A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil (newatlas.com)

Big Hairy Ian shares this report from New Atlas: The U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gallons of raw sewage that Americans create every day... [T]he raw sewage is placed in a reactor that's basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit, which mimics the same geological process that turned prehistoric organic matter into crude oil by breaking it down into simple compounds, only...it takes minutes instead of epochs... The end product is very similar to fossil crude oil with a bit of oxygen and water mixed in and can be refined like crude oil using conventional fractionating plants.
After six years of development, they've licensed the process for a $6 million pilot plant that's expected to launch in 2018.

Comments

Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

The USA burned through 7000 million barrels of crude oil in 2015, so 32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error. Also, since the sewage comes out at many disparate locations across the country, building one of these plants at every sewer plant might not even be worth the hassle.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

But but but technology will solve all our problems! 3D printers! Elon Musk! Mars colonies!

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[guruevi]

It's almost half a percentage and it takes care of the sewage problem. It seems the process is simple enough that having one near a large city might be both useful and cheap, perhaps even farms could find it useful. Hopefully we can eventually get off crude for all our energy needs and all sorts of biodiesels might make up where oils are still necessary.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

The significance, surely, is in creating a crude oil type when the demand for oil has dropped so far that oil fields themselves begin to fall out of action.

This isn't useful yet, but it will be. Particularly if the other outputs are so clean that this becomes a way to destroy waste.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

This is preparation for when we run out of oil to drill for. It is well known that the oil companies are lying about their "proven reserves" because the end of oil means the end of their business. But, actual scientists know and have proven and demonstrated with actual data that the end of oil as we know it is less than 20 years away at current rates of consumption.

Shit, we're already having to resort to fracturing the Earth's crust to release the last little tiny remnants of shale oil that is still down there. And, wells are drying up all around the world at a record pace.

When you consider the shell games that the oil companies are playing to keep investors interested in their stock, you cannot listen to their claims of proved reserves. Listen to actual scientists who are working with actual data.

This may be one of the few sources of crude oil we have in the future.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

You're entirely missing the point. Sewage comes out of EVERY part of the country. Local micro-refinery stations (not entirely unlike local water treatment generally) could be turning that into a usable product with less effort than paying foreign despots to ship it to you from around the world, obviously.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost half a percentage and it takes care of the sewage problem

If it works then great, it's a way of turning waste into a useful substance, but the article doesn't mention the usual problems with waste sludge (the article talks about liquid waste but the video shows sludge): it's full of iron and other (often heavy) metals. Those aren't that easy to separate out or deal with, which is why doing anything with sludge besides landfilling it is illegal in many countries. I'm curious where that stuff ends up in this process, where I live the sludge gets incinerated and the ash exported to become someone else's problem, which is damn expensive, and I can't imagine you'd want it in your biocrude.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Cederic]

the end of oil as we know it is less than 20 years away

That was true when I was at school in 1980 and learned the word conservation.

Fucking bullshit back then too.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Dutch Gun]

You realize that *eventually* we'll probably need to synthesize various sorts of hydrocarbon-based fuels, right? Our natural supplies aren't going to replenish themselves or last forever, and there isn't a viable fuel replacement for some types of applications, like aviation or boating.

Besides which, we need to process our sewage anyhow. Why not turn it into something useful? Certainly worth a test plant to see how well it can work.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[HiThere]

Actually, I suspect that heavy metals would be easy to extract from "your biocrude". At least after it had been cracked into volatiles. This would mean that the residue would be rich in heavy metals, quite possibly rich enough to compete with ores. The problem with heavy metals in sludge is that the grade of the ore is too poor, but if you take, say, 75% of the non-heavy metals away you've improved the ore remarkably. (And even if the ore is still unprofitably poor, at least you've decreased the volume you need to deal with by a LOT.)

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you see that this process would be cheap?

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[HiThere]

You've left out the factor of cost. As the price increases, fields that were too poor to consider as sources become worth considering. If we were still paying the prices of 20 years ago, most modern fields wouldn't pay for themselves. We HAVE run out of oil recoverable at the prices of 20 years ago. And if the price keeps increasing without limit, we'll find that we have lots of other sources of oil. You can turn coal into oil with enough work.

What this process does is get rid of waste while simultaneously providing a small but continuous stream of oil at low cost. Perhaps it will work, but many things fail at the pilot plant stage. Still, if it's got that far I give it a better than 50% chance of panning out.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Gavagai80]

In 20 years, if not taxed, oil will probably be cheaper than it is today thanks it becoming much easier to access in the arctic.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShanghaiBill]

The USA burned through 7000 million barrels of crude oil in 2015, so 32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error.

If you need to walk a kilometer, each step is only 0.1% of that distance, so there is obviously no point in taking a step. Thus, walking a kilometer is impossible.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[sumdumass]

Have you ever heard of comtil? The largest source in most places is sewage treatment. But yes, there are problems with sewage treatment and it is often tackled already at a large expense.

I'm not sure the bio-crude would suffer any ill issues with those contaminates though. Part of the crude refining process already removes or separates contamination by default. It basically removes the portions it wants and then the sludge left over gets reduced to make asphalt tars as well as petroleum coke. There are already acceptable heavy metal allowances in the delayed coker process which I doubt the amount in sewage would impact considering the volume in question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Maxo-Texas]

It's going to be expensive to maintain that pressure and that temperature.

But what people miss is that the half a percentage point reduces demand for the most expensive oil.

Say Oil is produced at
$10 a barrel (19.5%)
$24 a barrel (10%)
$40 a barrel (40%)
$50 a barrel (30%)
$65 a barrel (0.5%)

The price for every barrel of oil will be $65 a barrel (out side of some hedging contracts).
So if you can reduce demand for oil by just half a percent, the price for every barrel of oil will drop to $50 a barrel.

Of course that sets off a all kinds of feedback loops (lower prices means less new wells means as old wells dry up the price goes back up again). But with increasing conservation, use of alternative fuels, and processes like this we could hold oil at $50 a barrel (adjusted for inflation) for the next decade.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[rickb928]

20 years ago (1996) crude oil prices were remarkably close ($27-$39/bbl)to what they are today ($46/bbl)

The 1980 and 2008 spikes mess with our perceptions. We are right around Embargo-era pricing (+/-$50/bbl.) from the 70s.

And global economic decline along with fracking has driven global oil prices off the 2008 highs, with no end in sight.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[FatdogHaiku]

But but but technology will solve all our problems! 3D printers! Elon Musk! Mars colonies!

No, butt butt butt technology...

Re: Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

False analogy. It is straightforward to scale one step into many, accomplishing the kilometer. Turning poop into oil is not a step that can be scaled, unless you have plans for producing a whole lot more poop.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

That's a really neat argument, Marco. I knew oil was inelastic - as I understand it, the current situation is due to a very small imbalance between supply and demand.

