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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.
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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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?
I just wonder how much energy this oil production plant needs to keep going if it wouldn't be able to run itself on the products of its refinement process, then it's not a net gain.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
...then what would your military do?
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
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
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
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
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
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
"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.
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.
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.
Not to mention you can't tow a damn thing with a civic, and forget about merging onto the highway with four passengers as well.
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.
Are we all supposed to get in a circle and sing hymns or some shit ? live in the exact same house, marry the exact same person and drive the exact same cars ? Not to mention having the exact same wants/uses for those cars ?
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.)
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
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
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
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.
These fuels are considered carbon nuetral because the carbondioxide is taken from the air in order to produce them.
Plants extract carbon from CO2, animals eat plants, end up in being turned into oil with TCP, we burn the oil creating no more CO2 than was extracted in the first place, or they decompose, creating no more CO2 than was extracted in the first place.
Fossile fuels on the other hand bring CO2 into the environment that has been removed over millions of years, and when the US alone is burning 10 millions barrels of the stuff each day.
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.
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?
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 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"
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...
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.
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.
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
It's this attitude that bothers me. In many cases it's not that we don't choose to use mass transit, it's that we CAN'T choose to use mass transit. Europeans are generally blessed in that nearly every major city in Europe has efficient mass transit. Europe also has a much higher population density, which results in mass transit being more efficient in non-urban areas as well.
In the U.S., however, the population is much more spread out. I currently live in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, where subway and bus lines are convenient, and I use them when I can (I am very fortunate in that I live about a mile from my office and can actually walk to work). Only crazy people and those whose office is too distant from a metro station actually drive into the city.
An interesting note, here, however, is that it is actually more economical for my wife to drive to work rather than to metro, even though there is a train station within a couple of blocks of each end of the trip and the trip takes about the same time each way. The cost of the metro for a week is not less than the cost of gas and parking. Why is this? I wish I knew. Fixing this problem would make mass transit a much more attractive solution.
However, in redneck America (rural Michigan) where I grew up, it was twenty miles to the nearest grocery store. Mass transit is nonexistent for a reason: The population is so spread out that it's simply not economical to establish a mass transit system. A sizable percentage of Americans live in locations with similar problems.
Now, with regard to the Maryland and Virginia residents around me who spend three hours in their Ford Battlecruiser or Toyota Juggernaught to get to work when they could have hopped the bus or the train within a block or two of their house... I have no excuse for them. I assume they are mentally incompetent and have too much money, as they seem to be throwing it away on gas and parking. If they are the problem you are referring to, then by all means, flame away. They suck.
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
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
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.
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.
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!"
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.'"
Bingo!
Most, not all but MOST, Europeans have no idea how LARGE the United States really is. I've seen even well education Englishman come away awe struck at the size of our country when all they did was visit the east coast and the southern US!
Our country is AWESOMELY large and outside of the coastal areas our population density is fairly low. For instance in Wyoming, where I live, the population density is 13.13 per square kilometer. The state of Nebraska, a next door neighbor, is 25.2 per square kilomter.
For contrast the UK is roughly **242** per square kilometer! France is at 107, Germany 235 and Italy 195!
Now that you can see the difference in population density it is not difficult to understand why many Americans do not have Mass Transit as an option, it is simply not economically feasible to provide them with it.
In all while most of the civilized world bashes on us for our "Car Centric Culture" they are failing to understand the challenges presented to our population by the sheer scale of our landmass.
You can drive across most countries in Europe in less time then it would take me to cross the State of Nebraska!
As for morons driving SUV's in the city, they should be beaten with large sticks.