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Transforming Waste Plastic Into $10/Barrel Fuel
Mike writes "Today Washington DC-based company Envion opened a $5 million dollar facility that they claim will be able to efficiently transform plastic waste into a source of oil-like fuel. The technology uses infra-red energy to remove hydrocarbons from plastic without the use of a catalyst, transforming 82% of the original plastic material into fuel. According to Envion, the resulting fuel can then be blended with other components, providing a source for gasoline or diesel at as low as $10 per barrel."
That just doesn't seem like it will build much of a "facility"
I've been thinking of something like this factory, on a boat equipped with fishing nets processing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Wonder how much oil is in there?
That's what plastic is made of!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Well, if that oil is to be used to heat houses, why not use a district heating system attached directly to the Capitol Building? Then you'd get hot air for free!
Be relentless!
This isn't exactly something new, pyrolysis is a perfectly viable way of generating fuel. If you heat plastic enough - it decomposes into base hydrocarbons.
Would that be a vaguely technically sounding way of saying "heat"?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The price of fuel may plummet but the price of philly cheese steak toppings goes through the roof.
We will be mining the great pacific garbage patch to get fuel for our SUVs.
...and then run the hot liquid through your radiators.
And in other news, a new law was finally passed making it legal to beat fraudsters to death with copies of their SEC filings.
RTFA: This company has already built a facility, and has already landed a contract for the fuel. They are using a well known technology, just with a slightly different take (IR instead of chemical catalysts). This doesn't exactly look like vaporware to me.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but the name of the company scares me for some reason.
Table-ized A.I.
... But it's still a lot better than burning diesel to bring crude oil from the Persian Gulf.
The only downside is that instead of having bits of plastic in landfills and the Pacific gyre, we're chucking the carbon stored within into the atmosphere. It'll be marginally useful as a transition/legacy fuel technology or a means of expanding the strategic reserves, but alternatives that absorb atmospheric CO2, nuclear, or renewable energy are still superior.
No mention of byproducts, but what self-respecting corporation admits faults in their operation?
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
As much as I hate fraudsters and vaporware, they actually opened the facility (RTFA required)... time will tell if it's working, but it's not vapor or pie-in-the-sky... it's here.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
And the other $100k built the non-impressive looking "facility."
You don't get major politicos (he preceded Cheney as the Secretary of Defense and is a former National Security Advisor) like Carlucci as your "chairman emeritus" without throwing them a serious bone. I guess they've got designs on some government boondoggle or they would have used that money on Aeron chairs.
If turning waste plastic into fuel was cost effective, they'd be doing it already.
This is an offshoot of the garbage-to-energy plants that have been built in the 70's and 80's. The problem with incineration was that mercury, dioxin, etc., came out. They have been able to reduce this substantially over the years but there are still concerns. The big challenge with plastic-to-fuel plants may well be the same: what comes out when you burn the fuel?
Bruce Perens.
...the key part of TFA for me was:
We'll find out soon whether Envion's process works as well as the company claims --- the $5 million inaugural plastic-to-fuel plant opened today in Washington, DC, and an undisclosed company has already agreed to buy Envion's product to blend into vehicle fuel.
So yes, we'll find out soon, I guess.
Envion or Enron?
I also wonder what their scientist to lobbyist ratio is.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Just another way to convert food into fuel... Now they are going to convert all my twinkies into diesel.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
What you don't see is the truckloads of snakes that are being brought in through the back door. That's where the oil is likely going to come from.
Call me a skeptic, but when someone starts talking about $10/barrel oil made from trash, well let's just say we have a saying here in Missouri: "Show me".
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
Yeah, SUUUURRREE, Anyone want to write another check to T. Boone Picken?
Sorry I am a dying breed whom call themselves "skeptics", I never take much at face value.
And in other news, a new law was finally passed making it legal to beat fraudsters to death with copies of their SEC filings.
RTFA:
This company has already built a facility, and has already landed a contract for the fuel. They are using a well known technology, just with a slightly different take (IR instead of chemical catalysts).
This doesn't exactly look like vaporware to me.
So the hydrocarbons come off as a liquid?
*rimshot*
Thanks all, I'll be here all week! Remember to tip your waitress!
The ability to convert ethylene to polyethylene, and back to ethylene again has been around for a long time. Likewise, you can pyrolyze a bunch of different plastics, then use the Fischer-Tropsh process to make diesel and gasoline. The problem is how you deal with everything ELSE that's NOT hydrogen or carbon, (like chlorine from polyvinyl chloride) and keep it from forming REALLY toxic stuff (like dioxins). One of the key elements to almost all recycling is separation of the incoming materials and appropriate treatment for each category. But if it works, good luck to them!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
And in yet more news smug ignorant Slashdotters a little too eager to show off their self proclaimed intellectual superiority end up look like basement dwelling comic book guys when it comes commenting on anything outside of the world of computers.