With that said, I think you're still wrong and here's why : the production cost of sewage->oil is probably really high. The reason I think that is that you need a lot of sewage for very little oil, so you need a big and expensive and complex plant. And there's no way to get good economies of scale if you can't really pump sewage very far (it's so low value even converted to oil that it isn't worth the energy expenditure of pipelining).

Also, while there might be a short term decline in prices, if the actual cost to produce oil is, say, $55 a barrel for most oil, then the long term market price has to at least pay the oil producers cost. They can borrow money in the short term but the books have to balance in the end. That's why the president of OPEC has projected that prices must rise, because apparently a trillion dollars needs to be spent by 2020 to keep up with consumption, and that money has to come from sales of the oil. The books must balance in the long run. Right now all the producers are minimizing costs, but eventually they'll start having equipment breakdowns and the fracked wells will dry up. Production falls, prices rise, and it has to balance.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

This is due to the fact that while modern fields need more stuff in order to produce, the cost of delivering that stuff has also declined. Better automation, better equipment, the fracking gear is produced on a larger scale, and so forth.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[BradMajors]

They never said they were trying to solve America's energy supply problems.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[haruchai]

You're wrong.
"the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil PER YEAR from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day"

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[eth1]

The USA burned through 7000 million barrels of crude oil in 2015, so 32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error. Also, since the sewage comes out at many disparate locations across the country, building one of these plants at every sewer plant might not even be worth the hassle.

I don't think this is particularly new. I read about something similar probably 10-15 years ago already.

Thing is, the same process should work on a lot more than just sewage. Certain types of trash, butcher scraps, yard trimmings, maybe even pureed plastics could probably all be used as raw material. Really depends on how much a plant has to be "tuned" for a certain feed stock.

It would be really cool if it could get to a point where the entire waste stream is ground up, the sewage is added to liquefy it so it can be pumped through the plant, and then whatever can be turned into oil is, and the rest (probably mostly metals to be recycled, and sand) can be filtered off.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Charcharodon]

That is the same argument people use to not pick up a penny. Until you do the math.

To stoop down and pick up a penny takes 1 sec. $.01 for 1 sec is equivalent to $36 per hour pay for 1 second.

I here the same argument for nickels ($180 per hour), dimes ($360 per hour), quarters ($900 per hour), dollar bills ($3,600 dollars per hour), 5 dollar bills ($18,000 per hour). People couldn't be bothered unless we were talking about $20 laying on the ground. ($72,000 per hour).

So let's see 32 million barrels of oil of sewage from 34 billion gallons of sewage. So typical smaller city for a year. (New York produces for perspective 474B gallons per year) 32 million times $44 dollar on the barrel. $1.34 BILLION dollars. (New York would net $18.6B per year vs their $78B budget. Doubt they would be interested.) Yeah I can't think of too many cities that would like those kinds of numbers added to their tax base, considering most cities OWN all the sewage by way of public utility and just already happen to be collecting it and oh yeah already fork out truck loads of money to get rid of it.

Not worth doing you say? Dumb idea you say?

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[plover]

You're entirely missing the point. Sewage comes out of EVERY part of the country. Local micro-refinery stations (not entirely unlike local water treatment generally) could be turning that into a usable product with less effort than paying foreign despots to ship it to you from around the world, obviously.

Unfortunately, today's crude oil refineries are physically big, ugly plants that produce nasty smelling (and toxic) pollution. Boiling liquefied crude is already bad enough; imagine boiling sewage (hint: amplify the smell of a feedlot and picture it traveling about 10 miles along the ground.) Fractionating towers for petroleum are tall, ugly beasts because they need to be; they have to be on a large area, with lots of storage tanks, and they need round the clock lighting and security. Nothing about them is appealing, nobody would let you build one in their back yard. There's a reason nobody's built a new oil refinery in the last 30 years.

I can imagine that an existing refinery could retrofitted to handle the material; but I can't imagine that they could build micro-refineries near cities.

Re: Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

Turning poop into oil is not a step that can be scaled, unless you have plans for producing a whole lot more poop.

We have poop. Lots of poop. I have no idea why you think poop is the limiting factor.

And we won't know if this process scales, or how well it scales, until build the first one.

But as simple as it sounds, it should scale pretty well. The limiting factor may be political, NIMBY, rather than engineering.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. This does not take care of the sewage problem. It doesn't use the actual wastewater; instead it uses the sludge which is output as a byproduct from a conventional wastewater treatment plant. So you still need to have an entire wastewater treatment plant like we have now, and this just handles the sludge the plant produces.

Right now sludge is dewatered and partially sterilized and then goes to (typically) one of two places: either it is sent to a landfill to be used as cover (it is not the trash, it is what they use to cover the trash; otherwise they use dirt), or it goes through additional sterilization and is used as fertilizer on farms or is sold as fertilizer at retail.

The new process would still need a wastewater treatment plant to produce the sludge (and, you know, to treat the wastewater), and it would still need a dewatering facility to partially dry out the sludge. The only thing that changes is that you process the sludge into fuel instead of fertilizer.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[vinlud]

But its relatively expensive to drill there still, more likely it'll be cheaper by then as solar gains more and more energy marketshare lessening the need of oil

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't pay me $100 to pick up 1 penny per second, for an hour non-stop. That labor isn't worth the $36 job. Dumbass!

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[HiThere]

Well, also fracking gets mainly gas, not oil. That doesn't need much (any?) cracking, refining, etc.

And the price at the pump isn't what it was in the 1960-80's. I don't know about most of the period as I only drove for a short time. It certainly isn't what it was in the early 1960's...$0.35/gallon at the pump. Of course, there's also been a lot of inflation, so if you factor that in the price rise hasn't been very much. (A gallon of gas used to cost the same amount as an Ace double novel, but what do you compare that to these days? An e-book download? A trade paperback?)

P.S.: I do not trust the government values reported for inflation. They are calculated in a way to make inflation look low. But I wasn't renting an apartment in the early 1960's so I can't really compare based on that.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Bender0x7D1]

Actually, it did happen.

We have had to move offshore, with its inherent risks, and switch to tar sands and oil shale, which are lower grade and harder to process. Plus, we have moved a lot of power generation from burning oil to natural gas that we are getting from fracking.

So, oil "as we knew it" ended. We have just found ways of compensating. However, we have always known about those sources and known that, at a certain price, they became viable. Now, we are already into those reserves and haven't found anything new for when those run out.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

I can't argue one way or another if inflation is being over or understated. Certainly, essential goods like medical care and education are incredibly more expensive than they used to be, and I don't think they are included in the CPI at all. Also, in some real estate markets, it's the same story.

