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"Vetrolium" From Agricultural Waste
junctionvin writes "The company Sustainable Power Corp. claims to have created a form of bio-crude oil from agricultural refuse. They use agro-waste from cracked soy beans, rice and cotton seed hulls, grain sorghum, milo, and jatropha and turn it into bio-crude oil. This crude can then be further refined into everything from gasoline to jet fuel and just about every petrochemical in between. The CEO is quoted: 'Our biggest problem is that we are too good to be true. We can literally replace every gallon of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel in the United States using just 12 percent of the waste byproducts in the country.' They also claim that their fuel burns to near 100 percent efficiency." The article doesn't mention what price the "vetrolium" would command in today's market or going forward, except to report the CEO's promise "to one day sell his gasoline for $1 less than the pump price for regular fuel, no matter what the cost. 'Even if it's $2 per gallon, I'll sell mine for $1,"' he said."
Perhaps, but ever time I hear something like this, I still have the hope it really is true. Each time I'm wrong, but who cares! It would be awesome!
Sounds like a pump and dump to me. Their stock is at approximately nothing, this claim has no actual details of process. It also violates common sense (complete combustion from a hydrocarbon? They're not zero impurity fuels), and promises an astounding return from the use of a waste product. They make claims that they can put it into production very quickly, which is extremely unlikely given the issues with biofuel scaling.
From their website:
Matters discussed in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "may," "intend," "expect" and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those contemplated, expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements contained herein. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the expectations of the Company and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. These include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with: the impact of economic, competitive and other factors affecting the Company and its operations, markets, product, and distributor performance, the impact on the national and local economies resulting from terrorist actions, and U.S. actions subsequently; and other factors available from the Company.
I think that sums it up nicely.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Nah, we'll hear about them in a few months.
You know, after the company goes bankrupt from this guy embezzling the millions of investment capital they get from this announcement.
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Sure they can make a lot of crude and fertilizer out of their agricultural waste, but how much energy are they using to convert it? It's all good and wonderful that they can make gasoline out of "waste", but if the energy costs to convert it are more than the production and transportation costs from other sources, either conventional or unconventional (oil sands for example), they may not really be accomplishing anything useful... However, if they were using say a nuclear plant to power their conversion, that'd be a different story.
I'm critical, not cynical...
TFA: "Even after a few minutes of operation, the engine block was cool to the touch while the four-wheelerâ(TM)s exhaust pipe seemed to emit little more than warm, odorless air."
So. This fuel is oxidised thermally neutral? So what's causing the gas to expand? What's driving the pistons?
I'm not going to call bullshit on this whole story yet, but when a reporter thinks he sees crap like the above, he needs to ask WHY.
I refuse to make puns about "hot air" :)
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Is the bio-fuel from rice the same as the bio-fuel from cotton seed oil? Usually, it isn't. Different sources yield different products. A company that can produce a consistent product from a variety of different sources will make billions.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
They could just start making fuel and sell it on a small scale, then plow their profits back into their production facilities.
Apple was profitable from Day One.
This would be too, if it actually worked.
The fact that they're not just doing it means they can't.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Also, while I mostly spent Auto Shop getting beaten up so may have missed something important, isn't that heat what makes a normal engine work?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Burns without heat? WTF?
Correct me if (when) I'm wrong, but doesn't no heat output mean no enthalpy in the reaction means no ability to do useful work with that reaction? How is a reaction with no heat output supposed to do work in a heat engine like your car?
Your car converts gasoline into mechanical energy by mixing it with air and using the resulting explosion to push a piston (see, for example, here). Without heat output, how is the reaction supposed to cause the rapid pressure change needed to drive the piston?
If "no heat output" is one of their big selling points, I don't see how this can be legit.
But agricultural waste is chock-full of valuable organic substances. It should be composted and returned to the soil so that it can fertilise the next year's worth of food. Burning it up is not all that different from burning corn in the form of 'ethanol' (really, just whiskey): it's just another way to take the last remaining topsoil in the United States and use it to fuel our car addiction, not entirely different from a junky selling his blood every day to get his fix.
Now we have an Oil Bubble, and it is fun in its own way. Peak Oil! We're all doomed, the great die-off! Foriegners are eating our lunch! Kuntsler hasn't been this happy since we were all going to be totally doomed by Y2K!
Of course, I wouldn't mind seeing trains make a comeback, and some serious investment in improving nuclear tech, but I'm guessing that the current bubble will pop before we get very far in either on one them. You know its bad when, 12 U.S. airlines call on Congress to curb excessive speculation.
I'm wondering what the next Bubble will be. Some are thinking a Green Tech Bubble, but I'm hoping for a Water Bubble. You know, sort of like that episode of Darkwing Duck with the Liquidator.