More at 11.
Alright, I've left the wife's tupperware in the microwave for 12 hours now, and nothing is happening. What gives? RTFA AGAIN!! Oh, wait - IR, not microwave. Hmmmm. It's gonna take a long time with this little 'mote control thing, isn't it? I need a bigger 'mote....
Google "remote control infrared" - no, nothing there, how about "Huge remote control inrared" - hmmmm, one more time: "FUCKING HUGE REMOTE CONTROL INRARED"
Ahhh, screw it
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
At this time, America buys overpriced products from overseas, watches them break in no time, then in a fit of environmentalism, we recycle it. Where does it go? Back to china for cheap cheap input back into vastly overpriced products.
Now, we are talking about converting this plastic to cheap fuel. Sounds like a winner to me. My only question is, there tend to be contaminants in many of these products (lead, mercury, etc). Will this drop it, or will these make it back into the fuel. If so, then not a great thing. OTH, if not, sounds like a wonder way to get cheap energy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the fuel costs $10/barrel to make, we can probably expect the price we pay for it to be about...$7.50/gallon?
(Up here in Canada, at least, the price of gas goes up whenever the price of oil goes down.)
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Like they will really sell below the world price per barrel. Their investors will really love that. Not.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
www.changingworldtech.com
We all got real excited. The process works. The plant is marginally economic.
I, for one, am not holding my breath while they try to commericalize this new process. Been there, done that.
what ever happened with that technology?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
AC Clarke was quoted as saying that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.
Surely this magic non-polluting gasoline from plastic would trump even the magic non-polluting electricity that will power all of the magic non-polluting electric cars!
In related news, they've solved the dilemma of getting rid of toxic waste.
Three Squirrels
It's not exactly 10$ a barrel.
The plastic was made for a purpose and sold accordingly. The fact that it is now worthless junk is just because it has no additional purpose. That 10$ a barrel will go up when you are buying people's plastic!
$10 + $400 in government subsidies
That 10$ a barrel will go up when the oil companies buy up all the technology to bump up the prices and protect their profits!
Fixed that for you.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
In other news, most likely pushed by Big Oil activists, a new law was passed that bans the recycling and reuse of any plastic product.
Pyrolysis isn't anything new. In fact it's been known for quite some time. Whenever you heat something rich in hydrocarbons in the absence of oxygen, you release those hydrocarbons. It's the same process that turns coal into coke and tar.
Back to my original point, keep this quiet or the Democrats will find a way to tax it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The sludge would still be mostly hydrocarbons, just heavier stuff. It might be useful for putting into road paving asphalt.
I'd be curious to know the price of plastic purchased from recycling facilities, you know, those that collect the plastic that we put in our recycling bins,
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/09/16/1440244
Just when we were getting used to the paradigm of "Earth plus Plastic," someone wants to go use up the plastic!
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Call me a skeptic, but when someone starts talking about $10/barrel oil made from trash, well let's just say we have a saying here in Missouri: "Show me".
The plastic was made by joining petroleum molecules together. What makes you think that pulling them back apart would be very costly?
We already pay out the ass when OIL is $10 a barrel. The cost of the source seems to have little to do with the cost of the end product anymore.
is that also the saying you guys use when some bud says he has nekkid pictures of your mom? :P
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Instead of spending money and time in research for that kind of technology, souldn't we try to switch to a "geen" energy?
It's "OIL OIL OIL at any cost, and f**k the environement".
But i may be an ecolo-hippie... (I hope not)
We don't need more carbon in the atmosphere. The oil is worth more as material: plastic / carbon fibre / nanotubes / etc.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well, for starters, if one direction is energetically favorable, then the opposite is not.
TDP or Thermal De-Polymerization can in fact be fed plastics, turkey offal, etc. and separate it into components like carbon, oil, etc.
I want to see this go large scale. $10 a barrel oil would mean gasoline prices around $0.50
So instead of reusing the plastic, they are burning it off to make oil.... i really don't see how that is good, i'd rather see them separate that plastic to reuse it instead of separating the plastic to burn it off to make oil...
Duh. Where does the oil in plastic come from? It comes from... OIL! The only reason this is doable is because people throw away plastic and give it away for free. Once it's a valuable recyclable commodity the price will rise (like scrap metal).
This business model functions off the premise there will never be any competition. Bad idea.