What I can say is that if you use the UNDERstated numbers for $0.35 in 1963, that would be $2.76 today. Right now, it's $1.87 near me. So that would be $0.24 a gallon in 1963 dollars. You can't have it both ways. If you think the government is purposefully lowballing inflation (and they have an incentive to do so!), you have to admit that gas right now is very cheap.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[penguinoid]

It's not at all insignificant. The carbon needs to be removed from the sewage before it is released to the environment, and that isn't free no matter how it's done. Heat+Pressure isn't that complicated to do, especially if some of the heat can be generated from exothermic processes. However, I'm not sure it would actually compare too well with processes involving bacteria.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

Yer math on the currency part of your argument is off by a factor of two. Go get a watch that ticks so you get a good gut feel for how long a second is and figure if you can:

* Spot the currency
* Bend down
* Pick up currency
* Stand up
* Determine if currency is clean enough to put in pocket
* Place currency in pocket

all in one second... especially when you're distracted with _anything other than scanning the ground for currency_. I and the others in my cohort would be hard-pressed to do that in _two_ seconds. One is absolutely out of the question.

And -uh- I won't roll out of bed for $36/hr (let alone $18/hr!). Most USian programmers won't, unless they _love_ the project.

You're spot on about the civic benefit of petrochemical production from sewage, though.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[sydbarrett74]

If they can find a way to supply the energy required for pressurisation and refinement by using wind and/or solar, then the process could act as a 'battery' of sorts to smooth out supply/demand imbalances in the grid.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[sydbarrett74]

either it is sent to a landfill to be used as cover

As less and less waste goes to landfill, there will be correspondingly less need for sources of 'cover'. This new process can provide an alternative use for all that sludge.

it goes through additional sterilization and is used as fertilizer on farms or is sold as fertilizer at retail.

Then in this sense the new process is neutral as regards the energy required to sterilise the sludge. If it's used as a fuel source, it doesn't need to be made sterile. Plus, many, many people have problems with the use of sewage sludge on their fruits and veggies. Besides the diseases, another problem is that sludge contains the byproducts of all the pharmaceuticals that get defecated or poured down the pipes. These drugs and their metabolites have unknown effects on the crops themselves. That problem goes away, as well.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[lgftsa]

Check TFA, the article switched units while distracting us with big numbers. In fact, they switched two sets of units just to *ahem* muddy the waters.

The 36 million *barrels* of oil *per year* is processed from a supply that creates 34 billion *gallons* *per day*.

365.25 days per year, 42 US gallons per barrel, mumble...mutter...kcalc

OK, you'll get 36Mbbl oil from 295Gbbl sewage, 0.00012 oil/sewage, or 8208 sewage/oil.

At US$45/bbl, you have to process 7660 gallons of sewage per dollar to break even.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[lgftsa]

...and of course I typo'ed the 30Mbbl as 36Mbbl.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[umafuckit]

To stoop down and pick up a penny takes 1 sec. $.01 for 1 sec is equivalent to $36 per hour pay for 1 second.

That's a totally bogus calculation. There only one penny, so it's irrelevant how many theoretical pennies you could pick up in a hour.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[drinkypoo]

I can imagine that an existing refinery could retrofitted to handle the material; but I can't imagine that they could build micro-refineries near cities.

You could and for multiple reasons, but the primary one is that sewage is a much more benign feedstock than is petroleum. Once you've segregated it into organics and non-organics by floculation and settling then everything in it came out of someone's ass. By definition, it's not as dangerous as petroleum.

However, you wouldn't and for multiple reasons, and the primary one is that it's stupid. This whole idea is stupid. There are much easier, cheaper, cleaner, and energy-positive ways to process sewage.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the stupidest argument i've ever read.
You can't extrapolate picking up a penny into a full living wage unless if you're diving in wishing fountains to steal pennys.
For an average person you'll find maybe 2 to say 5 or even 10 pennies a week.
so if you're working minimum wage for $10/hr you can work an extra hour for $10 or spend 40 hours trying to find that next penny. You are only factoring the value of picking up the penny, not the time to find the penny.

Regarding this conversion, however I do agree with you. 32 million barrels is a drop in teh bucket, but if the process is simple enough, the sewerage is an existing resource that is already centralized in each city so conversion at each sewerage plant is effective. If we tried to do this conversion at each toilet then we're back to the penny's argument

Read Nicolas Taleb.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Charcharodon]

If that is the case then the whole thing is mostly bullshit. (Literally.) That would be the entire output of the US per day, and as you stated before too much of a pain the ass to do on a local scale. The big cities that have the most crap flowing might be candidates, since they have the quantities and the concentration, but the rest not so much.

The only small scale stuff I've heard of that makes more sense are the dairy ranchers that use the manure pits to generate methane gas which is directly fed into small generators (around 1000 watts) to make use of the gas that comes from the bacteria digesting the manure.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Charcharodon]

You are reading too deep into it. If you pick up a penny you have a penny. If you never pick up a penny because it is not at least $1000 then you will have gained nothing.

If you convert sewage into energy you'll have a bit more energy than you did before. If you won't do it until it can fully power all our energy needs then you will have gained nothing.

In other words its worth doing if it is profitable, but only if it is worth more than the time and effort to do it.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[HiThere]

Well, I live in the same area I did when gas was $0.35/gallon, and now it's well over $3.00/gallon...though it does vary a lot. There was a period when it was around $5.00/gallon a few years ago, and it frequently varies by over $1.00/gallon within a year.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Reziac]

The real savings might be in no longer needing vast sewage treatment plants, which for metro areas, and areas with high ground water, can be a financial and ecological adventure. And instead of construction cost followed by your taxes or sewer fees going up to maintain it, it would be construction cost followed by income (probably enough to cover operating costs) as the product was sold at something close to crude prices. Even if the cost/income was a wash (and I didn't look for operational costs for the conversion plant), not having to dispose of the waste sludge is a bonus.

So even if it's a drop in the daily oil bucket, it might still be very much worth considering for new sewage treatment construction.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

Ok, but if you convert $3.00 a gallon back to what it was back then (what year was it?), I bet it'll turn out to be LESS than you were paying then. Again, that's using the CPI, which as you said, understates inflation. (the reason it understates inflation is college tuition and medical care are not even factored in to the CPI !)

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

I agree there. It's just not something to run around shouting Eureka! about. Discovering a workable form of fusion power, or battery costs + solar panels dropping to the point that they make sense for the baseload, that's a Eureka moment.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[RockDoctor]

You realize that *eventually* we'll probably need to synthesize various sorts of hydrocarbon-based fuels, right?

Fuels - maybe. But then again, industrial chemistry text books in the 1930s were berating people for being stupid enough to burn oil, instead of using it for something useful. As feedstock for the chemistry industry (most of the plastics you've ever used, including in your 3d-printer), for lubricating materials ... liquid hydrocarbons will continue to be used. Like it or lump it.

Besides which, we need to process our sewage anyhow. Why not turn it into something useful?

Well, people have been using it for fertilizer for ... well, millennia certainly. Probably since the establishment of the first permanent villages. So let's say, 10 thousand years. The 1-2% or so of that time which (some) people have been able to consider the problem "flushed away" is lost in the noise.

