[Leanan]

FWIW, the Discover article describes the smell as a combination of rotting corpses, fried liver, and feces.

All parties seem to agree that perhaps building the plant in the middle of town was Not A Good Idea. There's no reason it can't be further out, where the odor wouldn't be as much of an issue. The turkey parts and the oil are both trucked some distance anyway.

[Pops]

The plant is about 35 miles from here, near the Big town where we shop from time to time. It was built in and old industrial area – perhaps partly in existing buildings.

Not only is it in town, its on the upwind side – and it does stink.

I’d be mad too.

That is one of the things that may trouble many of the alternative processes – infrastructure. 40 years ago it cost good money to build the roads, power transmission, water, sewer and all. But today the costs are huge due to regulation and labor primarily but also raw materials that are vastly more expensive.

Don’t get me wrong; health and safety rules are a good thing. Many of the great engineering feats of the past were achieved only through great sacrifice of life and limb. I guess that is one of the results of the diminishing returns of increasing complexity; everyone wants to be a software coder and no one wants to hang from a harness 300 feet in the air. I know I don’t.

Pstarr is probably right about the money losing aspect, but again, we all asked for rules governing everything right down to the height of our keyboards to avoid unnecessary carpal tunnel injury in our stressful coding jobs and indirect lighting so we don’t injure our eyesight struggling away for the evil slavemasters. The result of all the rules is the near impossibility of building just about anything without going bankrupt.

I guess ya gotta be careful what ya picket for…

[Tanada]

Acording to Carthage Press
the plant is now back in full production mode with ozone generators being used to scrub the air clean of odor's.

[Starvid]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'b')ut also raw materials that are vastly more expensive.

[DesertBear2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Eli', 'T')he reports I have read said that it smells like death, or that it smells like roadkill except more intense and it does not go away.

[JohnOfParis]

Nice to see all this reaction especially from those from those living in the area. The worst thing about this business is the weight of rumour that's building up.
You see I don't know what it smells like - it's not so bad as to reach Paris (even if we are downwind). What I mean to say is that it's very difficult for an outsider to get solid information on the process and its implications apart from CWT's glossy blurb and Discovery's journalese.

It's still not clear to me what stink is actually being described. For instance what DesertBear2 describes are the conditions found in any knacker's yard. This is nothing new to me : my dad was a butcher and he used give me the job of taking the bones and fat every week to the local knacker's yard. Horrible place and dangerous - I used to have to take some cotton waste with me to wipe the grease off my shoes before driving off because I couldn't keep my feet on the pedals.
So let's get this straight, the two plants, Butterball and TCP are in separate locations (this I have no way of knowing) so we're sure that the stink comes/came from the pre-scrubber TDP/TCP plant?

A proper assessment of this process from multiple points of view is becoming really urgent. Neglecting this would be nothing short of criminal in view of what they promise. What really makes this process interesting is the waste disposal aspect - even more important in my view than its potential as an energy source. In Europe, all they can talk about is incineration and land fill - not real solutions. I realise that am diverging from the subject of our debate here, but it is essential not to lose sight of this potential dual benefit from the TDP process as both the issues it claims to address are of immediate importance (we're talking about today, not tomorrow); therefore as many people, as possible should be made aware of its existence - not the case at present, I've never met anybody among my acquaintances who had ever heard of the process before I started talking about it. And as I just said, rumour abounds.

In passing I would add that if there were any way of contacting the inventor Paul Baskis, I for one would be very interested in his views on the present situation.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Starvid', '
')Raw materials are a lot cheaper today than they were in the old days when you compensate for purchasing power parity.

[Falconoffury]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')WIW, the Discover article describes the smell as a combination of rotting corpses, fried liver, and feces.

[Leanan]

They aren't just using turkey parts. Turns out, you can't just throw anything into the mix and get a usable product. That was something they had to learn by experience. They've got a carefully tweaked recipe now. For example, turkey parts are not enough to produce good oil. They are also importing pig fat from hog-processing plants and using that.

[JohnOfParis]

I am surprised they did not find this out at Philadelphia. All the same though, they are eliminating the turkey offal, reinforcing the point I made about waste disposal. Perhaps they are trying to do too many things at once too soon. It seems daft to me they are having to bring in extra pig fat.

[Falconoffury]

So, did my hunger comment make anyone laugh, or does everyone just think I'm a sicko? This forum needs more humor, and I think this a good thread for it.

[gego]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Falconoffury', 'S')o, did my hunger comment make anyone laugh, or does everyone just think I'm a sicko? This forum needs more humor, and I think this a good thread for it.

[Yavicleus]

So if they're going to use Turkey and Hog parts to make oil, does that mean that Muslims and Vegans won't be able to ethically buy gas anymore?