Just curious, what is the lethal dosage for dioxin? (During the Viktor Yushchenko case, one press report (was it AP?) said that the lethal dosage is not known since no one has actually died from it.)
you mean our plastic recycling bins?
That comes out to around $4.00 per barrel at a max output of 50,000 barrels annually. It sounds like there is other processing needed ('blended with other components') after the fact.
Ultimately, if net profit is $10 per barrel, we are talking a max of $500,000 in a year. Let's say they can pull a profit of $30 per barrel... the facility can pay for itself in 3.3 years, but we almost certainly are not discussing selling at $10 per barrel. The bottom line is, at best, a handful of investors will make a profit after several years. And that's only if their product is competitive and their numbers accurate.
Crude still rules. And folks who consider this progress are missing the fact that waste plastic is simply another finite resource, and one that is much more finite than oil. OTOH a handful of people might see a ROI.
It seems to me that this is not a step forward. Cheaper fossil based fuels are only going to discourage development of alternatives whilst pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. By all means reduce the amount of plastics that we throw away or recycle them into something useful. Even the practice of putting them back in the ground as landfill must be better. Turning them into something else to burn seems like a bad idea.
Why go through all the effort to turn plastic (and other waste) into a fuel, when you can just dump it all in a big waste incinerator and burn it? The heat can be used to produce electricity, which is equally useful.
Quickly lets find out what plastics are made of and make sure we have an ample supply of that stuff! Invade countries if we have to, but we will ensure our fuel independence!
How do you know which direction is energetically favorable? Maybe it is easier to break them down than build them up. Plastics don;t get made for free you know.
Also, they could well be two more or less equal energy states separated by a high energy barrier. It would then be just as easy to build it as to break it apart.
For most plastics, the making is energetically favourable. That's a fact. You often will have to heat up the monomer mix, and usually add a catalyst to help the reaction, but the reaction itself should be producing energy, not consuming it.
Cracking the plastics back to oil-type chunks does need a bit of energy to be added.
And finally to put things into perspective (as you obviously know nothing about the chemistry of plastics), the amounts of energy involved in these reactions are nothing compared to the energy released when burning the oil/plastics. Plastic itself is a fantastic fuel, it's just impractical to use as is in internal combustion engines.
Your contradicting yourself, if it is energetically favorable then no catalyst should be necessary because a catalyst is used to circumvent a difficult step in the making process which would normally not accure. While this company claims they have found a way to use IR to deteriorate plastic back to oil-like products without a catalyst. And this is seen (more or less) over long periodes of time in nature itself for some plastics. So it's not completely nonsens.
I am ecologically minded and whatnot, but i have never cared much about people complaining about landfills and trash.
i really think that one day people will simply mine those landfills for methane, metals, plastics, organics, and electronics(which can be rendered into several useful elements).
i can see that this could be done in a technological way with robots, heavy machinery. but i also think it can be done post-apocalyptic ally with mass numbers of workers :)
How long before they make it small enough to be attached to my car?
And you obviously don't know what a catalyst is doing really.
A catalyst will never, ever make a reaction go the other way than it would naturally do. What a catalyst is doing, is lowering the energy barrier for a reaction to take place, increasing the speed of a reaction. In some cases without a catalyst the energy barrier is so high that a reaction would be so slow that it basically does not occur.
You can however change the favourable end products by increasing the temperature - in the extreme, when temperature is high enough, all atoms will break bonds with each other and go free. This is what is done in oil cracking: heat it up, so smaller molecules are more favourable than larger molecules in terms of energy and entropy.
Another way to crack molecules is to use radiation like IR. IR with the correct wavelength will energise and resonate the bonds of molecules to the point of breaking, thereby cracking the molecules. Again a catalyst can help in this process, lowering the energy required to get enough resonance to break a bond. As the reaction takes place inside the molecule there may be not much a catalyst can do in this case, or the reaction is fast enough by itself that adding a catalyst is not helping enough to justify the cost.
The energy barrier to re-make the bond is at low temperatures so high that it can not be formed anymore. That is why ethylene gas is stable, and will not spontaneously polymerise to polyethylene. This in contrast to e.g. styrene or terephtalates which do tend to polymerise over time when stored at room temperature.
Yo dawg I heard you like oil so we took oil from your plastic while you're making plastic from your oil.
Ah, the sweet smell of capitalism working as it ought.
(BTW, I work in the oil industry, and I have no doubt what so ever about their standards of behaviour.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I been dreaming of this for a couple years now, glad to see that it can be done, I do wonder if the plastic could be broken down with some kinda distillation process.
Physics-fail.
No such thing as infra-red energy. there's infra-red light (photons, waves, whatever), but not energy.
