Slashdot Mirror
AgroWaste to Oil a Growing Market
EvilTwinSkippy writes "Last May Slashdot covered the story of Changing World Tech's opening of a plant that converts agricultural waste to oil. Fortune magazine has picked up the story, and followed up on their success. Apparently the turkey guts are not as profitable to recycle as hoped, the company paying $30-$40/ton for animal offal. They are producing diesel fuel at $80/barrel (compared to $50/barrel for petroleum derived diesel). However, the plant has been successful enough to spawn ventures in Europe and the U.S. A pilot plant in Philadelphia has successfully used the process to safely break down and extract oil from sewage, medical waste, electronics, even leftovers from petroleum refining. The solids are metal, pure carbon, and fertilizer. And aside from gas and oil, the only other thing the system produces otherwise is sterile water."
Doesn't this process consume more energy than it produces?
Does that mean it can't reproduce?
Do they sell franchises?
at least we know there will be a cap of $80 usd for the barrel of oil.
Well I have the perfect marketing slogan for this! We can call it STOOL FUEL, Straight from people's butts into your engines.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
It would be a great idea if it was cheaper. Maybe other natural ingredients will help bring the price down.
How, exactly, does one oil a market?
No, never mind. I don't want to know.
normal(adj)- people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots [DECS]
Given that there is legitimate concern that we will soon reach -- and maybe already have -- peak oil production, the $80/bbl price may be competitive before too long.
The real problem is that there just aren't enough turkey guts in the world to replace crude oil, and the grain that the turkeys are fed is produced by an agricultural industry that is totally dependent on petroleum-derived fertilizers and pesticides.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
yea, maybe after I see YOU drink it...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Why does that last link run through the fark.com referal bin?
Wouldn't it be truly ironic if the medical waste was liposuction fat (think Fight Club)? Then, the clinical obesity afflicting one in three Americans would itself be powering the automobiles that are, in part, responsible for the obesity.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Finally, endless energy! Hook this machine up to politicians' mouths and the RWCM's mouths and we wouldn't have to worry anymore!
I think it's important that we research these alternatives now. There are certain uses for petroleum that we can't reproduce via other means -- powering our cars and homes isn't one of them.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
You kill two birds with one stone. /. fark's redirecting script, and /. the final site. Genius!
Changing World Tech's opening of a plant that converts agricultural waste to oil.
You mean like what you get when you stuff dead trees and foliage in mud, burry it deep underground under billions of tons of rocks, and wait a few million years?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A)Do they deliver?
B)What's Darl McBride's address again?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
"NO MORE FECES FOR OIL!"
There are lost of other things I would think that are more viable that are hard to get rid of. I'm sure slaughterhouses would be glad to have a way to get rid of all the shit that the animals produce. Any one remember the CNN story about the giant flaming shitheap in Nebraska?
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/28/cow.fire.ap/
"feeding animals to animals remains standard practice in the U.S"
Really stupid. If politicians weren't in the pocket of industry, this would be outlawed. Make that OUTLAWED! Then, maybe the slaughterhouses would be _paying_ to have the offal disposed of - and not by dumping it anywhere they own a piece of land, either.
Voila! Suddenly the product becomes directly competitive with petroleum.
It's PEOPLE! Soylent Diesel is PEOPLE!!!!!
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
One of my mothers friends is starting a plant that converts tires into Oil. The process takes old tires and removes the oil from them, basically oil from the rubber and oil they pick up from driving on the road. I forget if it is a qt per tire or something goofy like that.
They are out there, we need to find them.
Great SCOTT marty! I knew I should have patented this process. luckly they haven't figured out how to reproduce the flux capacitor. We have plenty of time........
the giant flaming shitheap IS Nebraska....
There, better.
(God as my witness, I honestly thought turkeys could fly.)
The problem with the process, as I read the article, is that while thermal depolymerization may scale for any one particular type of waste, no single TD process works as well for all types of waste.
If you're already running a turkey plant, it may be economical to spend $1M to render down turkey guts into $1.1M worth of oil. (Spend time in phase 1 than in phase 2.)
If you're already running a tire dump, it may be economical to spend $1M for the same plant, with the dials set differently, to render used automobile tyres into $1.1M worth of oil. (Spend more time in phase 2 than phase 1.)
The problem is that the process isn't continuous and efficient for all input waste types, such that not worth spending $100M for a really big plant to render 3000 incoming truckloads of raw organic matter into $110M worth of oil, because you can't. You have to separate the truckloads of "stuff with carbon in it" into piles of cow/pig/turkey bones, human bits from hospitals, raw sewage, chickenshit, pigshit, spammer, plastic bottles, used tires, and run different processes to get the most valuable materials out of each of the three waste streams.
Neat idea for small and medium businesses with a uniform waste stream. Not gonna change the world.
Pardon me for being skeptical, but this almost sounds too good to be true. I'd love to believe it when I hear something like this, but more often than not, it ends up being a whole bunch of hypothetical crap that never ends up coming to fruition. Either that, or it'll be somehow compromised by the large oil companies so that it is either a) willed out of existance or b) cost prohibitive.
I hate being such a skeptic.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Ricer A:I just got new rims, dual exhausts and a fuel injection system
River B:That's nothing. My ride runs on recycled turkey shit...er, I'll just get my coat.
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
Pretty soon our oil-hungy government will be turning prisoners into oil, knocking out two birds with one stone. Overcrowded prisons and the oil crisis. Hell if they kill the diseased inmates maybe three birds.
And aside from gas and oil, the only other thing the system produces otherwise is sterile water.
The thing will never get off the ground unless it produces some money.
What?
