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Continuous System For Converting Waste Plastics Into Crude Oil
rtoz writes: A MIT spinout company aims to end the landfilling of plastic with a cost-effective system that breaks down nonrecycled plastics into oil, while reusing some of the gas it produces to operate. To convert the plastics into oil, this new system first shreds them. The shreds are then entered into a reactor — which runs at about 400 degrees Celsius — where a catalyst helps degrade the plastics' long carbon chains. This produces a vapor that runs through a condenser, where it's made into oil. Much of the system's innovation is in its continuous operation (video). This company aims to produce more refined fuel that recyclers can immediately pump back into their recycling trucks, without the need for oil refineries. Currently, 2 trillion tons of plastic waste is sitting in U.S. landfills, so there is a huge demand for this technology.
If this technology is so good like they said, and many companies (or better: governments) adopt such ways of transforming plastic into fuel, we can organize all the World plastic waste in to TWO recycle ways: produce FUEL and recycle PLASTIC. We don't need to transform all the plastic waste into fuel. The industry still needs plastic in their products so with a better equilibrium we can reduce the petroleum extraction (a.k.a.: dependency), try to utilize all the annual plastic waste, and (better) we can contribute with the environment with less pollution, in the air and in the ground (I think).
Why even bother with the landfills? There are massive garbage patches floating around in the oceans, the vast majority of which are plastics. If you can get a big enough tanker and implement this system on it, you could probably cut the amount of fuel needed even further - the tanker goes into a garbage patch, melts all the plastic down, keeps the oil, and uses some of it to get back to land. It would probably be more effective than loading fleets of trucks.
I don't know how they define "cost effective", but since the plastic mostly came from oil in the first place, any energy expenditure to recover it is a net minus overall.
For an individual organization that can get a hold of a lot of landfill plastic cheap, this may be a win, but overall it is a fuel source with an energy return on investment (EROI) less than 1.
We're in trouble if we have to start resorting to this as an energy source. Deep trouble.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I'm all for eliminating waste, but if the net effect is that we're removing plastic from landfills and emitting it as CO2, that's not terribly different from digging up crude oil and emitting it as CO2.
Now, I'm sure there's some sort of multiplier here that makes it a bit better - perhaps the plastics are a cleaner source and less energy will be used to process it - but currently this carbon is sequestered in an inert if unattractive form whose dangers are mostly localized.
Pyrolysis of plastics is anything but environmentally friendly..
While this converts waste plastic to oil it does not however:
A.: complete this conversion at a less than or equal cost of energy generated by the oil. The shredder, crucible, and condenser arent powered by the mellow rock stylings of huey lewis and the news.
B.: Absolve us from researching alternatives to crude oil, a fossil fuel that is finite in supply and directly contributing to climate change.
Our lust for oil has become all but indistinguishable from a heroin addicts search for a fix.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Instead of setting up a complicated process to convert plastic to oil, just burn the stuff, and use the heat to generate electricity.
we burn plastic
She seems much more fluent / comfortable speaking english, and I just want to hear her talk more about long-chain hydrocarbons.
This puts all that carbon back into the air...
Rather than burying some of,what we take out.
-- mark
Or this work:
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10...
Green Aerospace Fuels from Non-Petroleum Sources (2011)
http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10...
"Aerospace Fuels from Non-Petroleum Sources" (2013)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This puts that carbon into the air, rather than burying part (at least) or what we take out.
Actually, according to the article (and the summary), it does complete the conversion of plastic to oil an energy cost less than the generated oil.
Running the plant only takes *part* of the generated oil. The rest of the generated/recovered fuel can be properly processed and shipped elsewhere to be sold.
From the article:
About 70 to 80 percent of the product comes out as oil. Roughly 10 to 20 percent becomes hydrocarbon gas that heats the system, while the remainder is char residue.
For every 10 units of plastic the system is fed, it generates 7-8 units of oil, 1-2 units of gas which powers the system, and 0-1 units of waste 'char residue'. So it produces quite a bit more fuel from the plastic than it consumes.
I didn't RTFA, but this is /. so that's a given. As I recall, plastic is the leftover waste from refining oil. That was one of the reasons it was so revolutionary to begin with. No one knew what to do with all of those tons of leftover sludge created by the refining process. If this process can convert plastic into some kind of useful fuel, I would think it would be more efficient to do so prior to creating the plastic to begin with.
It seems like one of the biggest issues with recycling plastics is all the different types, and each type having a different method to get back into a usable form. I see this as being really useful for breaking down big mixtures of plastic, where it would be too costly to sort them out. I wouldn't even use the oil for fuel, make more plastics! Really, plastics has me more wrried about oil consumption in th elong-run, than the fuel usage itself.
The statement that there is 2 trillion tons of plastic in land fills got me wondering how much oil actually goes into producing something. From what I can gather a barrel of oil weighs about 300 pounds so if there aren't any other external inputs into making plastics that would mean that about 13 trillion barrels of oil have been turned into plastic. This doesn't seem the least bit right given that under 2 trillion barrels of oil have been extracted and not all of that went into making plastic. So how much oil actually goes into making plastic and how much is other stuff is use?
This leads me to my next question which is how much of the weight of the plastic is turned into oil? If it is over 1/6 of it then we have the equivalent of more than all presently extracted oil in our land fills already.