>>A single Envion unit is capable of processing up to 10,000 tons of plastic waste annually, producing three to five barrels of refined >>petroleum product per ton of plastic waste.
according to http://www.substech.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=plastics_recycling
the US makes/has about 15 million tons of plastic waste per year
according to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption
the US uses 20,680,000 bbl/day of oil
This works out to needing 1500 Envion units to transform that waste into approx. 60million barrels of oil or enough to run the US for 3 days. Per Year.
The Washington,DC plant from what I could find cost $5 million and 1500 of these would run about 7.5 billion to build.
This is also what it would cost for about 100 million barrels of oil at $77 per barrel so assuming all you get is alittle cheep oil it should recover the cost of construction in 2 years. Plus the amount of oil produced isn't substantial enough to drop the price of oil by much (if any), so you'll keep selling the new recycled oil for the regular price,
surely those 10$ quotes dont take into account the original cost of drilling for the oil, producing the plastic, or transporting all of each all over the world; or the time wasted while the plastic product was siting on a shelf, in a truck, or in a landfill.
i'm opting not to include the cost of cleaning up after each one of those steps.
DON'T CAPITALIZE! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!
blatant self promotion: see my other posts on capitalism... ; )
DON'T CAPITALIZE! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!
I suspect volume is exactly the problem. Although there is lots of plastic trash out there, I have a hard time believing we produce anywhere *near* enough plastic waste per day to supply enough fuel to even make a detectable impact on fuel prices. Granted, I might be wrong - I'm no expert. To try to get my head around this problem, I googled info on how many barrels of oil the US consumes per day, and how many gallons of gas are produced per barrel. The answers I found were that the US consumes about 20.68 Million bbl/day, and each barrel produces about 19.5 gallons of gas. So, that means we consumes roughly 400M gallons of gas per day.
Lets say that to affect the price of gas, you have to increase the amount of gas available by one percent (I think I'm being generous there - I suspect you'd need to increase supply something on the order of 3-5 percent to move gas prices, but I'll use 1 percent as a very conservative example). That means you have to produce about 4M gallons of gas. 3 percent would be 12M, 5 percent would be 20M. *EVERY DAY*.
That sounds like a *lot* of plastic.
Still, this sounds like a great opportunity for someone to make a small fortune. Since they probably won't be producing in enough volume to actually cause prices to change, it means they might be able to produce fuel at 1/8 or 1/10 the cost of other sources, but sell it for full price. That's really all this is about.
The other problem with a scheme like this, if you try to scale it up, is that as you consume more 'waste' as input, that waste will get more expensive to acquire. That is, I'm sure it's easy/cheap to get a few tons of plastic waste per day. Now, try getting 1000 tons of plastic waste every day, or 100,000 tons.
Still, nice little business, I'm sure, if you can get into it.
Well you don't see the truckloads of snakes because they come by plane, complete with Samuel L. Jackson complaining about the "MotherF'n Snakes on this plane"
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
And in yet more news smug ignorant Slashdotters a little too eager to show off their self proclaimed intellectual superiority end up look like basement dwelling comic book guys when it comes commenting on anything outside of the world of computers.
More at 11.
Hey, I made a fortune selling comic books out of my basement.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
...a diminishing return on investment.
If the sludge is "mostly hydrocarbons" then your process for extracting hydrocarbons has a lot of room for improvement.
True only up to that point. In such an industrial chemical process (i.e. messing with nasty vats full of boiling organic chem / petrochem mixtures) you always reach some point where it makes no economic sense to putting more energy into the process and accept whatever yield you get, and then just deal with disposal of the remaining wastes.
Make plastic into other plastics (recycle!)
That sounds good, but isn't 100% efficient either. Many kinds of plastic have no recycling market because it's hard to reconstitute it into high-quality material. So what you often get is the recycling center wasting resources on sorting out certain plastic types then dumping them in a landfill.
Moreover, a lot of other plastics are only turned into low-grade products. Take plastic decking boards. How many gallons of oil are tied up into just one of those huge solid chunks of junk plastic? Will that in turn get recycled again? Doubtful, because they usually mix in non-plastic fibers to give it what little strength it has. All that petroleum will probably get pitched in a landfill after the single recycling pass.
As long as anybody in the world is burning oil as fuel, it makes just as much sense to get the oil from junk plastic as from direct crude oil. If you want to complain about using petroleum, you need to *first* get all fuel use eliminated, *then* you can worry about plastic recycling. You're putting the cart before the horse.
It's not capitalism if you can "buy up all the technology" (as opposed to the physical facilities) such that no one can compete with you without your permission.