Whether converting it into liquid hydrocarbons is more energetically efficient than using it for making food ... short question, long (and locally variable) answer.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Reziac]

Yeah, every solution doesn't have to be the end-all and be-all. It's enough for a given solution to address its small part of the universe.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Verdatum]

While this makes some good points, fracturing isn't releasing the "last remnants" of oil left. Fracturing is allowing us to use a source of oil that is bigger than all the oil drilled so far in the US.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[Verdatum]

And it's a shame that the US hasn't built refineries lately, because modern refineries do not have this problem. Modern refineries hate to release much of anything, because it's nearly all got profit potential. Smelly things are smelly because they are volatile. Older refineries continue to operate merely because usually, the costs upgrading is too great to make it justifiable.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[HiThere]

You've only mentioned a couple of things wrong with the CPI. Which is why I tend to try to tie it to actual things I buy. The problem is that different parts go up (and down) by different amounts. This is a problem which the actual CPI has also, so a part of the inaccuracy is the difficulty (impossibility) in figuring the inflation in matching what every individual experiences. So there *is* no possible valid metric, only metrics that are valid for particular people. But an overriding problem is that it is periodically adjusted for political reasons to make those in office look good, and occasionally to make those not currently in office look bad. In this way it's like the money supply, or the employment numbers.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

We're getting off track here. Are you conceding you were talking out your ass on gasoline prices of the 1960s vs now or not? If CPI is understated - something I am also acknowledging - then gas is now cheaper than $0.35 per gallon is now.

As for college tuition and medical care - the tuition is now so expensive it can consume an adult's entire disposable income for 10+ years to pay off the debt. Medical care is at 17% of GDP - 17 cents of every dollar made by all of America just pays to provide services to try to make Americans live infinitesimally longer.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[strikethree]

The USA burned through 7000 million

I see this so often and yet it still annoys me: 7,000 million is NOT a proper number. WTF? Are you smoking dope or something? Try this: 7 billion.

Try it again, I will wait... 7 billion, not seven thousand million. You can say hundreds of millions, tens of millions, or just millions. You can not say thousands of millions; instead, you are supposed to say billions. There is a reason that comma is there.

I do not mean to pick on you since I see this everywhere... but you are the only one I can speak to.

Good luck with that numbers thing.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

It's a valid mathematical notation. You know and I know that 7000 * 1 million = 7 billion. The reason I did it was that it lets you directly compare 30 million to 7000 and see, even if you have below average math skills, that 7000 is much bigger than 30.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[HiThere]

No. See my other reply. I thought the post needed dividing into two threads.

But do note that most people aren't paying college tuition. Medical care is a very different consideration, however...but hard to figure. In the early 1960's I was a military dependent, so medical care was free. That got cut in a quite unfair way, however. It didn't affect me as by that time I was an adult, but people who had devoted their lives on the promise of a particular benefit (among others) found the "contract" renegotiated unilaterally after they had paid their commitment. Sort of like a more extreme form of the recent retroactive cancellation of signup bonuses. But this makes it difficult for me to compare current medical costs with historic values. (For that matter, if the product delivered were the same as was delivered in 1960, my wife would have died over a decade ago. [She needed heart surgery that would once have been too dangerous.]) So I have a hard time comparing medical bills. Of course, I'm also aware that there is a huge amount of money being extracted by the insurance companies, so calling that inflation is a bit weird...I feel more comfortable calling it corruption. There *is* a real increase in cost, but the product isn't the same. And theft isn't the same as inflation.

IOW, inflation can't be used to describe things that are necessary, and whose price is controlled by and effective monopoly. So I prefer to consider things like books and bread.

Now I haven't studied educational prices recently, but a cursory consideration calls me to believe that the prices are controlled by governmental policy. That's effectively monopoly control, so it can't really be said to reflect inflation. Governmental policy used to be to decrease the price of education, but over the last few decades it seems to have been to limit access and raise prices. The price of education seems to be independent of other commodities, so I really doubt that it represents inflation. Oligarchy control, yes, but that's a different consideration.

A better argument for your point would be housing costs, which have risen sharply since about 1985, at least in this area. That *has* risen enough to match the price of gasoline...but as other non-controlled prices haven't risen similarly, I don't think that even that is actually inflation...I suspect it of more reflecting tax policy.

Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[ShooterNeo]

Yeah, you don't have a clue what you're talking about. I hope I'm a little more mentally there when I hit your age.

Re: Neat that it's possible, but insignificant

[fintux]

You can't really scale a step into many, you'll just multiply it instead. Also, you can take just one first step when you're walking. Whether or not this can cover all of the oil production is irrelevant - this would just be a first step. Then you do something else for the remainder. Add to this improvements in renewable energy and excess energy production development - these are all important steps, even though it is very unlikely a single one of them will solve all of the issues related to fossil fuel.

Um, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you getting the energy to perform this process? Do we really want more oil, knowing what we do about global warming? This seems like a bad idea in practice because it has to draw energy from elsewhere and would probably slow the transition away from fossil fuels.

Re: Um, why?

[rupert.applin]

Firstly, it's probably carbon neutral, most sewerage comes from plant and animal waste, secondly the energy to do this may come from the refined product, thirdly it leaves oil in the ground

Re: Um, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's biogenic in origin so other than the energy input to create the 'oil' it is neutral. Wastewater treatment is very energy intensive so if we can turn it into energy for less energy than it takes to treat normally than this process can contribute to reducing global warming.

Re:Um, why?

[darthsilun]

Where are you getting the energy to perform this process?

It needs heat. Geothermal and solar come to mind.

Don't quit your day job.

Re:Um, why?

[HiThere]

Geothermal and solar are possibilities, but a better guess is that they get the heat by burning some of their output. Geothermal would be too expensive, and solar would require a stable source of sunlight. OK for a desert, but not for someplace that often cloudy. 300 C isn't intensely hot, but maintaining it can be a problem if you depend on sunlight, and the shit doesn't stop coming. (And though it does slow down at times, those aren't necessarily the times when the sun is out of the sky, or when it's really cloudy.) While I believe the problems with using solar for this could be overcome, I doubt that it would be cheap.

Re:Um, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oil as a source for liquid fuel satisfies unique niches not met by solar or even nuclear power.

Re:Um, why?

[haruchai]

"America is an unstoppable oil-dependency-breaking machine. Unfortunately, the machine runs on oil" - John Stewart, The Daily Show

Re:Um, why?

[Memnos]

According to the paper submitted to the DOE by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (not the article) about 3/4 of the energy required for heat is produced by burning gaseous byproducts of the Hydrothermal Liquefaction process and the rest is bought off the grid. The biofuel is not burned or otherwise processed onsite, but shipped/sold to a centralized upgrading/refining operation that processes it on a larger scale. Since it is only about 1/10000th of the volume of the incoming raw sewage before it's processed and dewatered, it's economical to truck it to a central refinery rather than doing any refinement at the site.

