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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's what plastic is made of!
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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.
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.
Nope - IR is a photon (i.e. an energy packet). This energy matches the vibrational energy levels of a molecule, so when it's absorbed it results in the same motions that we call heat. Heat can bleed in all directions, while light can only go in straight lines. Next time you're at a campfire/bonfire, hold up a hand and put your face in the shadow - you'll notice that you feel a small amount of heat on your face, but that overall it's much colder-feeling since you're not absorbing those IR photons.
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
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.
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Maybe partly because around here we have fairly cheap electricity (which I expect pyrolysis uses a lot of), generated by nuclear plants (which enables them to evade the "well you're just generating carbon at the coal plant instead of in the cars that burn your fuel to replace gasoline).
According to TFA and Wikipedia, there could be about 1/2 billion barrels there.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Problem is that although the "Great Garbage Patch" does indeed contain quite a lot of refuse, it's spread over an enormous area (ie. 2x the size of the continental US). It's unlikely that collecting any meaningful quantity of garbage would be economical -- in fact, it would likely be quite expensive.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
No, they aren't the secret behind the oil, they're the secret that could put moms out of business because the oil lasts a really long time and no one would have to buy her oil again.
Twice the size of Texas, not twice the size of the continental US.
Regardless, I think you're probably right - it would likely still be exceptionally expensive.
Probably not a bad way to generate some supplemental funding for a clean-up, though.
Well, for starters, if one direction is energetically favorable, then the opposite is not.
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.
I'm working in the plastic recycling industry.
You are correct for the fact that many plastics can be recycled. Almost all plastics can be recycled. But they have to be pure, and that's where the problem is.
Many packing films are multi-layer products: one layer for strength, one on top for gloss, another on the bottom to make it sealable, one more as moisture/oxygen/smell barrier, etc. This kind of plastic product is very hard to recycle, and often only to very low-end products. Fuel recovery is not that bad an idea.
Another issue is that it is often not known what plastic a product is made of. That becomes even more an issue when it is all mixed, such as post-consumer waste like we are now dumping in landfills or burning in incinerators. Those plastics need sorting (difficult if you have no way to tell what it is), washing, etc. A lot of work, very expensive to do, and as sorting is never 100% you will again end up with relative low end applications for the recycled plastic.
A lot of the plastics collected in USA and Europe is shipped to China for recycling, especially the post consumer waste. These fractions often have a negative price at the source: Chinese users pay a little bit for the material, but less than transport cost let alone collection cost. Sorting cost is high, recovery rates low. Pyrolysis may well be a cheaper and even environmentally favourable solution for these mixed plastics compared to shipping them to China or India for recovery.
Any higher-value stream will not go for pyrolysis. Higher value as in post-industrial wastes (they are generally clean and pure), or sorted fractions from domestic (think PET bottles (soda, water), HDPE bottles (soap, milk), PE film (wrapping film, shrink film, carrybags) or agricultural film). Those fractions are now being traded and recycled on a commercial basis.
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.
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.
You've failed basic research.
Wood gas generators, called Gasogene or GazogÃne, were used to power motor vehicles in Europe during World War II fuel shortages. These are just gasification devices which can use pretty much any organic fuel. Gasification is a common process technique for power plants around the world.
the Fischerâ"Tropsch process was invented in WWII by chemists in fossil-fuel poor Germany, and can convert the synthesis gas from gasification devices into low-sulphur diesel fuel. Companies in the United States, South Africa, Malaysia, Germany and Finland all either have functioning process plants or companies planning on creating process plants.
It hasn't been suppressed or killed, it's in use today. Don't mistake "Gas and oil prices are too low to justify investing in this stuff" for "we don't want this technology to exist".
It's been a long time.
The way industry works is this: After a process is deemed to have potential, first you spend a small amount (5 million dollars is a drop in the bucket in the cashflow of a real company or process plant) on a proof-of-concept plant called a 'pilot plant'. If the pilot plant shows the process is both viable and economical, then you can convince investors to put a few hundred million dollars into a full-scale process plant.
This seems to be a new technology, it makes sense that it'd be a pilot plant right now.
It's been a long time.
Much of the plastic is decomposing. Any net will ONLY catch large pieces while ignoring the bulk of it. Worse, it will destroy a lot of life. A decent skimmer boat would instead allow, in fact encourage, biologicals (seen as contaminate to the process) to get out of the way.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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