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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."
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
Please tell me there is no patent on fractional distillation, this process is primary-school chemistry. Cryogenic extraction processes may be encumbered, but aren't those only used for natural gas?
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.
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?)
Environmental laws that force refineries to produce the "boutique" blends the parent mentions are a step in the right direction.
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 are some of the better resources (ie. web)available out there where I can find more information?
Considering how much better air quality in LA has become (I should know, I live here too) perhaps the rest of the nation should adopt the same boutique blend.
That way, all refineries would be making the same stuff and the regional demand issues could go away. Refineries can be built. They're easier to build in TX than in CA, true, but they can be built.
Of course, nobody is going to reduce their gas consumption as an act of philanthropy. Gas consumption will go down as soon as the price of gas is high enough to pick something else.
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
There are a lot more Escalades than Blackhawks.
An Escalade on the highway will burn 1 gallon per 16 miles. Assuming highway cruise speed of 75, we're talking about 5 gallons per hour, or roughly $10 per hour (at the national average).
So we need 40 Escalades to match one Blackhawk.
36,114 Escalades were sold in 2002, according to GM. 35,621 in 2003. So in just 2 years, we have a little over 70,000 Escalades on the streets; this is equivalent to about 1750 Blackhawks. Though exact numbers are hard to find, there appear to be about 2000-2500 Blackhawks in the US Armed Forces.
Even assuming we run the Blackhawks as much as the Escalades, *one model* of SUV counterbalances the entire US military stock of Blackhawks.
Enough research for you?
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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
Your insurance company already does this. If SUVs are death traps/unsafe/injury prone/etc., they will have proportionately higher insurance rates.
They don't. Therefore, your biases are exposed and unfounded.
Increased auto emissions start this year and take effect for all vehicles including SUVS for the first time by 2007 (2009 for the HUGE SUVS). There are going to be a lot of SUVs that are going to be hard pressed to meet these new regulations. This is one of the biggest clean air regulations to ever be put into place. About an 85% reduction in non-CO2 emissions. It's equivalent to around 150 million cars being removed from the road once these new cars get out there. It's especially great for everyone in CA since it means that everyone will use the same clean gas as us, lowering our price since cheap gas from OR will become a possibility driving down in state production. Best of all is the reclassification of really big SUVs are consumer vehicles (the H2 isn't right now). This means they'll get the gas guzzler take and their poor MPG will count against their parent companies.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
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
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
"oh and the reason most SUV's get bad mileage is because the engines are typically underpowered."
is this true? Wouldn't moving a mass to some speed take the same force over time? Wouldn't this equate to the same amount of fuel, since power is related to the amount of fuel you can burn? Do bigger engines mean more efficiency (since that's the only way you could use less fuel)? Do engines get inneficient at higher rpm's?
Don't tell me that the same amount of CO2 is generated by decaying e.g. a ton biowaste to soil than by burning it. No. Just make a solid residua comperasion, on one hand you get don't know 0.9 tons soil? (and 0.1 CO2), on the other hand you burned all of it, you get maybe 0.05 tons of ashes.
Don't take me on the numbers, I'm no chemist, but common sense tells you that there is a huge difference.
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Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
I like how you talk about the "the market" (yet use Adam Smith's vaguely collectivist 'hand' notion that actual free market promoters sun), and then list three things that have everything to do with heavy handed government regulation and nothing to do with the free market!
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!
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...
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.
It's not just cleaner, it isn't upsetting the balance of CO2.
Burning gasoline releases CO2 into the atmosphere because it is taking carbon that was kept underground and putting it in the air.
Recycling plant and animal matter doesn't because the carbon came from the air in the first place; energy production begins to participate in the carbon-cycle instead of upsetting it.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
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.
Your comment is funny, but one of the advantages of this process is that it can convert any organic waste (burned pizzas, mc donalds leftovers etc), not just turkey-guts. And since US wastes a lot of food daily, I think we could comfortably be supplying all the "fuel" for these plants.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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.
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.
What we need is for the government to stay out of it. Let the market decide if it works.
:)
And there's the major question of whether your second process creates more CO2. There was an article in Scientific American in the last couple of months that suggested that a 100% switch to a hydrogen economy might result in increased CO2 production because the energy to crack the hydrogen out of whatever materials has to come from somewhere, and solar power's just not up to the job.
I've been watching this for a while, and to those who in the past have replied to my posts about this deriding it as a lame dream and a waste of time: BOOYAH!
If it's commercially feasible, then there will be plenty of other places signing onto this. Perhaps we'll even see an easier way of recycling matter that doesn't involve sorting things out (which makes people not want to do it), and which involves simply shredding the material before it goes into the process. The US alone produces more than 225 million tons of trash per year, of which a bit more than 80% is chemically organic (paper, wood, food waste, plastics, yard trimmings, etc) and would probably benefit from this.
According to a paper at the Changing World Technologies site (which, BTW, calls its own process TCP, so it is a proper name), "Agriculture represents over 50% of the estimated 12 billion tons of solid waste produced each year in the U.S. alone. These 12 billion tons of solid agricultural waste could produce 24 billion barrels of oil if processed through the CWT-TP." That's three times more than the country uses in a year, and a tremendous reduction in the volume of waste. Now, much of that can be reused in other ways, so it's not a complete solution, but factor in sewage treatment and existing domestic oil production of about 10 million bpd, and it leaves the rest of the world the Middle Eastern oil to fight over.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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!"
Actually, America can never be free of foreign oil unless it uses alternative energy. I read a very interesting article in The Economist a while back title The Oil We Eat. I highly reccomend looking it up and reading it.
In short it discussed how modern agricultural practices (i.e. fertilization, crop-spraying, tractors and whatnot) have come to the point where we actually expend ~5 calories of energy to produce every calorie of energy in our food. If you compare this with 20 years ago when the ratio was about 1:1, or 50 years ago when it was closer to 0.5:1 it's a very scary trend. The article is a bit of a statistics and numbers game, but it is very insightful and does a much more in-depth analysis of the issue than I've presented here.
The reason this is relevant is simple closed-system mathematics. If it takes you 5 times the energy to produce a given unit of energy in food form, you can never create all your energy from food. I agree that these plants can help with recycling and are probably overall a good thing, but one must keep in mind that these industrial processes can only rise to provide a certain portion of our energy, and anything above that percentage will be extremely inefficient. In the long run, America will have to look towards wind or solar or nuclear (my personal favourite) or some other alternative power source if they want to have any hope of relieving their dependance on foreign oil.
Ah but it would take a lot less work to make crops that are suitable for oil production than it takes to make crops that are fit for human comsumtion.
You could even use genetically modified crops to good effect without the bio-luddites making a torch and pitchfork brigade.
Once companies saw a stable and lucrative market for GM crop research they would jump on it, and soon you would see more effiecient crops to convert sunlight into easilly storable and portable energy. (Which is what oil is, concentrated sunlight)