19 Million bbls per day now

[jlbprof]

The USA uses 19 million barrels a day. So we are getting less then 2 days of oil out of the sewage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:19 Million bbls per day now

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, but the sewage is gone... Isn't that a good thing? Besides we can also extract the water. Kill two birds with one turd.

Re:19 Million bbls per day now

[fahrbot-bot]

Yeah, but the sewage is gone... Isn't that a good thing? Besides we can also extract the water.

Well... not gone:

... produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gallons of raw sewage ...

30 million from 34 billion leaves a LOT of other stuff left over. Sure, some, maybe much, of that is water, but the rest? TFA doesn't say.

Article full of shit

[Tablizer]

...in a good way

Re:Article full of shit

[Anne Thwacks]

We need to prepare ourselves for "peak shit" ...

Oh, wait, so long as we have politicians, energy will be cheap.

Now we finally know how Trump will make America rich again!

Re:Article full of shit

[ghoul]

He said great not rich. We are already rich. But not great. Why? Too many of those people are also rich... So we need a Turmp in the White House. BTW the President has hardly any power to do anything on domestic policy if Congress does not agree. He does have a lot of power on foreign policy so when electing a President you are electing more for what America's relationship with the world will be rather than Washington's relationship with you. And on that front we are SOL.
We got Trump who wants to start trade wars with China and Hillary who wants to start real wars with Russia.

Re:Article full of shit

[Anne Thwacks]

I am certain Trump is not short of poop. The same applies to all politicians, everywhere.

BS

[Anonymous Coward]

30M barrels of crude from 68M barrels of sewage.. highly doubtful!! Cost per barrel for the crude, I'll bet it's nowhere near spot price. Rough guess 10x to 40x market cost.

Re:BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr... ok 680M barrels of poop. I sit corrected!

That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[bugnuts]

It sure sounds like it's not a cost effective way of making oil, but it might be very cost and space effective in sewage treatment.

It would be carbon neutral, very fast in comparison to traditional treatment, and sounds like there's no methane release (an issue in normal sewage treatment). If they can separate it on site, they can use the fuel generated to power the plant.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[grasshoppa]

Why is everyone saying this is carbon neutral? It doesn't sound to me like this is a part of any carbon cycle, nor is it sequestering carbon. It's, in fact, freeing carbon from the cycle by turning it in to oil then burning it, releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere.

This is as far from "carbon neutral" as you can get.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[angel'o'sphere]

Erm, which school did you attend to?
Perhaps you should try to sue them for your stupidity?

What would happen if you drop the sewage somewhere? Hm?

You have no idea?

Wow ...

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[lobiusmoop]

This begs the question of what the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) of the process is, that's what is most important I think.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[perpenso]

It doesn't sound to me like this is a part of any carbon cycle

Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human -> Fuel -> Atmosphere
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> Fuel -> Atmosphere

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[HiThere]

As they haven't yet built the pilot plant yet, I doubt they could give a decent answer to that. If you got one it would be from the marketing department.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Calydor]

But what if it's actually Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Fuel -> Atmosphere?

Why do humans have to be in the equation for it to be carbon neutral?

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans are an essential step in the creation of human sewage. :-)

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human ->GROUND
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> GROUND

See humans just existing are Carbon sinks.

As soon as you turn the waste into fuel, it balances the equation from being carbon NEGATIVE to POSSIBLY "Neutral"

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Zontar The Mindless]

Oil has additional uses, other than as a fuel.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as you turn the waste into fuel, it balances the equation from being carbon NEGATIVE to POSSIBLY "Neutral"

You failed to consider that the human waste would be displacing ancient sequestered crude oil.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human -> Fuel -> Atmosphere

Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> Fuel -> Atmosphere

This can be simplified by directly burning humans.

Re: That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a shit about carbon? Nobody.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[K. S. Kyosuke]

EROEI may not necessarily be the most meaningful measure here since the inputs may be quite different from the outputs. You could use, e.g., solar heat for this. Sunlight is cheap and heat can be stored reasonably easily.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's, in fact, freeing carbon from the cycle by turning it in to oil then burning it, releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere.

No, it's doing no such thing. All it does is that it inserts one more link into the chain. How could you ever put "freeing carbon from the cycle" and "releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere" into one sentence? Either you believe that the atmosphere is not a part of the cycle, or your thinking is incoherent, or both.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Waste management in feed lots, large cattle and pig farming operations is a big issue. So a lot of sewage is created without humans that this could help with.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[bugnuts]

Plants pull carbon from both the ground and the air. Rich topsoil is full of carbon by definition.

Thus Human->ground (assuming you mean whole, preserved corpses going into the ground) doesn't really mean much, and means even less when you consider that sequestering bodies in caskets isn't done in most places (preferring non-preserving, or burning), the meat that is buried is insignificant. Even with 55 million humans dying per year, consider that we kill over 50 billion chickens every year, 40 million cows, and 100 million pigs. All of those are also eating plants, so they're consuming carbon. If what you said about them being carbon sinks was correct, we wouldn't have the issues with atmospheric carbon that we do.

In other words, that is not the cycle.

Some of our waste is just thrown in the ground, but that is not a good way to treat it. In order to prevent water contamination and diseases, our waste is filtered, blended, treated with bacteria, methane reclaimed, dried, chopped up, treated to remove pathogens, and used as fertilizer or otherwise churned back into the soil. Basically, it's fed to plants, and it goes back to us one way or another, in an altered form. Some of it goes right back into the atmosphere.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't actually do sewage treatment. It processes the sludge which is created as a byproduct of a conventional treatment plant. So you still need the same old treatment plants we have now to treat the wastewater.

The New Atlas article and the summary are flat-out false when they say "raw sewage is placed in a reactor". The process doesn't use the raw sewage, it uses the sludge from the treatment plant. Clearly the New Atlas author didn't have a damn clue what they were writing about (and we take that for granted with the Slashdot editor). Fortunately the PNNL article they link to is a little better.

Re:That sounds like a lot of power to make oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Not carbon neutral because they're going to be using a ton of energy (electricity from the grid I assume) to pressurize and heat the sludge.

Bergius process?

[mbone]

Sounds a lot like the German Bergius process to convert coal to oil (which largely kept Nazi Germany running in World War II). That ran at ~500 C and ~50 MegaPascals; although it ran on coal, what it really did was hydrogenate carbon into oil. I suspect that they have just adopted this for use on carbon-rich garbage. I also suspect it will be tough to make a profit on it, at least at the present price of fuel oil and gasoline.

Re:Bergius process?

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew Hitler was to blame for this

Re:Bergius process?

[WindBourne]

should be reasonable if you have a nuke plant that can provide electricity and direct heat.

