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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
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
They make biodiesel from used french fry oil and stuff like that. Runs in unmodified (or barely modified) diesel engines.
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?)
Environmental laws that force refineries to produce the "boutique" blends the parent mentions are a step in the right direction.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
"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.
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.
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.
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!
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.