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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?
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.
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.
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.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
So that's how they snuck in that patent on fire.
Table-ized A.I.
...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.
That's what plastic is made of!
The summary left unsaid that it is the removed hydrocarbons that are retained, and the rest discarded.
Then the retained hydrocarbons (82% of the input) is reduced to an "oil product". Tfa linked to rather thin page which explained vary little.
Further digging at environ.com yielded this:
The reactor, a vital component of the unit, utilizes a heating system that converts plastic into oil through low temperature thermal cracking in a vacuum. Using this innovative approach, the Envion Oil Generatorâ produces oil and power safely, efficiently, and economically through an environmentally sensitive process that produces a net gain in energy recaptured.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yes, nothing new can ever be (or have the potential for becoming) cost effective, because if it was, it would already be done by everyone, everywhere, already. Everything that can be done, is already being done. Semptember 16, 2009, is the official end date of human progress.
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
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.
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
what ever happened with that technology?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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!
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
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.
Well, for starters, if one direction is energetically favorable, then the opposite is not.
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...
TFA quotes up top 82% recovery, the envion.com website indicates an average of 60% conversion. 1400 lbs out of 2000 lbs that would be 70% conversion.
And the amount of energy needed for cracking is not much.
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
you mean our plastic recycling bins?
Think of landfills as caches for the future.
The size of landfills are starting to attract attention of the metals recycling industry. There are concerns about reopening these landfills due to poor record keeping in the past; not knowing exactly what is down there.
But the plastic glass and metal will still be there when the econemic conditions are right for mining these places.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
On the envion.com web site, PVC is mentioned as one of the major components of their feed stock. This indeed surprised me, you are right, the chlorine is an issue. If burned it may produce dioxins (very very poisonous stuff), or hydrochloric acid that wreaks havoc on any metal parts it comes in contact with, such as the internals of your engine.
Either they have a way to remove the chlorine later, or they take care of it in another way - this is not mentioned on the web site. At least I couldn't find it. If there is really chlorine in the product then I'd not want to use it at all. And I also doubt it could pass any environmental standards when used in engines due to the dioxin problem.
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..
The chlorine will not be "liberated" to Cl2 as it is not chemically stable in this case. As soon as there would be a Cl2 molecule in the mix, and it finds a hydrocarbon with a double bond, it will react with this hydrocarbon. And double bonds there will be plenty of considering it is a cracking process. So no chance to get Cl2 gas out of it without taking special measures beyond just thermal cracking of the plastic.
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.
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...
The law of conservation of energy only applies to a closed system. This isn't a closed system.
The plastic feedstock contains vast amounts of energy, where the point of the process is to change it from a solid to a liquid that can be used in vehicles. Since we've established that the feedstock contains a vast amount of energy, it's only reasonable that some of that energy can be burned to power the process of converting from a solid to a liquid.
It's been a long time.
By your logic, oil refineries also operate on pixie dust.
Luckily, DOW has a full team of imagineers on staff, or this whole oil based economy wouldn't exist.
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.
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
Hey, get an extinguisher, your patent is on fire!
Free Martian Whores!