Re:Bergius process?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I also suspect it will be tough to make a profit on it, at least at the present price of fuel oil and gasoline.

Since treating and disposing of sewage is a very real need, this process wouldn't necessarily have to be profitable on its own to still be worthwhile.

Re:Bergius process?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also suspect it will be tough to make a profit on it, at least at the present price of fuel oil and gasoline.

Since treating and disposing of sewage is a very real need, this process wouldn't necessarily have to be profitable on its own to still be worthwhile.

Well it would be better than storing it in a landfill or using it directly as fertilizer (due to problems with heavy metals).

It might even be worth-wile to have a source of hydrocarbons when deposits of crude are exhausted.

Plastics could also be recycled into crude oil.

What is the most energy efficient process to create it without geological processes?

Missing From The Story: THE COST

[Crashmarik]

Really no damn mention of the cost ? That should be a giant red flag to anyone.

I agree

[rsilvergun]

shiat just got real.

Oil and internal combustion are not the problems

[perpenso]

Yeah cuz we really need more oil OK??

Oil and internal combustion engines are not the problems. The problem is a fuel that is made from sequestered carbon, carbon not part of the current atmosphere. If the fuel is made from carbon already in the atmosphere it does not necessarily contribute to climate change. Only introducing additional carbon contributes to climate change.

The preceding is more apparent when the carbon is coming out of the atmosphere directly, for example when bacteria/algae/etc create the fuel. Of course when the carbon is coming out of a "solid" there could very well be a problem, it was "sequestered" and not part of the atmosphere. However that is only looking at one "step". It seems there are two paths for that "solid". (1) Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human and (2) Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human. So perhaps there is no net carbon gain?

the editors

[sucko]

can turn raw sewage into slashdot stories, so big deal.

Smells like

[perpenso]

So biodiesel exhaust made from deep frier waste supposedly smells like french fries. The exhaust from the fuel from this process smells like? :-)

Yeah, the pressures and temperatures of this process are different and breaks things into simpler molecules so there is probably no "special odor".

30M barrels per year, 34B gallons per day...

[CrimsonAvenger]

Convert both to barrels per year, and we get ONE barrel of crude out of ~226000 barrels of sewage.

Hardly an efficient process. Not even sure it's more efficient than just filtering the sewer water for the waste oil that might have been dumped....

Re:30M barrels per year, 34B gallons per day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we in a risk of running out of sewage? If the heat needed for this process is also waste heat form a power plant or whatever, then who cares about efficiency.

Uh...math?

[Notabadguy]

This article says that 34 billion gallons of sewage a day ....

Can be turned into 30 million gallons per year.

I'm too lazy to math that out (and my fingers are greasy right now from this egg roll) but that's a few assfulls of shit (more than a few), and a logistical nightmare to turn the theoretical into actuals.

Ridiculously inefficient

[Teppy]

If the summary is correct, to make a single barrel of oil you must process 34B*365/30M=413,666 gallons of sewage? Hard to imagine this being remotely cost effective.

Re:Ridiculously inefficient

[penguinoid]

Yes, and from what I calculated the energy needed to heat the sewage would be approximately equal to the energy in the oil produced (~34 kJ to produce ~46 kJ), although I imagine that a good portion of that would come from exothermic reactions from the ~40% carbon that doesn't end up as oil.

The more important thing though, is that what's being processed is not sewage as many people got the impression, but sewage sludge, the solid portion. This means that this would not replace any of the sewage processing (unless you count "trucking the sludge to a landfill"), and more importantly that a lot less material is available (the sludge is a tiny fraction of the total sewage).

Actually there might be some gain

[perpenso]

32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error.

Or a drop in the bucket.

since the sewage comes out at many disparate locations across the country, building one of these plants at every sewer plant might not even be worth the hassle.

It depends entirely on the size and complexity of the plant. Plus fuel production may not be the only benefit. This new system also replaces whatever the current treatment and processing system is. There might be some sort of gain there.

An old process turns sewage into natural gas

[drinkypoo]

You put the sewage into a bag, you tap the bag, you use a membrane to separate the methane, you compress it and it has many uses.

For a fancier bag, use AIWPS.

To replace gasoline, use Butanol.

To replace diesel fuel, use "green diesel" — not transesterified biodiesel, but you actually use a fractional distillation column to "crack" waste fats as you would petroleum. It has none of the usual problems of biodiesel, namely acidity or a high gel point.

HTH, HAND

Re:An old process turns sewage into natural gas

[michael_wojcik]

To replace gasoline, use Butanol

Yeah, or propane. Gasoline engines require some conversion to be used with propane (whereas I understand they typically can run butanol unchanged), but it's easy and cheap. And propane is already a popular vehicle fuel, and we have an established infrastructure for storing, transporting, and dispensing the stuff.

People sometimes talk about using cheap energy (e.g. solar in the Sahara, or decently-designed nuclear) to synthesize gasoline (hexane, octane, and other light liquid-at-standard-conditions hydrocarbons) from waste inputs, but really there's no need to synth anything more complex than propane or, as you say, butanol. Not that hexane is much more complex than propane, but still.

As always, it's a question of economics. Hard to make this economically worthwhile until extracted crude gets more expensive.

Less than 0.1% efficient

[laing]

The amount of energy required to run the thing is likely greater than the potential energy available from the oil produced.

Re:Less than 0.1% efficient

[glenebob]

And that's different from natural crude oil in what way?

Re:Less than 0.1% efficient

[EvilSS]

Nature provided the energy to convert biomatter to crude oil that's in the ground million's of years ago. It doesn't take that much energy to pull it out of the ground and refine it today because the majority of the energy required to make it was expended long ago.

Sounds like a load of crap to me!

[IHTFISP]

Just sayin'. ;-)

New?? How about Thermal Depolymerization..

[Daemonik]

There's been a pilot plant for the process since 2004 in Carthage Missouri. Last reports were that it was running at a loss, but it did successfully turn sewage and offal from meat processing plants into crude oil.

Link

Re:New?? How about Thermal Depolymerization..

[K. S. Kyosuke]

basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit

I didn't need to read more than this to know someone would mention TDP. :) It seems to be the obvious conclusion that is essentially the same process. Not to mention that Fischer-Tropsch, of the 1920s vintage, can apparently use biomass as well.

Re:New?? How about Thermal Depolymerization..

[drinkypoo]

There's been a pilot plant for the process since 2004 in Carthage Missouri. Last reports were that it was running at a loss, but it did successfully turn sewage and offal from meat processing plants into crude oil.

And what an incredibly idiotic idea that is. You turn the waste fat into diesel fuel and you compost the rest (meat can be composted if mixed with other material and if the right organisms are introduced) and make methane which has a million and one uses.

Re:New?? How about Thermal Depolymerization..

[Shag]

Yup, pretty much clicked just to see if someone else had already mentioned TDP. I remember a while ago a company at the Philly navy yard or some such place had a prototype - think they may have been the same ones who built Carthage.