Yay, We are running out of natural, not-renewing energy containers, that we can burn mostly in cars so smooth to pollute/dirt everything in sight! Lets create new ways to keep up the pollution!
Sarcasm aside - the only positive factor at it is to get waste recycled. That should be triggered more widely. Get your rubbish sorted - and it will be time to build up new industries on recycling.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
He gave a talk for my organization a couple of months ago on his thermochemical process that converts cellulosic waste to precursor chemicals for fuels and fine chemicals. You can read a litte more on it here or by googling his name and Biofine. He claims the energy inmput/output ratio is quite good--I recall in the 30-40 range--and there is a process-scale facility online in Italy with interest to build a couple in the US.
80$ a barrell vs 50$ a barell may SEEM to be a failure, but it is actualy an incredible accomplishment that will become increasingly viable in short order.
I've done some research on this topic and found out that californias agricultural waste which is mostly funneled down into a southern californian dessert lake area could supply enough fuel to satiate the US oil supply.
There is enough un-inhabitable land area in southern california to process all of this waste and thus fully liberate the US from foriegn oil, not to mention create a replenshible power supply compatible with our current prevelant technology (gas based power).
The greatest contorl over per barell pricing is from the supply made available from oil producing states greatly controlled by OPEC. As world consumption increases and known stock piles decrease and cease over the next 30 to 50 years the price per barrell will continualy rise. And will certainly exceed 80$ a barell probably within the next five to ten years.
The only reason oil is at 50$ per barell is due to it's massive scale, if waste based oils had even a hundreth of the scale that our current oil industry uses, or even a thousandth of the money, industry and investment it does, we would probably see prices drop well below the 50$ mark.
And this is speaking of the technology in it's current form. Though it may have some initial ineffeciences which have made the cost 80$ a barrell, cost saving measures through natural refinment of the processing of waste will undoubtably greatly improve the procedure within the next few years and continue.
I would say that 80$ a barrell is an astounding accomplishment which given the finite and defintie bounds of drill based oil will rapdily become an extremly attractive alternative fuel source.
Im surprised at the pesimisitc tone from slashdot. I also speculate that in the next ten years or so we shall see the major players seek control over this new market to sell oil to the world market as their drill based supply dwindles.
--VISION
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
BioDesiel is the fuel of the (achievable) future, IMHO. Untill we can get Fuel Cells at reasonable prices or batteries get much better power density (or portable nuclear reactors are invented and safe) then getting peopole over to BioDesiel (which conventional Desiel engines can be easily modified to handle) is the solution.
Plus, the exhaust smells like french fries so McDonald's should be pushing this because it will increase demand for their product. McDonald's: Bringing you the green future through fast food cravings ;)
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Robots using human bodies as batteries.
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Why would the price spike like that?
Google up on "Hotelling model" and "optimal depletion path"
If the price spikes then the oil cartel was only screwing themselves all along, and I don't see them as the type to do many favors.
The $80 per barrel number is misleading. When considering large markets, shipping oil all over the place from a root source at $80/barrel is not economically feasible. The key here is that this oil doesn't have to compete in that market. In eastern Washington State, a number of rendering plants are already doing this themselves. They don't have to ship the animal waste anywhere, so they aren't paying for it, and the oil they get it *vastly* cheaper than the diesel at the pump for their distribution. One plant I've seen also provides some electricity through a diesel generator running fuel they produce. I don't really know about the math here, but let's say you're saving $10 per barrel by not having to buy the "offal." Now you're at $70. How much overhead is put on a $50 barrel of diesel before it comes to the pump? Right now, we're seeing spot prices at $2.30 - multiplied by 55 gallons (per barrel, correct me if I'm wrong) - you get over $125. Since you're at the point of purchase already, as long as your equipment costs are less than $55/barrel, you're saving money over filling your trucks at the pump.
Check out http://www.biosourcefuels.com/. They claim they can make biodiesel at competitive rates (way below $80/barrel) and appear to have a pilot plant actually running and proving the technology in Montana.
Ah, darn. I guess that makes these futures I bought in turkey guts pretty useless.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As a side note, fertilizers are certainly NOT derived from petroleum, and pesticides are sometimes synthesized using petroleum products (i.e., organic solvents), but I don't think that makes them petroleum-derived any more than pharmaceuticals are.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
I'd imagine waste vegetable oil would smell significantly better. Do you want your exhaust to smell like poo or like donuts?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
that supposedly intelligent people are atill hell-bent on producing and consuming gasoline by preference.
Even if it is made from recycling, burning gas still produces pollution that is leading directly to an environmental catastrophe, no matter how hard most americans including the president, refuse to acknowledge it.
These scientists would be doing the world a much bigger favour by researching pollution-free alternatives like hydrogen power instead.
Algae based biodiesel may have a lot more promise. I've seen it claimed that a small part of the Mojave desert could supply the US with all necessary vehicle fuel.
exist and are safe.... for their intended use they are in use in both American and Russian satellites. Do some research on "Nuclear Batteries" http://www.ne.doe.gov/space/space-desc.html
I just don't think, in todays geo-political situation, I would want every Joe to have one in his car. Can you say easy dirty bomb, boys and girls?
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I wish we would spend more time and research into fuels that won't pour carbon into the atmosphere. Why do we want to continue to use primitive fuels that will continue to advance to global warming?
Perhaps biodiesel is different. I don't know. All I know is turkeys are carbon-based life forms and burning turkeys would seem to put carbon into the atmosphere just as oil does.
"We invaded Turkey because they've got guts".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This isn't all too shocking when you consider that, once you find it, petrolium comes out of the ground for essentially free. Subtract the cost of the source stock and you end up with a refined product at roughly the same price.
