gasoline. ConAgra (and I think Arthur Daniels Midland: ADM) lobbied hard for those requirements.
See.. they had a whole lot of land they couldn't use profitably under then current government farm subsidies, so they came up with a way to grow corn and turn it in to an automotive fuel required by law.
They get paid a farm subsidy to grow corn, then they are paid a federal clean-air subsidy for creating a clean-air fuel, then they sell that fuel at full market price to gasoline blenders. It's quite the cash cow.
You as a consumer are actually paying well over the listed pump price for gasoline because of these hidden payments.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Oops, bad math..
At 600 barrels crude/day/ea for these plants, it would take 16 and 2/3rd's of these to feed a 10,000 bcd/refinery.
Of course, if they can scale this and apply it to other types of waste as mentioned (so they don't run out of turkeys!) it could become a valuable alternative crude oil source... But probably not poised to replace petroleum imports in the near future.
In any case, getting a useful product out of what started as 200 tons / day of thrown out turkey parts is useful on its own, and could definitely tilt the scales toward cost-effectiveness.
Fuel Oil No. 4 is a Heavy Fuel Oil. Pour point is -10 degrees celsius. Boiling point ranges from 200 to 600 degrees celsius (or maybe 220-300 degrees fahrenheit; seems to depend on where you look. Probably the latter, since another place says its flashpoint is 140-240 fahrenheit, and autoignition is at 505 degrees fahrenheit). Viscosity at 20 celsius is 200-500 cSt (what the fuck is a cSt? Yeah, I had no idea either, so here you go.)
Fuel oil no. 4 produces about 145,000 BTU's per gallon (but I don't know how dense it is, so I can't compare to the ~40,000 Btu's in a kilogram of gasoline). Fuel Oil No. 4 is mostly used in industrial burners and marine diesel engines.
There, now isn't that way more than you wanted to know about Fuel Oil No. 4? Only problem is, I'm not sure Fuel Oil No. 4 would be the same as Oil No. 4; I assume it is though, because if it was being compared to crude oils it should have a letter designation.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/infocardnew.html I think this is what he was talking about.
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Parent poster has NO IDEA what he's talking about.
See:
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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!
Where do you get your information from?
A google for US oil demand finds this page which says, "The average of US petroleum imports reached 10.6 million bpd in 2001, to complement a total US oil demand of 19.6 million bpd." Were you confusing total demand with imports?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
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
OK, let's do the math:
US Daily consumption: 20M bbl/day
US Strategic Oil Reserve: 500M bbl
500M/20M = 25 Days Reserve
So, we blow our reserve so you don't need to pay the extra 50 cents/gallon at the pump. Do you really think that OPEC is then going to say "Allah! The US has used all their reserves! Increase production so they can refill it!"?
You think they're putting the screws to us now? Make it so we have nothing to fall back on and you really will see high gas prices.
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
They don't make money. From the faq, it doesn't appear that a 500 barrel/day plant will make without tax credits.
You're probably looking at the very very least 5 million just in salary you'll pay to welders. Having ~70 industrial workers on site at a paper mill for a 2 week shutdown can run you above 500k easily. Now quadruple that for intense construction, and calculate a good 8-12 months of having them around. But that's just for time, now you gotta buy all the equipment.
Building a new boiler for a paper mill is something around 125-150 million $. That's just one boiler. Some big refineries sites have three or more power boilers, and that's just a drop in a huge sea.
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.
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It's true, i meta-moderated for a couple of weeks straight and got mod points for a couple of weeks after that. I stoppped meta moderating and presumably thats the reason why I stopped getting more mod points
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1995/103-12/focus
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
The people that it happen to wish it was too. In NC we have a LOT of hog farms. Heavy rain, floods, hurricanes can either break the containment of the ponds or just cause them to overflow. I'm just glad that I live upstream.
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
Put simply, a bigger engine spends more fuel at idle than a smaller one. At cruising speeds bigger engines usually do all right economy-wise, which is why you have old muscle cars getting like 8 mpg in town and 25 mpg on the freeway. But, at cruising speeds, SUVs fight wind resistance. Meanwhile, large engines are inefficient at low RPMs, so basically, your typical SUV is inefficient all the time.
Assorted companies are putting together hybrid SUVs. Dodge already had a hybrid Durango for one year, but they tried to get $85,000 for a vehicle which was overpriced to begin with. I've never understood how a vehicle that in most ways is inferior to either cars or minivans can, in many circumstances, cost more than buying a car and a minivan.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The press release says $20M.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Interestingly enough, it'd be a quick n' easy way to get rid of lots and lots of dead bodies in a more useful way...just send all the "code red's" and "code yellows" ; aka terrorists, into these things...
*shutter*
Frankly, the proper way of reducing agri-waste isn't to throw it into a machine and make gas. The ground can only creat so much stuff before the natural resources in it are used up, and our poo poo and pee pee is what is broken down and thrown back into the ground to replenish those resources.
The proper way to break the waste down is to break it into compost; spread it out over a large area, turn, capture the methane from the decomposition and after it's turned back into grade-a dirt, sell it back.
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