[Leanan]

The Butterball plant is about 100 yards from the turkey-to-oil plant. However, the Butterball plant has been there for years, so they know it's not the Butterball plant that's to blame. Plus, the oil plant has been shut down numerous times due to odor complaints, and the smell goes away when it's shut down.

The turkey parts are shipped to the plant via truck, so it would be no big deal to ship them a little farther. Like, two miles out of town. Especially since they are shipping pig fat from who knows where.

Last I heard, the other plants planned for the U.S. have been put on hold, possibly forever.

[Falconoffury]

The turkey parts plant sounds like it would be a good addition to the TV show, Dirty Jobs.

[DesertBear2]

I'm not sure why this whole idea is given so much credibility. The industrial meat-raising industry is just another phenomenon of the cheap oil age. The corn monoculture, the herbicides, pesticides, plastic wrap, refrigerated trucks, refrigerated food stores, chicken-fry shacks, processing plants all run on Saudi black gold.

The cheap chicken/turkey dinners and the accompanying millions of tons of animal body waste will just blow away when the PO shock waves start rolling in.

[Leanan]

I don't think anyone ever expected this to be more than a way to deal with waste. Obviously, there is no way this will generate enough oil to be significant, if it worked as advertised (which it doesn't, really).

But it might be a useful way to deal with problematic wastes. Mad cow infected carcasses. Old tires. Sewage.

Anyway, here's the full article:

http://members.aol.com/leanan7/oil3.htm

It's interesting to read the first two articles, then the third one. Though being spun as a success, it really didn't work out like they'd hoped.

[Magus]

WE'RE SAVED!

Article excerpt from Discover magazine, April 2006 issue.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he smell is a melange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct fecal note. It comes from the worst stuff in the world - turkey slaughterhouse waste. Rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs swollen with putid gases have been trucked here from a local Butterball packager and dumped into an 80-foot-long hopper with a sickening glorp. In about 20 minutes, the awful mess disappears into the workings of the thermal conversion process plant in Carthage, Missouri.

Two hours later a much cleaner truck - an oil carrier - pulls up to the other end of the plant, and the driver attaches a hose to the truck's intake valve. One hundred fifty barrels of fuel oil, worth $12,600 wholesale, gush into the truck, headed for an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oils to upgrade the stock. Three tanker trucks arrive here on peak production days, loading up with 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tons of turkey guts and 20 tons of pig fat. Most of what cannot be converted into fuel oil becomes high-grade fertilizer; the rest is water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system.

For Brian Appel - and, maybe, for an energy-hungry world - it's a dream come true, better than turning straw into gold. The thermal conversion process can take material more plentiful and troublesome than straw - slaughterhouse waste, municipal sewage, old tires, mixed plastics, virtually all the wretched detritus of modern life - and make it something the world needs much more than gold: high-quality oil.

Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, has prodded, pushed, and sometimes bulldozed his way toward this goal for nearly a decade, and his joy almost palpable. "This is a real plant," he says, grinning broadly. He nods at the $42 million mass of tanks, pipes, pumps, grinders, boilers, and catwalks inside a corrugated steel building. The plant is perched 100 yards from ConAgra Foods' Butterball plant, where 35,000 turkeys are butchered daily, surrendering their viscera to Appel's operation. The pig fat comes from four other midwestern ConAgra slaughterhouses. "To anybody who thinks this can't work on an industrial scale, I say, 'Come here and look.' This is the first commercial biorefinery in the world that can make oil from a variety of waste streams."

Still, Appel looks wearier than he did when Discover broke the news about his company's technology (see "Anything Into Oil," May 2003). Back then, when the process was still experimental, Appel predicted that the Carthage plant would crank out oil for about $15 a barrel and rack up profits from day one. But the plant was delayed by construction problems, and federal subsidies were postponed. After it started up, a foul odor angered town residents, leading to a temporary shutdown in December 2005. Production costs turned out to be $80 per barrel, meaning that for most of the plant's working life Appel has lost about $40 per barrel. As recently as last April, he feared that the whole operation might implode. "There have definitely been growing pains," he says. "We have made mistakes. We were too aggressive in our earlier projections."

But now, after more than $100 million in private funding and $17 million in government grants, several hurdles have tumbled. The Carthage plant has been optimized and is expected to turn a small profit. A tax credit has leveled the playing field with other renewable fuels like biodiesel and ethanol. Appel is confident that new ozone scrubbers and other equipment will abate the odors. State officials are warily optimistic. "We are not hoping to shut them down [permanently] and take away jobs," says Connie Patterson, spokesperson for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. "We have given them a window of opportunity to solve the problem."