OT- Solution to fuel & oil problems. Longish...

This makes a person go Hmmmmmmm...

Might it be a solution to the oil & petrochemical industry problems.
A way to deal with the high cost of fuel etc...

Kinda explains the turning of cats into fuel in another thread...
Sorry if this has been previously posted...

This round - my tab...

Kat...

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/environment_new_recycling_process_2003.html

No More Waste, No More Pollution, Plenty of Oil - Brad Lemley
[This article is reprinted from Discover Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 5,
5 May 2003]

This is rather hard to belive..........sounds like a scifi film, but
here goes....

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can
change almost anything into oil. Really. "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." Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid
dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur
who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and
deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal
depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle
almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, 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. According to
Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products,
all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning
gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or
specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into
ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. 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. While no one plans to put people
into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation
could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn
sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer
Terry Adams, a project consultant. 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."

"This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees
Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and
a former Bell Laboratories director.

Andreassen and 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 first things first. Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's
Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey
processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts.
A forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's
first stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray
brown slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes,
which hum and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture.
Two hours later, a white-jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours
a honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills
a glass beaker.

It really is a lovely oil.

"The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the
liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially the same as a mix
of half fuel oil, half gasoline."

Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the
process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government
has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be
able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor
of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate
economy."

Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth
mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and
animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by
sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under
pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen,
and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into
short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet
time doing this-generally thousands or millions of years-because
subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal
depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising
heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular
bonds.

Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel
using waste products before, but their efforts have been notoriously
inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried
to do the transformation in one step-superheat the material to drive off
the water and simultaneously break down the molecules," says Appel.
That leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous
substances to pollute the finished product. Very wet Waste -- and much
of the world's waste is wet -- is particularly difficult to process
efficiently because driving off the water requires so much energy.
Usually, the Btu content in the resulting oil or gas barely exceeds
the amount needed to make the stuff.

That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who
lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the late 1980s. He says he
"had a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind
another inventor's waste-reforming process. "The prototype I saw
produced a heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement
and filed the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors
and, in 1996, met Appel, a former commodities trader. "I saw what this
could be and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a
partnership with the Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration
plant up and running by 1999. Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has
proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such
as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we
use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is
even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.

So how does it work? In the cold Philadelphia warehouse, Appel waves a
long arm at the apparatus, which looks surprisingly low tech: a tangle
of pressure vessels, pipes, valves, and heat exchangers terminating in
storage tanks. It resembles the oil refineries that stretch to the
horizon on either side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and in part, that's
exactly what it is.

Appel strides to a silver gray pressure tank that is 20 feet long, three
feet wide, heavily insulated, and wrapped with electric heating coils.
He raps on its side. "The chief difference in our process is that we
make water a friend rather than an enemy," he says. "The other processes
all tried to drive out water. We drive it in, inside this tank, with
heat and pressure. We super-hydrate the material." Thus temperatures and
pressures need only be modest, because water helps to convey heat into
the feedstock. "We're talking about temperatures of 500 degrees
Fahrenheit and pressures of about 600 pounds for most organic
material-not at all extreme or energy intensive. And the cooking times
are pretty short, usually about 15 minutes."

Once the organic soup is heated and partially depolymerized in the
reactor vessel, phase two begins. "We quickly drop the slurry to a
lower pressure," says Appel, pointing at a branching series of pipes.
The rapid depressurization releases about 90 percent of the slurry's
free water. Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms
of energy consumed than is heating and boiling off the water,
particularly because no heat is wasted. "We send the flashed-off water
back up there," Appel says, pointing to a pipe that leads to the
beginning of the process, "to heat the incoming stream."

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,"
Appel says.

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.

Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process
can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more
profitable than oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce
fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride,
or PVC-the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes-yields
hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable
chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. "That's what's so great
about making water a friend," says Appel. "The hydrogen in water
combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in
a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin-very toxic."

The technicians here have spent three years feeding different kinds of
waste into their machinery to formulate recipes. In a little trailer
next to the plant, Appel picks up a handful of one-gallon plastic bags
sent by a potential customer in Japan. The first is full of ground-up
appliances, each piece no larger than a pea. "Put a computer and a
refrigerator into a grinder, and that's what you get," he says, shaking
the bag. "It's PVC, wood, fiberglass, metal, just a mess of different
things. This process handles mixed waste beautifully." Next to the
ground-up appliances is a plastic bucket of municipal sewage. Appel pops
the lid and instantly regrets it. "Whew," he says. "That is nasty."

Experimentation revealed that different waste streams require different
cooking and coking times and yield different finished products. "It's a
two-step process, and you do more in step one or step two depending on
what you are processing," Terry Adams says. "With the turkey guts, you
do the lion's share in the first stage. With mixed plastics, most of the
breakdown happens in the second stage." The oil-to-mineral ratios vary
too. Plastic bottles, for example, yield copious amounts of oil, while
tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says Adams, "nothing
hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try."

"The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel says.
"If it contains carbon, we can do it."

This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day,
but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from
one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the
company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20
million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest
more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.

The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving all the time.
At the Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package
30,000 turkeys each workday, filling the air with the distinctive tang
of boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of
large-scale poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging
carcasses clanks past knife-wielding laborers who slash away. Outside,
a tanker truck idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many
years, ConAgra Foods has trucked the plant's Waste -- feathers, organs,
and other nonusable parts -- to a rendering facility where it was ground
and dried to make animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products.
But bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can
spread among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease
has been found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about
feeding animals to animals. In Europe the practice is illegal for all
livestock. Since 1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of
most recycled animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of
European-style mad-cow regulations may kick-start the acceptance of
thermal depolymerization. "In Europe, there are mountains of bones
piling up," says Alf Andreassen. "When recycling waste into feed stops
in this country, it will change everything."

Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level,
Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a
wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new Plant -- an artless
assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings -- as if it were his
favorite child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which
will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says.
"It will make 21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to
discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be
completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of
oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a number two heating oil."
He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It's amazing.
The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste
handlers. We are actually Manufacturers -- that's what our permit says.
This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a
cost to a profit."

He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops
of piping. A group of 15 investors and corporate advisers, including
Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among
the sparks and hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager
Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders emphasizes that
once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to
oil refining. The equipment, the procedures, the safety factors, the
maintenance -- it's all proven technology."

And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing
in Philadelphia, we already know the costs," he says. "This is our
first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In
three to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size
oil exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from
there."

"We've got a lot of confidence in this," Buffett says. "I represent
ConAgra's investment. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't anticipate
success." Buffett isn't alone. Appel has lined up federal grant money
to help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure
in Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. Also in the works
are plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and
cheese waste in Italy. He says the first generation of depolymerization
centers will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear
whether the technology is as miraculous as its backers claim.
.