(I realize that it's not quite that simple, but it's an interesting 'coincidence'.)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
If you input a ton of chicken guts (waste) and a gallon of oil (useful energy) a get two gallons of oil (useful energy) out, then you've got an increase in useful energy.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The last section of the article Forbes explains how it is better than drilling carbon from underground and releasing that into the atmosphere. The TDP process fits into the natural carbon cycle, and does not increase the net carbon involved in the cycle.
Sure, it looks like helpful technology, but think about what happens next. The price of turkey guts goes sky high. Pretty soon, we are importing cheap turkey guts from Brazil and Montenegro, and then we find we are in political thrall to the OTEC countries, and have to support them in their wars against Uruguay and Macedonia. That way lies madness!
This might be reasonable if you are talking about sewage solids, but that's a small fraction of most sewage and I'd want you to confirm your source and its accuracy before I took it seriously.
That says, CWT did mention that they can process things such as grease-trap waste (cooking grease, mostly). With the amount of grease produced in big cities and the disposal costs in landfills, it appears that the natural place for CWT to build their next plant isn't near rural poultry plants, but Manhattan. All they'd have to do is undercut the cost of trucking the stuff to New Jersey and they'd have all the feedstock a 400 bbl/day plant could handle, and probably much more.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I meant the second article - the one from mindfully.org. There is no Forbes article.
In a few years I can drive my SUV to McDonalds... Get fat... Get lipo... Give the fat to AgroWaste... Convert it to fuel... Gas up my SUV... Drive my SUV to McDonalds...
... make that $180/person/month.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
For oil, at least.
*sigh* back to work...
I don't know how to feel. I can just imagine a mighty column of American military vehicles rolling like a sandstorm through some third world country to liberate its people. And to think it will be fueled not by petroleum, but by McDonald's waste. ph34r!
:)
The recursion just blew the stack of my mind
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Yatta yatta yatta, but you all saw that coming.
I see a way that this could be a boon for flagging state economies. For one, every state is literally being buried in landfills, slowly but surely.
At least 3/4 of the waste being dumped into landfills is organic in nature.
Now if, for example, a state such as Washington, built a municiple biodiesel plant to recycle said waste into fuel, then instead of relying on external fuel sources, they could not only supply their state with energy resources.
That way they can pocket the funds from said resources to pay for education, roads, etc, instead of relying on Uncle Sugar or taxes to make the balance. Each state can do this and improve everything for the better.
However, this is a pipe dream. As long as there's lobbyists and a government that is devoted to their money, such a possibility will never come to pass.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Just recycling carbon isn't going to save us; land plants aren't efficient enough at converting sunlight to fixed carbon to yield what we need. I suspect that we're going to need to cycle carbon a lot more tightly than that, keeping the atmosphere out of the loop for most of it; look for a future essay on The Ergosphere when I get a Round Tuit.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Subsidies usually result in overproduction and overconsumption, financed by the taxpayer. If we want to "fix" the problem, let's tax petroleum to pay for all the defense costs of the oil shipping routes instead of the taxpayer paying more for other things.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Are you ok with a 60% increase in your gas prices? That would cost you $3.2 for a gallon of gas then. This sounds all nice and good but the process is a pipe dream. Sorry to be the one to burst your bubble but the reason that electric/eco friendly cars haven't gotten a good foothold isn't the evil oil industry its the cheap walmart mentality. Either come up with a cheaper way or figure out a way to recenter America's value system. But don't just blame it on "Big Oil"
I've seen pictures of the pools of hog sewage in industrial farms that have bursted after a storm and killed people along with the hogs.
This would make such disasters a bad memory and create oil, power and other non-lethal products.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Well, many people have been in search of a perpetual motion engine or an additional natural resource. Maybe...?
1. Extract fat
2. Create fuel for automobile
3. Get fat from using automobile
4. Go to step 1
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
High natural gas prices have driven some users to petroleum fuels, so the demand for fertilizer is increasing petroleum demand even if it isn't a direct petroleum product.
If their manufacture involves petrochemicals and their use increases the demand for oil, you might as well call them petroleum-derived.Sustainability and energy independence essay
i'm a lazy vegetarian - i'd hate to have to choose between walking and cruising on turkey guts.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
(The ability to hover is also a plus.)
END OF LINE
This is not a solution, or a start to a solution, or even helpful. It's part of the problem.
Earth has an unknown amount of oil in it, but it is finite. One day, it will all be gone. Earth has a finite amount of life supporting compounds in it. We do NOT need to be burning those on a mass scale.
A self supporting system, such as that which evolved on our planet relies on the sun to power it, it self cycles compounds as necissary, this is taught in grade school in grade school. What is learned later on is if you start pulling out the c-c double bonds, random carboxylic acids, ketones, and such then throw them off as waste, you will end up making this planet a lifeless rock. Not tomorrow, not the next day, maybe even a few thousands years from now, but it will be the result. It took a lot of energy to put those compounds togethor. It takes a lot of energy to keep them in cycles.
Solar power is the answer (or some system equivalent), Nuclear power would be a good short term answer (as in a few thousand years, with little pollution).
Burn Hollywood Burn
There is a growing number of geologists who now wonder whether oil [as we know it] might not be the byproduct of some heretofore unknown process that transpires deep within the earth.
Google on e.g. "abiotic oil":
I know, normally getting government subsidies is bad news, but in this case it may make sense. ASSUMING this is a viable process in the first place (IE net output of energy), reducing the taxes on the diesel fuel made from waste makes sense if it reduces the tax burden elsewhere (like if some waste processing facilities or landfills have to be built or something).
Also, there's something to be said for the old saw of reducing dependence on foreign oil.
