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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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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