More generally, capitalism is incompatible with widespread aggression of any sort. Patents and the like are merely one all-too-common variety.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Sure 83% is recycled into oil, but the remaining 17% is powdered monkey poo with only minor radiation and a smell like the New Orleans sewers after Mardi Gras and a nasty tendency to become airborne then permanently adhere only to human skin.
But at least we will have cheap gas.
Actually i never said the catalyst would change the direction of the reaction. I said the catalyst change the circumstances, In fewer words than you do.
55 gallons is the standard size for modern oil drums, but a "barrel" of oil is 42 gallons. (It's he average volume of repurposed wine and whiskey barrels they pumped oil into in 19th century Pennsylvania, and the need to maintain backward compatibility in the oil industry means we still use that instead of a sensible unit)
0 1 - just my two bits
And even if such low cost fuels replace the more expensive oil in use today, consumers will still see ever increasing prices at the pumps!
Why are we so desperate to squeeze oil out of every last resource available? We've spent our lives thus far digging up ancient carbon deposits just so we can release it all into the atmosphere. Now we're going to take all of our trash cluttering ground level and burn it as well. Even if you don't go as far as adopting electric cars powered by solar and wind farms, why isn't this money and effort being put into alcohol and biofuels? By nature the plants pull more carbon out of the air than is released by the fuel they produce. It's not a perfect solution, but at least we'd be going in the right direction.
Assuming that you mean "till operator at a petrol station" by "gas station attendant" ("gas" is an American word, and no-one does more than turn on the pump from the console and take the money, which is hardly "attendance"), no, you're wrong. That's the retail industry, approximately evenly split between the supermarkets and the downstream petrol sales companies. I work in the upstream oil industry, searching for new reserves to exploit and performing detailed appraisal on them at the rigsite. And if the Boss's oft-forked tongue speaks straight, I'm going to add another 30 to 40 degrees of longitude to my CV in the near future.
Oh great, another continental margin ticked off. I'll have to do a count up and see if I've worked half the world yet. May be getting close.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
about it. According to the envion site, we recycle only 4% of our plastic. That is it. And according to other sites, most of that is recycled in China. We even pay them to take it. Now, how useful would a process like Envion be? Well, it would allow us to recycle plastics LOCALLY. Right at the sites where garbage is taken. For example, Waste Management would likely be a prime buyer of these. They will change from PAYING somebody to take the plastics to somebody who turns it into cheap oil. According to the website, it can handle ALL PLASTICS. That makes sorting trivial and CHEAP.Since it just uses simple light to break it down, it means that it can use AE (namely wind and solar) as its energy input stream. And that oil is then able to be used as energy OR plastic feed. So, what is interesting about this? With cost this low, it will likely lead towards payment for plastic similar to what happens with aluminum and copper. It will not be as high, but it will be up there. Basically, THIS could get us to recycle a great deal more plastics than what we currently do. As it is, do you see metal cans on the roadside? RARELY. Why? Because it pays to recycle those. Ppl either save them, or they collect them and recycle them. Offices will likely collect these. And in the waste streams, it will be viable to have ppl sorting out metals, glass, plastics, and paper. I am not certain if glass and paper have have cheap recycling, but with so much of a waste stream being profitably recycled, it will make it possible.
Now, how is that different than the company that you represent? It really is not. You are BOTH using waste streams and creating oil. The big difference is that plastic is already here. It will remain here because there are really no alternatives. OTH, Doty absolutely depends on a waste stream from Coal/Natural Gas. Without pure CO2, then it is too high costs. In addition, doty ignores the high need for water (and purified at that). That will work great in eastern USA/EU, but here in the western USA as well as many parts of the world, that will be at high cost. My guess is that we will see Nukes being used to create that hydrogen, not wind. But the one thing that you seem to miss is that if you take electricity (loss over the power lines), Convert water to hydrogen (loss of efficiency), combine it with CO2, that is then burned in ICE. The overall efficiency of that is staggering. I am guessing that less than 20% (more likely 10%) of the originally generated energy actually arrives to the wheel (loss of energy over the powers + loss of conversion of h2o -> h2/O2 + loss of transportation of h2 + normal loss of oil based/ICE system). It does recycle once what is a waste stream, there by increasing the efficiency of system, as well as helps to reduce dependency on oil, BUT it is still inefficient.
In the end, I suspect that both Envion and Doty will have their place in society.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, truth hurts doesn't it? Althought the above was a little pushed we all know, including the one who modded troll, that Big Oil puts lots of money in lobbying. And this fucked up country lets it. Lobbying should be illegal, in Italy it's called "mafia"