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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."
We will be mining the great pacific garbage patch to get fuel for our SUVs.
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 Japanese and Norwegians are already working on freeing up all that oil trapped in Minke whales in the ocean (purely for research purposes, of course). :P
> If turning waste plastic into fuel was cost effective, they'd be doing it already.
There's a first time for everything.
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
Hmm, hopefully the "undisclosed" company isn't Chevron or Mobile Oil.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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.
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.
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
I doubt that such a ship would be economical, BUT, a different approach would be to build small robotic solar powered skimmers (say 12'/4 meters or so). They could pick up the plastics (which is generally not that large) and then bring it back to a main ship. That main ship could then simply take from the skimmers and at least condense it down.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, there are many impurities in various plastics. PVC comes to mind. You really would rather not burn the chlorine (though it might be recycled for other items). There are others in there as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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!
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.
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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?
2000 pounds of plastic gives 126 to 210 gallons of gas... at 6.7lb/gal, that's maybe 1400 pounds.
Dare I ask how much energy is expended in this conversion?
Dare I ask how much energy is expended in this conversion?
It doesn't matter EmagGeek, because it gets all the energy it need by burning some of the output product for power generation. It outputs both oil and power.
Since all that plastic was going into the ground anyway, its a net gain, and the energy of conversion is not an issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Why not? These companies make money selling oil, not drilling it. If they can get more oil to sell from other sources, surely they will jump at the chance of doing so? Especially when there's a definite "green" angle to spin for the sake of PR...
What are you talking about? When oil was $10/bbl (latter 90s), gas was under a buck a gallon. I remember paying $1.20/gal when I was in HS (graduated 1987). Minimum wage when I was in HS was around $3/hr (2.5gal/hr). Minimum wage in the late 90s was maybe $6/hr (6gal/hr). Minimum wage now is $8.55/hr (WA), and gas is $3/gal (2.85gal/hr). Clearly, kids these days have it better than I did when I was a kid, but not so great as kids in the late 90s.
To look at it another way, gas was $1/gal when oil was $10/bbl. 15 minutes ago as I'm typing this, oil was 72.27/bbl. That's 7x more than the 90s price, yet gas is only 3x more expensive.
We're getting a bargain price but people are so energy greedy they don't even realize it. Whine whine, whine, but for what you get from fossil fuel, it's a deal at thrice the price. Seriously, go ahead and dig a 10x10x6 foot hole with a shovel, then watch it being done with an excavator -- you'll get an instant appreciation for the power of oil.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Assuming (and I realize that it is a grand assumption) that the chlorine is liberated as a part of the process: Isn't that chemical just another marketable byproduct?
Kid-proof tablet..
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"
Maybe all the buried oil and metals are landfills from previous civilizations...
Why?
You take one hydrocarbon that burns like the dickens and convert it into another hydrocarbon that burns like the dickens but happens to be liquid (and thus more convenient).
I don't really see any magic involved. You won't get all the energy back, for sure -- turning the oil into plastic and the plastic into fuel will result in far less net energy than just turning the oil into fuel products to begin with, but that's factored into the cost.
It's been a long time.
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.