Of course, someone could do something about all the insane, emotion-driven speculation but that wouldn't be as much fun. It might lead to economic stability, and who wants that?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
vaporware, literally.
Although TFA has a few obvious errors, they apparently just use thermal depolymerization to crack just about anything organic into a light crude-like goo.
Not at all vaporware, and not even all that difficult (though not something you can really do on a small scale, thus the need for VC).
The biggest "problems" with it appear mostly regulatory... At the same time we have everyone crying about the price of energy, we have just about every viable alternative energy proposal shot down for completely assinine reasons ranging from cosmetic to FUD.
And how, exactly, does oil not require energy input? For that matter (bad pun, I know), can you think of any exchange that does not require energy input? The goal here is to find a renewable, lasting portable supply of cheap energy.
For what it's worth "high heat" is a pretty abundant and cheap form of energy; using it to create a fuel source from waste sounds like a good option (although I would wait for actual data before investing).
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
The problem is that this alleged wunderfuel is still a hydrocarbon, which means that you still have carbon atoms to dispose of (lots of 'em)
Carbon from this source wouldn't be a problem at all.
The Greenhouse Gas problem is really about taking carbon which has been buried and effectively out of the biosphere for millions of years and dumping it into the air in quantities large enough to affect atmospheric carbon concentrations.
All those Biofuels are effectively carbon neutral (or would be in an ideal world if we weren't using fossil fuels to harvest the feedstock) because the carbon in the feedstock has come directly from the atmosphere within the last 1-2, 10-20 years (depending on the feedstock).
If we could run the entire worlds fleet of cars/buses/planes/trains on biofuels, it would have eventually balance out and have zero effect on atmospheric carbon concentrations.
Biofuels have a single problem, in the last hundred years we have (in the west at least) got used to burning a fuel store which took millions of years to produce, biofuels have to produce energy in a 1:1 time ratio and there is simply no way to do that without a significant proportion of the earths surface being turned over to energy collection and conversion into an energy store.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
He says "we are too good to be true" and he is telling the truth...
Trouble with a lot of these wonder solutions is that you do not really know yet how environmentally damaging the production process is. If it is possible I would be happy to pay more to get less reliant on areas of the world that we should get away from... (speaking as someone living in Azerbaijan [north of Iran])
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Well, a lot of people here aren't familiar with the term "bathtub".
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The heat is not exactly a wasted byproduct. An internal combustion engine is a way to transfer chemical energy into thermal(heat) energy into linear energy into rotational energy. A Wankel skips the linear energy step. The heat is important, because although you can run an engine off "cryogenic" power, for example using liquid nitrogen as fuel, what you are doing there is taking something very cold, and as it warms due to its environment you harness the energy of its expansion. Similar to an external combustion engine. These are both very ineffective; Google it if you like. If you could use all the thermal energy from combustion, the exhaust and engine would be cool to the touch, no matter how long it ran. Good luck with that. That isn't what is happening here, which is either a reporter making changes to the story in order to show the subject in a more favorable light, or a reporter making mistakes. Either way, the reporter is not a subject matter expert, and is screwing things up; it happens.
I have had engines I referred to as "cold blooded" before, generally because they were built so heavily that it took forever (one was over half a god damn hour) for them to warm up to peak operating temperatures, and you got no power or reliability out of them until then. These engines pissed me off. If you want one, look for a small displacement (less than 300cc) "universal Japanese model" motorcycle from the 70's. There are lots of other places too, but that is a reliable, inexpensive source.
Pressure and heat are very closely related. A diesel works by creating enough thermal energy through pressure on the fuel to cause it to spontaneously combust, which vastly increases the temperature, which increases the pressure enough to drive the pistons through their power cycle. Replace the pressure induced heat with an electric spark and you have a gasoline engine. The thermal energy is still the integral part of the operation of the engine.
As far as no byproducts, the only way you are going to ever end up with no physical byproducts would be a 100% efficient nuclear reaction (again, good luck with that), during which you would expect large quantities of some form of energy, most likely thermal energy, electromagnetic radiation, and light. No harmful byproducts, on the other hand, could be as simple as water, in the case of hydrogen power, but is likely claimed to be water and CO2 for this stuff. In reality, there would be some carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide too, just because that stuff gets everywhere, and unburned hydrocarbons.
The idea that there would be no heat from this fuel source's combustion is silly at best, and certainly wouldn't be a selling point as a gasoline replacement even if true, but the idea that it burns much cleaner than petroleum based fuels is both likely and laudable. If the whole thing isn't a sham, which is possible.
Apathy; it does a body good.
Let's get real. Supposing the stuff was real, what distribution network would they use to get the fuel to consumers? Who would have the capital to improve on the process and then market the fuel oversees? I don't think oil companies care where the oil comes from as long as they can sell it.
love is just extroverted narcissism