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."

Comments

Not that it will change prices

[gatesh8r]

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.

Re:New RFC?

[John Hurliman]

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.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[John Hurliman]

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).

Sounds similar to biodiesel

[schwaang]

They make biodiesel from used french fry oil and stuff like that. Runs in unmodified (or barely modified) diesel engines.

Re:Sounds similar to biodiesel

[Exocet]

Unmodified engines. The only modifications one would need to make:

* If your diesel vehicle is 10 years or older you will eventually need to swap out the natural rubber fuel lines for synthetic ones. Less than $20 in parts.

* If you've been running diesel for awhile now and are switching to 100% biodiesel you will probably need to change your fuel filter after a tank or two. B100 cleans your fuel tank, lines, etc. All that gets filtered.

Biodiesel can be made from a variety of oils (used or new) + methanol or ethanol + lye + heat (basically). It can be for as little as $1/gallon, if you're buying in bulk and getting your used oil for free. Most places will give their oil away for free since they normally have to pay someone to haul it away for them.

Sure, there are drawbacks. The positives outweigh the negatives, though.

I'm involved with the GoBiodiesel Cooperative in Portland, OR.

Re:Oil No. 4?

[rengav]

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.

Good business plan

[Openstandards.net]

I actually believe this is a very viable business plan, because of my experience at BP Chemicals. BP Chemicals (originally part of Standard Oil), was created to process the waste of the oil business, in an attempt to at least recoup some of the costs, and possibly make a profit.

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.

Re:500?? 500???????!!!?

[York the Mysterious]

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.

Re:Damn - Still no free lunch!

[gerardrj]

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.

Re:Oil No. 4?

[demonbug]

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.

Re:500?? 500???????!!!?

[njcoder]

http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/infocardnew.html I think this is what he was talking about.

Re:New RFC?

[keraneuology]

According to a post I found at http://forums.biodieselnow.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID= 829

If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.

The trick is to feed all of those turkeys h erbal v 14 gr.a and give them all a freakishly large p 3.ni5 to increase the mass that goes into the machines, thereby increasing the output. But seriously, Circle Four farms in Utah claims on their website to have produced 1,000,000 market hogs in 2003 - http://www.c4farms.com/FAQ/FAQ.htm#market. A typical market hog can be expected to produce 2 tons of waste every year (large hog farms produce sewage waste in quantities similar to small-to-medium cities). 2,000,000 tons of manure would produce somewhere around 600,000 barrels of light oil/year. Granted, this isn't much (Saudia Arabia will shift their production by 1,000,000 barrels/day), but it would mean that this particular farm and many houses around it could be self-sufficient energy-wise, and they wouldn't need those massive lagoons of pig waste that occasionally break open and flood the neighborhood.

The plant isn't making money

[jmichaelg]

but since the plants make money they'd probably be built anyway

They don't make money. From the faq, it doesn't appear that a 500 barrel/day plant will make without tax credits.

Is moneythe plant economically viable?
The plant is still in the startup phase, but we expect to meet our revenue projections when the plant is operating at capacity. We are counting on legislative assistance in the form of production tax credits, which stimulated other new technology innovation such as wind power. In addition, looking forward, the next generation of plants will be larger, giving us economies of scale and other economic benefits.

Re:New RFC?

[keraneuology]

The North Carolina hog industry has tripled in size since 1990, making it the fastest-growing as well as the largest in the country. This growth has come at a cost, however. Most waste from hogs and cows raised in confinement is collected in lagoons, which are large, shallow pits dug into the ground. The waste solids sink to the bottom of the lagoon and are broken down by anaerobic bacteria over a period of months. In theory, operators keep the lagoons from overflowing by spraying the liquid that rises to the surface on nearby fields.

In practice, however, these lagoons do not necessarily contain the waste. The most dramatic evidence for this came on June 21 of this year (1995), when North Carolina suffered the largest agricultural waste spill in its history: a 7.5-acre, 12-foot-deep lagoon leaked 25 million gallons of hog waste into the headwaters of the New River near Richlands. The waste from the 10,000-head operation, owned by Oceanview Farms, contaminated the water for several miles downstream, increasing the levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients. When nutrient levels dramtically increase in rivers and other bodies of water, algae grow furiously, consuming most of the dissolved oxygen and asphyxiating the other aquatic organisms living there. An estimated 5,000 fish died as a result of the Oceanview Farms spill. Nine subsequent waste lagoon spills--six in North Carolina and three in Iowa--showed that this was not an isolated occurrence.

http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/1995/103-12/focus1 .h tml