If this is a viable way to make the waste diesel competitive with dino-juice diesel, it may be worth considering.
Given one of the article's examples, I think there's a far better name:
"Fillerup?"
"Yes, with new Soylent Green Gas!"
www.eFax.com are spammers
Check the links in this post and this story (referenced here).
Sustainability and energy independence essay
If that sounds a bit ridiculous, well, that's how I interpret the assertion that fertilizer and pharmaceuticals are petrochemicals. If it doesn't come off of the cat. cracker, and doesn't have a significant hydrocarbon component, it isn't a petrochemical to me. Your definition is too broad to be really meaningful to me.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Bear in mind that these turkey guts would probably have been landfilled.
In effect the turkeys serve as a carbon sequestering system... they absorb airborne carbon through the grain they eat, and their guts get buried and will (eventually) turn into oil.
Now if we were to start breeding turkeys specifically for this process... then it'd be zero net.
So, it turns out that Mad Max was prophetic. They had refinerys to turn pig waste into fuel. So we started with turkeys, big deal.
Does this mean I can start mounting cool weapons on my car? Anyone know where I can get a good deal on a used AutoCannon-10 or maybe refurbished PPC? I'll break out my tool box...
We the Sheeple...
Short facts on oil form animal waste.
It takes alot of enery to produce it, that's true at least.
Oil produced on this method has to be thined becouse it has greater caloric output than regular oil.
For example u cant use this oil directly in your heating, simply becouse your oven can't take such high temperatures.
The best way to make use of this oil is to enrich regular oil so you burn less of it. (Company around here uses this techniqe, and it's working)
The waste that remains from production of this oil still has about 40% of energy to cover the production (if burned).
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
Oil yes - since there are no fossils to be found in oil, there is a real possibility that oil is secreted by the earth mantle as it cools down. If true, it would mean that the supply of oil is practically limitless - we may still consume it faster than it is produced though. Coal however, contains plant fossils and is clearly of bio origin.
... Just chiming in to ask when there'll be a filling station in the tristate NYC area...
I suppose when zero-sulfur diesel mandates go into effect, given that biodiesel doesn't have any sulfur...
"Renewable" energy has been discussed here fairly regularly. One potentially promising technology, Renewable Energy from Algae, is in fact very feasible, according to an energy conference I helped run recently.
If you REALLY want to annoy the Saudis build one of these next to the pig farms.
Pigs make as much sewage as a human and many of these farms have 300,000 animals! Sewage treatment from pig farms are MAJOR environmental problems.
So we process the sewage and pig guts left over from slaughter into oil....
I wonder what Islam says about running a car fuled with ex-pig gas?
I guess you could argue that turkey waste shouldn't come from factories anyway and we should all be self sufficient farmers but that's not the world we live in.
The applications for this would seem to be near endless. So they are being charged for turkey guts, why not set up shop at a landfill? Can you imagine the vast quantities of metals, plastics and organic solids in some of those dumps? And people would PAY them to take the trash. Just set up a big shredder and start bulldozing crap in one end. Oil and raw materials come out the other. What about the fast food business? they have to pay to have their waste cooking grease taken away, and thats just about pure oil. And people have been trying for decades to figure out how to process old tires into something useful; according to this guy they can handle them, so whats stopping them from trucking away all those tire heaps? Again, people PAY to have tires disposed of. Honestly either these guys are peddling snake oil or they just aren't thinking clearly.
Sort of but not really.
Mad cow disease is caused by cows eating COWS (or sheep). The US has banned canabilistic feed. But remember that most diseases are species specific and by feeding turkeys to cows and cows to turkeys you prevent the spread of disease as efectivly as turning them into oil.
But remember that by doing this you will make the cost of feed go up which will make the cost of meat go up...
There are two cost factors that are really afffecting them. Remedying either or both of them could turn the tide.
The first is their exclusion from a tax break for biodiesel. This looks like a gross oversight which they may be able to get corrected. The article mentions this as being equivalent to a $1/gal. reduction in production costs, which would be significant.
The second is the cost of raw materials. Animal wastes are accounting for $15 to $20 per barrel. If they can source a raw material that is either free or they can charge to process, half or more of their cost difference vs. traditional diesel will be removed. The other option would be to remove the current primary market for animal byproducts, use in animal feed. This increases the viability in Europe.
If they could get both of those changes enacted, their cost per barrel could be near zero, certainly competitive with traditional sources.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Phase 2: dehydrate by depressurising
Phase 3: profit!
In all actuality, the waste produced by many farms could be utilised in this system instead of seeping into rivers and resulting in fish kills etc.
Let's face it, the simple fact of the matter is that oil is necessary to our everyday requirements and that renewable sources of energy aren't going to make up the loss of oil overnight. This method of oil "production" is a good stop gap measure and let's not forget that it can also produce other leftover chemicals as byproducts.
The article linked to states:
$30-40/ton for input materials
2 tons of offal per barrel
Translates to $60-80 per barrel for raw materials ALONE. The technology is apparently pretty damned good.
Note that in many other countries (such as Europe), using such waste products for feedstock has been banned, and producers of that waste have to PAY to get rid of it.
In short, if CWT opened a plant in Europe, they would not only not need to pay for their raw input materials, they would actually GET PAID to take those materials, in addition to the ability to sell the oil produced from the process.
It's all in the article... While CWT made a bet on the price of their raw materials and lost in the case of their first plant, their strategy is to begin refining things they KNOW they can get for free or even get paid to process. (See the comments in the article about sewage, and poultry offal in Europe.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
the ability to turn essentially anything organic (even people - soylent diesel, anyone? :) ) into oil
damn... that's an idea that could only come from a sick, twisted mind.
i likes.