Re:New?? How about Thermal Depolymerization..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, that's what I immediately thought of too.

Discover magazine had an article about this, very compelling (perhaps a bit too swayed by the technology and personalities involved, but that's a minor nit). It was called "Anything Into Oil". After a couple of years I badly wanted some follow-up information and they eventually published that follow-up. It turned out the pilot plant had several problems, including smells that the local citizens weren't very happy about. And the plant had taken more money and more time than planned for to get up and running, which didn't surprise me.

They need to...

[Anonymous Coward]

This needs to be coupled with the current presidential candidates. Everything out of both camps has been nothing but sewage...

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[nadaou]

I don't disagree, but keep in mind that the production of fertilizer is a major consumer of fossil hydrocarbons.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't disagree, but keep in mind that the production of fertilizer is a major consumer of fossil hydrocarbons.

Then that seems another market for this new process. A somewhat "fitting" one.

NEver thought I'd live to see this day

[Anonymous Coward]

The fat, lazy portions of American society will finally contribute and they won't even bitch about the how.

how is this beneficial?

[Gravis Zero]

[T]he raw sewage is placed in a reactor that's basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit,

A) Where are you going to get all that energy to pressurized and heat the tube?
B) Is the overall energy loss greater or less than existing battery systems?
C) Why not use that energy directly instead of making crude oil that has to be refined?

Efficiency

[pubwvj]

So efficient imagine that: It only takes 1.6 gallons of petroleum energy to produce one gallon of crude shit. Of course the crude shit must still be refined to make it usable so that drops the efficiency a bit more...

Re:Efficiency

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why would you need "petroleum energy" for this?

Now, add thorium nuke plant, with desalnaiton,...

[WindBourne]

and you have a total solution for providing electricity, water, oil, taking care of sewage, and even providing oil for plastics, etc.

Re:Oil

[BradMajors]

Yeah cuz we really need more oil OK??

No is forcing you to buy any oil. If you don't like oil, don't buy it.

Sounds like Supercritical Water Oxidization

[Nova Express]

Basically, put water at 4000 PSI and you can dump loads of heat into it without it turning into steam. Now dump Oxygen into it and it will basically break down any organic molecule.

The problem has always been how to scale a reactor vessel large enough and strong enough to make it suitable for commercial use.

The big question is whether it can economically scale.

Re:Sounds like Supercritical Water Oxidization

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you build or line the vessel with to keep it from oxidizing?

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Jumperalex]

True, which is what makes this process attractive.

Atmosphere -> Plant -> Fuel: More plants need to be grown using more fertilizer and possibly replacing food crops

Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human -> Sewage -> Fuel or
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> Sewage -> Fuel: means there is no point in growing more plants because humans are only going to eat so much of it to produce the sewage waste needed for the process.

That is the benefit of this, over other processes that claim to leverage current waste as the feed-stock. It isn't practical to generate more sewage to feed the beast ... unless you envision a Matrix like poo farm ;-) Put another way, the sum total of all human digestive systems can be counted on to produce sewage feed-stock without fail (it just needs to be collected) but it isn't subject to scaling it up beyond how much we all poop.

The counter example of course being Cellulosic fuel processes which can be fed by the current remnants of human activity BUT ALSO by intentionally growing more cellulosic fuel crops (like sugarcane, switchgrass, etc) using more fertilizer and possibly supplanting food crops. It would be silly to not leverage cellulosic waste, but there needs to be effective policy to make sure we don't do more harm than good as farmers start deciding what crops to plant.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Jarik C-Bol]

You can probably also include the waste products from animals as well. The disposal of waste from pig farms is a big issue, so being able to turn it into oil would be a win, as it removes disgusting waste ponds from the farms, and creates fuel.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[haruchai]

Problem here is this process is highly inefficient and would turn the entire ANNUAL "output" of American rectums into 1.5 days worth of oil consumption.

Those reserves are a taxable asset, they'd pay mor

[raymorris]

> It is well known that the oil companies are lying about their "proven reserves" because the end of oil means the end of their business.

Reserves controlled by an oil company are a taxable asset. The more they have, the more taxes they pay. Do you think they're lying so they pay MORE taxes?

One of the biggest "oil company tax subsidies" that the tinfoil crowd whines about is that as those reserves are used up, oil companies no longer pay taxes on the reserves that they no longer have.

Re: Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You need to pay for the cleanup of my air. If you don't, I won't let you use any oil.

Re: Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

So you'll kill for what you want?

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[gtall]

That waste from the farms is not merely disgusting, it is a health hazard. When one of the ponds breaks it bounds, the waste drains the way the rest of the land drains, right into rivers. Worse, when there's a flood, it can send that waste directly into city centers.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot (most?) people miss this point. It is also why so many carbon offset schemes are a complete and utter waste of time. Burning fossil fuels is releasing carbon from long-term (think geological time) storage. No amount of trees, grasslands, green pixies or whatever are going to put an appreciable amount of that *back* into long-term storage. You burn it, it's back in circulation.

Which is why, if (big if) this actually works, and if (massive if) it can produce enough oil to make up more than a drop in the ocean of our current consumption, it is a bloody brilliant idea!

Energy balance anyone?

[plopez]

Is this going to require more energy in than out like the ethanol scam? In this case it wouldn't be unreasonable to ignore energy spent producing the food, IMO, as it has already served an important purpose. But I still want to see how it stacks up to say drilling, transporting, and cracking petroleum.

Remember oil from turkey guts?

[russotto]

Slashdot fell hard for this stuff over 10 years ago. It isn't any more practical now than it was then. Classify it with flying cars, cold fusion, and any significant energy source at all environmentalists won't protest.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

If the goal was to replace all our fossil oil production with this process, that would be a valid criticism. But instead the op was talking about just getting rid of a particular type of problem we already have, namely waste from pigs. So it is a gain.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[perpenso]

Problem here is this process is highly inefficient and would turn the entire ANNUAL "output" of American rectums into 1.5 days worth of oil consumption.

As we increase our use of electric that waste will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption.

barrels used per day in america?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just looked it up, it's 19.4 million per day. So that's 1.5 days supply for a years work! And out of 34 billion barrels of crap!

Maybe Useless

[JimSadler]

And just how much energy is required to produce one gallon of this stuff? How much heat is released from the process into the atmosphere? Fighting global warming is much more complex than simply trying to release less CO2. Burning vegetable oils often gives off a scent when use in diesel engines. It is one thing for your exhaust to have a hint of French Fried foods and quite another to have an odor of human waste.

Re: Oil and internal combustion are not the proble

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could send it all to India, they're starving over there.

Animal Waste is Also a Major Source of Methane.

[robbak]

Normal disposal of placing the waste into a pond really encourages anaerobic bacteria, which produce methane, which is an important greenhouse gas.

