"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."

Comments

Too good to be true???

[pablo_max]

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!

Re:Too good to be true???

[SatanicPuppy]

That hope, that beautiful little flower of perfect happy hope, is how they take your money away from you.

Let me tell you how the fuel of the future will come about. Some guy in a lab will come up with something that is woefully inefficient, and they will haggle with it for a decade with little funding and little respect, and it will become more efficient, and then more people will say, "Wow, maybe there is something to (insert inefficient process here)" and they'll start working on it. And a decade or so later it will be roughly equivalent to our current fuel in cost.

People have been working on the idea of biofuels forever, and we've got some semi-decent methods out there, but every one of them is the fruit of a LOT of crappy thankless work done when oil was cheaper than bottled water.

Likewise fusion; we know it can be done. One day we will do it, barring an intellectual dark age. But right now its an expensive boondoggle.

Oooo magic!

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:Oooo magic!

[Mr. Slippery]

Not to say these guys are or aren't legit, but that's a pretty standard investment disclaimer. An annual report for even the bluest of blue chip companies will warn you how it contains "forward-looking statements" and how the sky might fall and result in a loss for stockholders.

Re:Oooo magic!

[Crowley]

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)

Having RTFA, they actually claim no by-products - by which they mean no smoke. If (and this is a *big* if) the hydrocarbon was burning with 100% efficiency - no soot being produced - then surely the chemical reaction is maximising the amount of CO2 that the engine will then pump out; simple high-school chemistry says that there are byproducts of the combustion, they are just invisible to the human eye. The byproduct is also quite honestly the one that we don't want. Ecologically, from a global warming POV, having diesel *not* emit useless soot is absolutely catastrophic, as the carbon has to go somewhere. It's either soot, or carbon dioxide.

I still call bull on the claims, though...

Re:snake oil, more like

[Kamokazi]

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.

Energy Input?

[IAAE]

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.

Fire the reporter

[LSD-OBS]

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" :)

If they could do this, they would just do it.

[stankulp]

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.

Re:awesome

[Otter]

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?

TFA Looks Sketchy

[Dire Bonobo]

Rivera claims that products made from Vetroleum burn at near 100 percent efficiency, leaving behind neither heat nor pollution as proof of the chemical reactions taking place.

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.

A bad idea even if true

[Bob Uhl]

This may or may not be a scam (my bet's on the former). But even if by some chance it is true, it's still a horrible idea. Think about it: it's taking agricultural waste and burning it up in car engines. It's one thing to burn petroleum--it's a nasty poisonous substance with few uses other than fuel, plastics and medicines.

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.

Re:Problem with bio-fuel

[Hatta]

A diesel engine can run on just about anything, so what's the problem?

Re:snake oil, more like

[pla]

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.

Re:awesome

[Captain Hook]

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.

Re:awesome

[SomeJoel]

Well, a lot of people here aren't familiar with the term "bathtub".

Re:snake oil, more like

[avandesande]

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.