Oil for Nuthin’… Chicks for Free

You’ll call me crazy. Tell me I’m insane. And you’d be right, by the way, but not necessarily with regards to what this essay is about. What if I told you that we have, right now, the technology to turn just about anything into oil? And when I say “anything” I mean mostly nasty stuff that we don’t want… Like “tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores.” In fact, pretty much anything except nuclear waste. I’ll provide a source to my quote below the fold.

It’s a process called the Thermal Depolymerization Process, or TDP. Basically it uses the same processes that Mother Nature uses to make oil (High pressure and temperatures) – only at a vastly accelerated pace.

Pie in the sky you say? What if I told you we’re doing it right now at a plant in Missouri that’s been built beside a huge turkey processing plant? The reason for its location: They have a LOT of guts to dispose of – somewhere around 200 tons of turkey offal a day to be exact. And it’s being processed by a company called Changing World Technologies. They make oil with it today and sell it on the open market.

“This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind,” says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. “This process can deal with the world’s waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming.”

According to this article in Discover Magazine “If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.” I can think of a couple of guys – whose names I wouldn’t dare mention – where that’d be a pretty good “return on success” if they did fall in. But it just goes to show you how efficient this process is.

So how does it really work? Here’s a graphic:

(Graphic From Discover Magazine’s article link above)

Basically water is added to the “slurry” material, heated to about 500 degrees farenheit while under pressure – a big, pressure cooker if you will. Next, the pressure is quickly dropped which releases about 90 percent of the free water. (This hot water is re-used to heat the next batch coming in) Next, “At this stage, the minerals-in turkey waste, they come mostly from bones-settle out and are shunted to storage tanks. Rich in calcium and magnesium, the dried brown powder “is a perfect balanced fertilizer,” according to Brian Appel, Chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies.

To keep things brief for me, (’cause I’m old and tired!) I’ll simply quote the final step(s):

The remaining concentrated organic soup gushes into a second-stage reactor similar to the coke ovens used to refine oil into gasoline. “This technology is as old as the hills,” says Appel, grinning broadly. The reactor heats the soup to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit to further break apart long molecular chains. Next, in vertical distillation columns, hot vapor flows up, condenses, and flows out from different levels: gases from the top of the column, light oils from the upper middle, heavier oils from the middle, water from the lower middle, and powdered carbon-used to manufacture tires, filters, and printer toners-from the bottom. “Gas is expensive to transport, so we use it on-site in the plant to heat the process,” Appel says. The oil, minerals, and carbon are sold to the highest bidders.

OK, I’m no “noo-cyoo-lar” scientist or anything but this doesn’t sound like it to me. In fact, it sounds like it’s a helluva lot simpler than what happens at most sewage processing plants in practically every city and town in America. And after we’re done with the sewage treatment in our town, what do we do with what’s left? Dump it in the river for the next town, downstream to deal with.

Speaking of Sewage

“There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil,” says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. With the right type of machinery, and quintessential components like wire cloth made strainers (learn more here about wire cloth) or something similar, the technology can be precisely executed. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. “The potential is unbelievable,” says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. “You’re not only cleaning up waste; you’re talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world.”

For Me, The Money Quote

This summed things up nicely and if former CIA Director James Woolsey is on board, I’d like to think it’s not all tin-foil hattery:

…Others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”

But What About Global Warming? Won’t Burning All That Oil Fuck Everything Up?

OK, I’ve already told you I’m not a noo-cyoo-lar kind of guy. I’m not sure about the following quote but it’s addressed in the article. Here is what they say about that and frankly, it’s over my head:

If the thermal depolymerization process WORKS AS Claimed, it will clean up waste and generate new sources of energy. But its backers contend it could also stem global warming, which sounds iffy. After all, burning oil creates global warming, doesn’t it? Carbon is the major chemical constituent of most organic matter-plants take it in; animals eat plants, die, and decompose; and plants take it back in, ad infinitum. Since the industrial revolution, human beings burning fossil fuels have boosted concentrations of atmospheric carbon more than 30 percent, disrupting the ancient cycle. According to global-warming theory, as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps solar radiation, which warms the atmosphere-and, some say, disrupts the planet’s ecosystems.
But if there were a global shift to thermal depolymerization technologies, belowground carbon would remain there. The accoutrements of the civilized world-domestic animals and plants, buildings, artificial objects of all kinds-would then be regarded as temporary carbon sinks. At the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in thermal depolymerization machines into short-chain fuels, fertilizers, and industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back into long chains again. So the only carbon used would be that which already existed above the surface; it could no longer dangerously accumulate in the atmosphere. “Suddenly, the whole built world just becomes a temporary carbon sink,” says Paul Baskis, inventor of the thermal depolymerization process. “We would be honoring the balance of nature.”

My brain is too fried this late to digest that! So comments from those dharmaniacs out there about whether this bit sounds like a load of turkey offal are welcome! However, I would point out that it’s not particularly realistic to think we can wean ourselves from oil overnight – or “cold turkey” if you will. (Sorry!)

I’d just settle for a bit of time in which we: 1) Buy ourselves energy independence from the Middle East and 2) Devote the money saved from that to producing even better alternative energy sources that may impact the impending global warming crisis as soon as possible.

Anyone for a giblet?