MORTAR COMBAT!
... about the prices. You could have a ompany make the oil and refine it, built on / near an old landfill (lots of free/cheap materials) have the trash companies still come and PAY to drop off the trash (better than free) and then put gas pumps in an expanding range around the landfill (now a refinery) and sell the gas for a reasonable profit. Then let the dollar decide. If people in the are want to support cleaning up thier land, they will buy the gas. Add this to the relatively short transport distance, and the possibility of a tax break due to the fact that the city no longer has to pay for the landfills, and you could probably be close enough to competitive that I for one would be willing to spend the difference, if not actually make it cheaper.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
NYC pays on the order of $168M for five year contracts to the mafioso Merco corporation, for "disposal" in Texas. That's about 750Ktons, which is over $2000:ton, that NYC pays for disposal. Even skipping the mafia "administration" layer, NYC sewage would be much better recycled into oil and water than into dirty profits for mobsters and Texans.
--
make install -not war
This is a great idea.
This is not making energy from nothing. This is capturing energy that would have normally gone to waste. Even better, it is capturing the energy in a highly useful form, oil.
You are correct that although what goes out may come right back in, energy will be gradually lost in the process. You still need a net input of energy. That could come out of the ground as it does now, in which case we would only be slowing down our mad dash to turn all the buried carbon in the world back into carbon dioxide... but it could also just as easily, perhaps even MORE easily, come from other sources. The most obvious being... random biomass. Not even something fancy like rapeseed, whatever you can lay your hands one. Grass, weeds, trash trees. That damned acacia or kudzu or duckweed or cedar that's ruining your local biome. Easily available everywhere, except maybe in the desert. Stuff that doesn't need fertilizer or pesticides or care or energy to produce, just sunlight, water, CO2, and dirt, and produces O2 in the process.
The "hydrogen economy" is a red herring. Hydrogen is a total bitch to store and transport, requires specialized equipment to use, and the energy needed to make it has to come from somewhere. It's only advantage is not producing carbon dioxide at the source. Diesel, OTOH, is ideal to store and use, and has a huge infrastructure built around it. Make that biodiesel, and it becomes renewable. And that is essentially what this technology is producing from waste. Add in some purposefully grown material to make up for losses, and you'll never need to import another barrel.
There's no need to worry about CO2 as a byproduct, if in the larger cycle you take in as much as you put out. If you no longer have to dig carbon out of the ground, you no longer have to worry about putting CO2 in the air.
You might want to build a solar thermal one though. After all, this process requires energy mainly in the form of heat, and a field of mirrors can capture solar thermal energy far better than a field of plants can. Geothermal, where applicable, would work pretty well too. Nukes, which are also thermal, would work, but they're not worth the hassle.
Not only does it produce useful energy carriers like oil and gas, it can also separate out pure carbon (useful for many purposes) and solids which are a mix of metals and minerals. Useful, partially refined minerals and metals which would require less energy to turn them into useful materials than the stuff you dug out of the ground to make the original material in the first place. The oil and gas themselves also make for a good feedstock for various petrochemicals, namely plastics.
That waste can including toxic or hazardous waste. Stuff we normally would have spent energy to dispose of and had to build a landfill for. Bonus!
Hey, you can also use this to produce relatively clean water that can of course be purified further. Since a natural candidate for this technology is wastewater, you'll probably be producing a lot of it too. Double bonus!
I can sum this up in one word. RECYCLING. Not today's bullshit recycling where only aluminum cans can be efficiently reused, because aluminum is so hideously energy intensive (you'd be better off buying plastic bottles and throwing them away energy-wise). Your garbage becomes an important resource. We're talking all types of waste, human, industrial, post-consumer, agricultural, toxic, everything.
Economically viable, universal RECYCLING, that takes care of dangerous materials to boot.
Hell, if it works as advertised, we'll be digging into our landfills instead of virgin soil for resources.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Sounds like a mcguiver episode.
I'm going to power this car using animal shit, Yellow 5 dye, and 3 old copies of the New York Times.
(Usually after colliding with a vehicle traveling at 60MPH.)
Do this often, do you?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
So when I come out in the morning and find my car on blocks I'll be puttin' my tires back in the gastank instead of buying them back at the swap meet. Great.
Liposuction, even high-volume liposuction, is no panacea for clinical obesity. High-volume lipo can remove 15-20 pounds of fat, tops. I don't have any personal experience, but bariatric surgery is probably a better option as an obesity "cure" than liposuction.
Sent from my iPhone
They're not spending billions to ensure the world's oil supply. They're spending billions to ensure their kickbacks.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Currently, NYC sewage is dried and place on western farmer's fields. Quite honestly, we have more than enough available via Denver, Lincoln, and most certainly, places like dallas, houston, austin, etc.
Instead, of shipping crap to the west, the east coast can now make money and lower their own costs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
The number of geologists who believe in abiotic oil is directly proportional to how much they are paid to express those views.
No halfway respectable geologist believes in that, just like no respectable biologist believes in creationism (or intelligent design).
There's just too much evidence in favor of oil being organic, and too much evidence against it not being.
Excellent idea. My spider-sense tells me that your math is off by about a magnitude though. Even so, If the city could save $200 bucks per ton and turn that into 2 barrels per ton (assuming its in the same ballpark as turkey guts) which could be burned in city vehicles then they would be about $300 per ton ahead of the game. I think you should email your suggestion to Fortune Magazine,CWT, plus whoever is currently mayor of that stinking cesspool at the mouth of the Hudson.
He could grind up the 'undesireables' and then sell them to the UN. Blood to Oil.
