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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."
And in other news, a new law was finally passed making it legal to beat fraudsters to death with copies of their SEC filings.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
right sure you do
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.
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."
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.
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.
committerbase Wand
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.
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.
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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
$10 + $400 in government subsidies
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Yeah. They got a quasi-race war in the press, to distract the base from stuff like this:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005704
and this:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/15/bagram/index.html
Hey! Stay classy America! Your Edward R. Murrow is a comedian for chris'sake!
http://crooksandliars.com/dday/colbert-goes-there-only-media-figure-america
Meanwhile - back in the states:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8133
http://www.examiner.com/x-10317-San-Diego-County-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2009m9d11-San-Diego-Sheriff-deployed-military-crowd-control-device-at-Congressional-town-halls
Gosh. Glenn Beck didn't FREAK OUT about that, did he?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.)
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!
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?
Yo dawg I heard you like oil so we took oil from your plastic while you're making plastic from your oil.
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,
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.