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

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: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: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.