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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."
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 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
...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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
There is a lot of DC that I've never seen, but I was wondering where they found those vacant lots with trees where they were able to set up a couple tractor trailer loads of tanks and catwalks. I'll check the yellow pages for propane/LNG wholesalers....
I'm sure it must get a mention in the latest Dan Brown book as some kind of conspiracy involving the Freemasons trying to undermine the Oil Cartels.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
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.