But the BIG problem is one of scale. In the US, on average, each person consumes over 10 pounds of gasoline in his/her car each day, and more than that through the other energy we consume. This is a staggeringly large and unsustainable amount of consumption. The US does NOT create enough biomass to match this, even if it were technically feasible to do so.
That said, biomass fuels will help. A little bit. But the scale of our consumption is a big ass problem that we'll have to open our eyes to some day.
Never eat anything bigger than your head.
so you mean to tell me instead of using petroleum to make gasoline, diesel fuel, etc, we could be using it to make booze? If that's the case, why not take the turkey guts and then refine them to make Wild Turkey? That would sell for quite a bit more than $80/barrel.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I'm curious,
Does anyone actually know what kind of oil they get from this process, what condition is it in? is it suitable for _ALL_ of the current uses we currently have for oil (plastics, chemicals, fuel etc?)
Also, as much as I fear peak oil and so on, it really would be nice if we could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as well as soon as possible, considering the freak weather happening at the moment in some locations (no nothing dramatic enough for movies but certainly some "odd" weather is occuring in the news of late)
Inorder to increase Turkey consumption President Bush has declared every Thursday Thanksgiving. This plan should have the secondary benefits of increasing crannberry and pumpkin comsumption increasing profits for farmers and supermarkets. Add to this increased holiday specials and decoration purchases the resulting consumer consumption should create an economic boom not unlike the tech boom.
Bush's second plan to make everyday Christmas should have an even more dramatic positive effect on the economy.
Your spider-sense is good: The article cites "[dumping] 1.5 billion pounds of sewage sludge over five years" and "a [dumping] contract valued at $168 million dollars over five years". That's $168M for 750Mtons, which is $224:ton. Thanks for setting me straight - I'm advising the NYC Council's Tech committee again tomorrow. BTW - that "C" in NYC doesn't stand for cesspool. Our stinking cesspool, as the article makes clear, is Texas. Maybe you're thinking of New Jersey...
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make install -not war
1. I wonder how long it would take the animal-rights group to start protesting outside their company parking lot. 2. The initial investment and maintenance costs still seems high, but further integration efforts might change the picture
The 3 Laws of Thermodynamics 1) You can't win. 2) You can't break even. 3) You can't quit the game. Also (for those of us who like analogies): 1) There's no such thing as a free lunch. 2) There's no such thing as a lunch that's even worth what you paid for it. 3) You must have lunch.
"Biodiesel from plant stocks in particular is some three and a half times more efficient than petrodiesel because it utilizes solar energy..."
Okay how is it more efficient? It may be better for the enviroment or even better for nation security but how is it more efficent than petrodiesel?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
(see the below post about what would happen to a person falling into this system...)
Im confused here a $50 dollar barrel of oil doesnt make a $50 barrel of diesel. Also transport costs in many cases make up the bulk of the cost of geting fuel to the consumer and thats totally missed in this article.
I must nod in deference to thermodynamics as I point out that a primary energy source is being forgotten: the animal feed. Sure, use turkey guts or sewage or whatever, but you're ultimately harnessing solar energy through photosynthesis. Turkeys eat (I presume) grain of some sort as part of their feed. The hydrocarbons (err, carbohydrates) that make up much of their offal came about through photosynthesis, whereby the polymer chains were elongated and molecular bonds formed. This process just breaks those bonds down into a more readily ignitable compound: oil. The sun already did the heavy lifting (and pulled carbon out of the air to do it). No energy is created in this process; molecules are re-arranged such that they will more readily release the energy already stored therein. An absoultely brilliant solution, in my book. I could be wrong.
Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it -- Dostoevsky
Until we run out of breathable air, anyway. Remember that CO2 is poisonous in relatively small quantities.
Oh, you're from New York. Well please accept my apology. I shouldn't take a poke at a whole city just because I've run into a few a-holes from there. That is fantastic that you actually have the ear of somebody in the city government. I hope you can at least convince them to investigate this possiblity because I think it's a great idea.
If it were done as a municipal project just imagine NYC getting paid $200/ton to take other cities sludge and turn it into bio-fuel. The taxpayers would sure like that, wouldn't they? And something like that could help build a new reputation for New York as a clean, modern metropolis. Plus the mobsters could toss dead bodies in with the sludge instead of leaving them float down the East River. So that's a bonus.
It takes a lot more than calling NYC a "stinking cesspool" to actually rile a New Yorker But we expect that out-of-towners will be nice enough to apologize, without getting too paranoid about why ;). Advising the City Council != opportunity for progress, but at least it's something. That $200:ton is for a mafioso carting company cutting a deal between Giuliani's NYC and Bush's Texas, so it's neither 1> representative of any subsequent deal, especially a sensible one, nor 2> going away any time soon. But at least we can bang our heads against the right wall.
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make install -not war
Thanks for the illustration. Reminds me of the "water recycling" process used by the Fremen of Arrakis - we'll just get more goods out of it.
Speaking of human waste - municipalities use energy to treat them anyway. IANAEE (Enviromental Engineer); but perhaps the process may prove to be more beneficial than the status quo, since the end products are truly reusable (matl + sterile water), whereas current processes (AFAIK) does produce other waste products that need to be incinerated/buried.
I'm sure once we start recycling material useable by this process (biomass et al) from all sources (e.g., sewage, agriculture, residential(food/lawn)), we may be able to make a dent on our need for commodity resources.
It would be a bad thing if the oil industry acquired exclusive rights to this technology. It would be even worse if a single oil company did so. In the latter case, only a single oil company would switch to waste/biomass and the other companies would have to continue to pump oil to stay in business.
