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

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.

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: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.