Any handling method that prevents that is a nice plus. Even if it converts it to CO2 instead. If they capture the energy and use it to replace fossil fuels - hey, big plus.

Re:Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, we do, and preferably cheap and affordable oil. Fun fact: oil isn't actually a limited resource and ALL scarcity of oil is artificially generated in order to increase profits.

Fossil fuel? nope, dead animals have fuck all to do with creating oil.

Delorean

[TJHook3r]

I'm imagining in the reboot of Back to the Future 2, that Doc will just take a crap in the Delorean to power it. Banana skins optional.

Sewage huh? Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

...we could put all the political bullstuff we have seen during the past past few months in that device, and produce enough crude for a
century at 10 cents a gallon.

Just saying.

What?

[Ol Olsoc]

Not this shit again.....

Standing at the Gas Pump

[FrankDrebin]

"Same shit, different day."

It all comes down to efficiency

[argStyopa]

How many barrels of oil (energy) is needed to generate the reaction?
If it eats 10bbl of oil to make 2 bbl of biooil, I'm not sure that's super interesting...

Now, of course, if we could ever get fusion going.. I hear it's only about 30 years away.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[bwcbwc]

More accurately, as we increase our use of renewables, this will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption. And as other posters have indicated, traditional methods of treating sewage release lots of greenhouse gases anyway. I do have to question how much energy comes out of this vs. all the energy that gets put in by both the conversion process and the refining process.

Maybe this will satisfy the needs for petroleum-based lubricants when most of our fuel needs are met by other methods.

I have a perpetual motion machine, too!

[Sir Holo]

Oh, for FSM's sake, how many links in the chain of energy extraction / production there are? The article is just cherry-picking on one step that is more efficient.

And to what end? To generate more fuel for CO2-producing engines?

PNNL, WTF are you thinking?!?

This process is thermodynamically negative once other factors (like heat capacity, efficiency of recovery of that heat, and whole slew of other details) are included. That is these relevant factors are not ignored.

Dumb. dumb, dumb of you, PNNL. One reason I never considered applying for a post-doc there. Don't trumpet your failures.

Recycling is a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Dredd to Control... 20 bodies for recyc.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Lord Kano]

Where I live, the existing sewage infrastructure is maxed out. Too much rain results in raw sewage being released into local waterways.

If they can come up with a practical way to turn our excrement into something useful, I'm all for it.

LK

Re: Oil and internal combustion are not the proble

[Anonymous Coward]

If the cost of turning into oil is more expensive than another way to effectively deal with it then it's not very useful. It probably makes more sense to use anaerobic digestion to turn it into gas in EROEI terms.

My neighbors diesel will now smell like farts

[Anonymous Coward]

I liked the french fry smell better.

Re: Oil

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the American Way!!

turns one kind of crap into another kind of crap

[mark_reh]

so we can use it to pollute the air instead of the water.

Uhh....

[easyTree]

Time to start 'bringing democracy' to those countries with lots of sewage.

Net gain?

[biggaijin]

It takes a lot of energy to heat a big tank of sewage to 660F. If the crude oil yield high enough to cover the energy cost of extracting it?

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of sewerage, if we just hooked up the infinite amounts of bullshit coming out of politicians mouths and converted that to crude, we'd solve the world's energy problems overnight.

Only cheaper if you ignore externalities.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only cheaper if you ignore externalities. Why do the conservative and libertarian worshipers of the market and economics ignore the most basic principles? Econ 2 anybody?

The true costs of oil production and use are borne not by the producers and consumers but by all of us due to pollution, ecological damage, despoliation, and dare I say it - the very real possibility of damages from climate change.

When there are not enough fish to eat and not enough oxygen to breathe so-called cheap oil will turn out to have been the most expensive mistake humanity ever made. Unless of course, we trump that (pun intended) with a nuclear war.

Peace out.

How does this differ from past versions?

[eric_harris_76]

Sounds like a variation of the thermal depolymerization process used in Carthage MO. What's the big difference?

Re:How does this differ from past versions?

[eric_harris_76]

Forgot to include these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

http://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=338

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[haruchai]

If I understand how this process works, the sewage has to be treated, dewatered and processed into sludge which is then processed inefficiently into oil.
Probably cheaper & much more efficient to turn it into biogas as is already being done in many places.

Clogged lines

[ebvwfbw]

Now I really can say - now that's some shit?

Nope

[ebvwfbw]

It would break all of the equipment. Political BS is far worse, it's toxic waste. Capable of tearing apart a nation, even the world. Especially if you let criminals run the country. Criminals that are above the law.

nice but somewhat old idea

[cerniagigante]

People have been burning dung for fuel since the paleolithic.

Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem

[Verdatum]

It's not a question of "if" it works, because it does. It's a question of it's the most efficient method to extract usable energy from waste. And because it requires pressures of around 3000PSI, it almost certainly is not. The Fischer-Tropsch process is likewise able to produce liquid hydrocarbons from organic feedstocks, and it requires very little heat and a fraction of that pressure (granted it has its own set of problems).

At present, some waste is incinerated to drive turbines, some is composted into fertilizer, some is dried and sent to landfills. and some could certainly be converted into diesel to fuel vehicles. The only particularly bad scenario is the waste that is sequestered in such a way that it produces methane without reclaiming it, as that's a waste of energy and is a nasty greenhouse gas. What happens to which waste all depends on infrastructure and the laws of supply & demand. There needs to be an efficient means for the waste to get to the appropriate processing facility, and a way for the processing facility to get it's output to consumers. It pretty much requires government intervention to make even the most efficient of processes work out to be cheaper than drilled oil. That means subsidies on biocrude, or taxes on drilled oil, or creating laws that limit drilling and purchasing foreign oil.

A few years back, an entity tried to make a functional plant that converted turkey byproducts (mainly feathers) into oil. That crashed due to a combination of major complaints of odors (which, depending on who you ask, may have been untrue) and more importantly, the price of oil crashing. Tons of oil-alternative companies start and fail because of the variable price of oil.

curso NR 10

[curso NR 10]

Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online

Re:Neat that it's po... response to differnt point

[HiThere]

If I consider the price of a loaf of bread, in the early 1960's it was around $1.00 ... a bit less, but not a whole bunch. If I buy a loaf of bread now it's about $5.00. (I don't, but bread that's white and mainly air, and I didn't then. These days the bread is likely to be actual whole grain bread with lots of seeds. Then it was often Roman Meal...but also often Rainbow...which is (was?) white bread, but not mainly air.. So that's an increase of a factor of 5. 5 * 0.35 is about $1.75, which is a lot less than $3.00, so gas prices have gone up significantly more than inflation of bread prices.

(See my other response for why this isn't a good argument, but briefly, you need a much larger range of items being compared.)

Always the same question

[AutodidactLabrat]

Energy gain or loss?
Including all down-conversion losses when the oil is refined and burned, that is?
Synthetic oil is old news, the Nazis even did it
But so far, no gain.