As long as the technology remains availible to all, though involvement of the oil companies would be a good thing, at least in the short term. Who else has the capital and the experience to deploy this on a large scale? Also, the second stage of the process looks suspiciously like an oil refinery so it may be possible to "bolt" the first stage onto existing refineries converting them to the ability to run off of waste and biomass.
In the long term, however, it would be desireable to have many smaller plants scattered throughout the country. This would greatly reduce the cost and energy consumption associated with transporting the waste, biomass, and finished products not to mention the hazards of spills. Smaller installations could be placed at each landfill, sewage treatment plant, medical waste facility (medical waste and mad cows might need a separate plant because the grinder would become contaminated), farm coop, large poultry/pig/beef plants, oil storage facilities, and other strategic locations.
So, it could be important to have legislation restricting exclusive ownership of the technology or at least a commitment to use existing anti-trust laws. This is one case where eminent domain would be justified.
Green gasoline--it's PEOPLE.
So where does all this offal go? It just disappears, "up and out" like magic? Put in s#$t in and out comes sweet nectar of the gods. Sounds too good to be true if you ask me---unless there's a bioprocess in there somewhere or a collection of energy from solar or geothermal heat or something along those lines, the amount of energy put in to do this TDP thing sounds too costly (think "Conservation of Energy").
Linux at home
I, along with everyone else who's been force-fed the new state religion of evolution thought that this process was supposed to take millions of years. And now you're telling me it can be done in a LAB?
Pardon me as I scoff at this OBVIOUS hoax. It contravenes everything we've been told to believe, so it can't be true.
Heck, they might even pay you to haul away stuff dumped there.
Wikipedia states on it's front page that on this day (Feb 23) in 1893, Rudolph Diesel recieved a patent for his 'oil engine'. Part of Mr. Diesels thoughts also include:
Between 1911 and 1912 he stated:
"The diesel engine can be fed with vegetable oils and would help considerably in the development of agriculture of the countries which use it"
He also predicted that:
"The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time."
Ok, he was 100 years out of date, but BioDiesel is a damn good idea. It's cleaner than gas, and there is a domestic source.
We grow about 300 mllion turkeys a year. Assume 30 pounds/turkey, 30% guts, 20% of that extracted as oil, crunch crunch crunch, turkey guts will produce a bit under 0.03% of our oil needs. Turkey poop you say? Turkeys generate about 3 pounds of poop per pound of body weight, so that only improvs things by a factor of 3, up to 0.1% of our needs.
About as close to insignificant as you can get.
Even if you found TEN TIMES more waste from other animals, we're still not talking about anything significant. Less than one year's energy growth.
Hydrogen burns.
e s. html
Oil burns.
How is one currency and the other a source?
Your type of thinking seems popular now amongst people who think they are enlightened about hydrogen cars.
If you use eloctolysis to split water molecules and filter out the oxygen in it to create hydrogen gas you are EXTRACTING the fuel. This is no different than extracting oil. You can then choose to burn the hydrogen just like you would any other fuel. If you power the hydrolysis off of sunlight then the process is very similar logically to extracting oil from turkey guts.
People say that solar panels are expensive...
How about using a true parabolic mirror to concentrate the sun's rays intensely?
http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/solarcooking/fram
I saw these devices demonstrated, and they produce a lot of energy. The one I saw was from a satellite dish, which is not fully parabolic. The professor who did the demonstration for me claimed that a truly parabolic mirror would reach temperatures strong enough to crack water atoms apart. I have not tried to independently test this yet, but I have been shopping for sunglasses.
HYDROGEN CAN BE A FUEL.
The pacific northwest has a number of aluminum plants now shuttered. Huge industrial structures with a technical and available work force. The Goldendale Wa. smelter has access to electrical power and a stream of 7500 tons of waste a day. This waste is now headed to the Rosevelt super landfill 20 miles to the east and is on the same rail line. It seems that these plants, already approved as industrial sites and all now declared superfund could be retrofitted as waste to oil conversion plants. The Rosevelt plant currently generates a small amount of power from methane recovery and electrical generation. It seems a great percentage of the energy is wasted with passive conversion of the feedstock. Jim Davis.
...of technology (from the USA at that, though I know China has tried somewhat similar stuff) being the solution rather than lip service (like Kyoto).
:)
About 80$ and that's when it is operating within undesirable settings (not getting biofuel incentives as well as high material cost) in addition to being a nascent technology (30 years is nothing) without any economics of scale (yet). The price could drop like a stone within the next fifteen years, no wonder Forbes (as well as the DoE btw (read the article)) got interested.
All you who consider yourself green and liberal and whatnot and haven't yet opened your eyes should do so now: the combination of business and technology will be the solution, not the problem (of course you can still be critical, just drop the naysaying). Some of your leaders have already realized and gone pro-nuclear (just an example) and this is even better.
Flame me all you want, it's still true
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
"Appel has lined up federal grant money to help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada."
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Check out Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers by Mary Roach. (I'd try to make a link to Amazon, but I'm not sure how to build one that doesn't refer back to me.) There are a lot more options for your body than just burying it. Personally, I think the option of being flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, then broken up with ultrasonics is an interesting idea. It's a heck of a lot more likely to not leave crunchy bits than cremation is, less polluting too.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Reminds me of the Simpson's episode where Mr. Burns loses everything and then Lisa helps him regain his confidence with recycling cans but he rises to the top of the capitalism game by recycling animals.
Charles
www.charlesjo.com
Charles Jo
They are almost completely wrong. Here was my response:
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
"Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. 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."
:-)
I know some people would object, but dead bodies could be used for this as well - this would not only help with the energy problem, but also with the issue many major cities are currently having where they don't have enough room to bury all their dead.