Time to offend someone
"Currently, 2 trillion tons of plastic waste is sitting in U.S. landfills, so there is a huge NEED (not demand) for this technology." Just as petrol companies don't want us to switch to solar, landfill owners make money storing your trash. In the USA many towns have reduced property tax in exchange for having landfills.
Pyrolysis for "recycling" plastic waste into oil (or tire waste into oil) has been around since at least the 1990s. The main problems are 2: A) As Irate Engineer states, a polymer is an "added value" and deconstructing polymers back to oil always fails economically when actual recycling to like-polymers is available, and B) as Itzy says, the comparative value of returning it to fuel, vs. leaving it in an Municipal Solid Waste to energy facility and burning it, is small.
I read TFA and cannot figure out what differentiates this from the pyrolysis "waste investments" of the 1990s, none of which really sailed.
Gently reply
Perhaps, but can it be less green than dumping billions of tuns of plastic trash into landfills per year? To me it could be one piece of the puzzle towards solving our many energy, product & sustainability issues. Preventing billions of tones of trash that is currently going into our landfills, removing the need to extract millions of barrels of oil from the ground and possibly removing billions of tons that are currently in those landfills.
Nothing is free.
Well, someday at least.
I'll probably live to be 200, long enough to fart my way to oblivion, my methane emissions pushing the Earth to the tipping point and over the edge! Tough luck for the rest of you blokes!
let's start thinking of ways to reduce the amount of plastic we produce in the first place. I'm thinking mostly about all of the plastic packaging in our Big Box stores. we really do not need, have not needed in the past, to wrap a hammer in a plastic clam shell. It's not like it will go stale if we just hang it on a hook. If you must package non perishable items (to reduce shrink for instance) put it in a cardboard box. Using our finite petroleum resources to package non perishable items is crazy.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Why not just put the worlds plastic in a volcano. BAM just solved the worlds plastic problem.
We could pitch other stuff as-well in volcanoes like cars, electronics & other stuff I'm sure. I don't think anyone will complain about a polluted volcano.
I asked everyone in the office about this & they agree with me. I'm right.
I have seen this so many times before and what is always missing are the energy balance numbers. I haven't seen away to reform plastic or tires that doesn't consume as many calories as it produces in fuel.
And i goofed up my last entry. Anyhoo, Frank Pringle figured this out years ago, and the theories behind all this are even older.
http://www.rexresearch.com/pringle/pringle.htm
and put all that carbon into the air where it belongs!
Who comes up with this stuff?
It's actually fairly cheap to manufacture "plastics" that can be used as raw materials by 3D printers from compostable materials that can be used to grow food if need be.
We only use plastics that are oil-based because we have lots of cheap material and the sludge from the separator columns on the refineries needs to be used for something. We could easily replace those with vegetable based rotation crops that have oils - in fact major US research universities have the basic patents to do just that (e.g. University of Wisconsin (the other UW), WSU, etc).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Your math is off. If there is demand for 100 barrels of oil for use as fuel, we will pull 100 barrels out of the ground and burn it. If we substitute 10 barrels of oil from recycled plastics, then we only pull 90 barrels of oil out of the ground. In both cases, we still burn the same 100 barrels of oil. The plastic existed already -- the energy required to pull the oil out of the ground and process the constituents into the chemicals pre-cursors for the plastic had already been spent. There's only a small net increase in CO2 production due to losses from reprocessing the plastic (again), which may be offset by not producing CO2 when extracting the oil from the ground and transporting the crude which it replaced.
WTH? As if what we've done isn't enough we now are going to cut up plastic and throw that into the air as well. There are better solutions and they don't involve making things worse.
Your math is off. The cheaper oil is the more we rely on it as an energy source as opposed to less dirty alternatives.
A heat source is not the problem here since the stuff is a fuel in itself. I suspect the above poster just wanted to push a nuclear agenda by attaching it to something unrelated, but I could be wrong and they may just be so fixated on a topic that "when you've got a hammer everything is a nail" applies. Maybe we should let "mlts" let us know instead of both of us trying to explain what his mostly unrelated post was about? For all we know it could just be about being able to stay at sea for months at a time.
How do you know this? Do you have access to information that shows it is not like the sewerage treatment that releases far more methane than is requited to power the treatment or are you just making a wild guess based on gut feeling and ignorance?
A German company named Alphakat is developing a similat technology.
On their website they claim to have some pilot plants already in production:
http://www.alphakat.de/temp/company.php
C - the footgun of programming languages
Put this one with practical commercial fusion, economical solar energy, and flying cars. It wasn't that long ago Slashdot was all excited about "anything to oil"... went nowhere, of course.
oil is not getting cheaper, it's getting more expensive. The only reason the recycling of plastics and depolymerization of biomass is becoming "economical" is that the cost of crude pulled from the ground is exceeding the threshold for processing these other materials.
that never seems to quite come into production or actually get anywhere. I keep hoping, but .. sigh ...
I'll still keep recycling my plastic (and hope they aren't kidding me and just dumping it into the landfill anyway). Even if it ends up being "recycled" into park benches or whatever, it's better than nothing.
I didn't say oil is getting cheaper. I said it is cheaper, e.g., oil is cheaper with this technology than without it.