For those who don't wish to be buried, you could simply be "oil-ized". Not only do you avoid the cost of cremation/casket/burial, but you could get oil out of the process.
Just imagine heating your home with the remains of Ol' Uncle Earl
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
Our mayor is Michael Bloomberg and he is rather progressive - certainly not a traditional Republican. I would send the idea to his office.
Bloomberg is also a billionaire, unlike Guliani and Bush, and doesn't need to make backroom deals to fund his political ambitions. PS Bush's dad is super rich be he isn't - at least not yet.
The most interesting biodiesel process I've seen so far is Biox's. Their process is actually cost-competitive with existing petroleum.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
Turkeys can fly. One crashed into a building in PPG Plaza in Pittsburgh back in 2000. Linky. Maybe they can't fly as much as freefall, but still...
Which means everything is running down hill. Fortunately it will take about a hundred billion years to hit bottem.
Here at our multi-billion dollar refinery in Fairbanks, we're extracting 2.5 billion barrels of crude oil each day from teenagers' faces
This lobster was alive when it hit the frothy, boiling water.
Bloomberg - my mayor too - is like traditional Republicans in many states where Democrats don't have a chance to get elected, so no one ever runs as a Democrat. Like Bernie Sanders, now I-VT. Bloomberg's Republican reregistration gained him Giuliani's endorsement, ensuring his election. He's certainly not the kind of fascist we had in Giuliani, who lowered the bar almost as much as Bush has. But Bush isn't a traditional Republican, either - those old Republicans never wanted to destroy the government, but Bush does. And Bloomberg has been one of the biggest mayoral boosters of Bush, alongside his chosen bedmates Giuliani and Pataki (who are the country's biggest Bush fundraisers).
Bloomberg's billionaire status has proven to be irrelevant to keeping him free of political ambitions and allegiences. Just like Schwarzenegger. They are just as greedy for consuming and risking other people's money as any merely rich politician - that's how you get to be, and stay, rich.
But Bloomberg isn't too bad. He hasn't pushed Giuliani's unnecessary/mobster water treatment plant proposal through. OTOH, from my work directly with the NYC City Council, it's clear that "sending the idea to the mayor's office" will produce exactly nothing. Any idea needs a constituency and a plan for persistent pursuit of its goals, and compromises. Politics is a process. Sure, they're lacking good and new ideas, but the bottleneck is horses to trade, and access of individuals with power to others with power. So the most productive use of the idea is to merely promote it among geeks, and help the idea's time come. Nothing stronger than an idea whose time has come, especially if you're too busy with other, better risks to make it your personal crusade.
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make install -not war
with respect to waste streams... what about sewage?
With respect to arable land, who says it has to be arable? The following quote discusses the sewage into algae biomass oil research Mike Briggs is doing:
Using algae biomass as a practical energy solution requires removing a couple of process bottlenecks, one being growing the algae while capturing methane generated in its growth cheaply (the DOE solusion used open raceway ponds), and getting the oil out of the algae cheaply. You won't see much about possible solutions for a while because in order to get research funding, anybody with what he thinks are the right answers is discussing them on an NDA basis with potential investors or team members. (based on comments I've seen from researchers... and because I'm looking for money myself in this area)
With respect to solar, neither of you brought up an obvious point. What happens when the sun goes down? ,p.A homeowner on the grid can choose either battery backup (since you've priced this, you know this means REAL BIG batteries) or grid backup, buy power when the rates are low.
The choices are more limited with respect to supplying utility grade power:
I favor the solar power satellite solution, since JP Aerospace appears to be on the edge of success with their blimp-to-orbit space transportation solution, which promises orders-of-magnitude reductions in the price-per-kilogram for boosting payloads into orbit to less than what NASA says on their solar power satellite project site is required to make a SPS project feasible.
With respect to solar cells themselves, I am not at all certain about whether or not the real problem in getting the cost down in this application is best done through new types of solar cells or through more economical packaging of existing devices. Wafer-scale cells with arrays of cells photolithographed onto them, automated laser testing to mask out defective cells just might reduce costs quite a bit. Or not, this is not my field and I'm not really equipped to run the numbers. But I suspect an effective 100% yield on very high production volumes certainly wouldn't hurt.
The other possibility that occurs to me for reducing the cost of a solar power satellite array is to replace NASA's rigid structure setup with solar cell array modules strung on cables combined with microwave transmitters to make very large phased-array antenna systems to ship the power back without having to carry it back to a central power nexus and separate antenna system. The central control nexus would gather the physical location of the cell arrays and instruct the array transmitters as phase-control information. Not saying this is THE answer, just suggesting that thinking outside NASA's box might be in order here.
The URLs for the NASA project, etc. are on the page in my sig.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
On Maryland's Eastern Shore, chicken farming is probably the biggest industry. They've got waaaayy too much offal as a result. They already use it to grow the feed for the chickens, but there's a huge amount that just washes into the Chesapeake Bay. It's uneconomical to truck it elsewhere - transportation costs too much. Having a TD plant locally would fix a number of problems, and would probably pay for itself. Granted, that won't be the case everywhere.
If the manure can be applied as (cheap) fertilizer - it's a win/win situation. If not, then TD is a great answer.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Well if we do end up using this kind of oil, members of PETA are gonna get pissed. It means they can no longer drive cars that use any kind of fossil fuel now as they'll be going against their very beliefs. Same thing with vegans.
My Gawd WTF...
" Apparently the turkey guts are not as profitable to recycle as hoped And aside from gas and oil, the only other thing the system produces otherwise is sterile water."
So im guessing profit can be had if they extracted the steril water from turkey guts.... Colon Juice anyone?