[gego]

Actually my wife read the article aloud as we drove along the highway wasting more of this limited oil.

What burned my ass was the fact that the Federal government in the USA subsidizes fuel manufacture. This Appel "turkey" was complaining that he could not make money without subsidy.

What these environmentalist fail to grasp is if you lose money, then you lose resources. If it took Appel $80 to produce his oil, and it was only worth $40 then that means that he expended twice the resources to get that one barrel of oil; cut down two trees to save one and then brag that you have save two trees and ignore the fact that you obliterated four. Get the government to give you three trees and you can claim that you only used up four trees to save five. Surely the human race deserves the devistation to come when this model is what is commonly believed to be the energy salvation of mankind.

[coyote]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gego', 'W')hat these environmentalist fail to grasp...

[gego]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('coyote', '
')No need to lump environmentalists in with these jokers. As far as I can tell, he isn't one, just a misguided entrepreneur.

[mrobert]

I wonder if we would have put the $100 million in to alternative technologies ... how much would that have saved us?

Even if he can produce oil at $1/barrel from turkey leftovers ... do they really think there is enough turkey for all of us?

[Zarusoba]

[quote]Anything Into Oil Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end By Brad Lemley, Photography by Dean Kaufman, DISCOVER Vol. 27 No. 04 | April 2006 | Technology:

The thermal conversion process is probably the only practical large-scale method of dismantling prions, the proteins that cause mad cow disease. Although the process has never been specifically used to destroy prions, Jefferson Tester, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, says he's confident that the proteins would be ripped apart and rendered harmless by such extreme temperatures and pressures.

Mad cow disease is thought to spread via the common American practice of feeding rendered animal parts back to animals. Appel assumed that the United States, like most modern nations, would ban the practice, creating more demand for his machinery to process leftover animal parts. In 1997 the government did ban feeding beef parts to beef cattle, but turkey and chicken cannibalism are still legal.

Article: http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-06/f ... il/?page=2

Making oil out of waste
ABC Radio National Australia
Saturday 15 April 2006
Summary
Tim Jones is passionate about the amount of waste generated by companies and households in America. He's trying to convince people to participate in a scheme to use food wasted by commercial enterprises to make natural gas; the remains could be used on soil-depleted farms. He's currently looking for funding to develop a new technology to turn waste into oil.

Audio: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/default.htm
Summary: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/sto ... 613572.htm

[Rishabh87]

It takes like $80 a barrel to make this stuff profitable. So only at like $85+ is this stuff marginally profitiable. Plus, people complain about the smell in the community the factory is in.

[peaker_2005]

Yeah, it's a great solution for the waste problem, but aside from that it's rather pointless.

Don't expect this sort of thing to produce much oil ever.

[TWilliam]

Consider also that the huge waste stream that serves as feedstock for such a process is largely fossil-fuel based. Less oil means less waste means less feedstock for thermal depolymerization & such...

[arocoun]

Yeah, TWilliam states an important problem. It's much like a human trying to live off his own droppings, both in terms of effectiveness, and in terms of filthiness.

[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t's much like a human trying to live off his own droppings, both in terms of effectiveness, and in terms of filthiness.

[Zarusoba]

I urge you all to please LISTEN to the radio interview. Link posted above.

[Leanan]

Sorry, no sound card.

But I think the Discover article makes it pretty clear that this is not the answer. It's certainly a useful process, but it can't replace oil.

Especially interesting is to read all three Discover articles (the first one was in May 2003), and see how theory compared to practice. The oil ended up costing 5 times what they promised, and is still only profitable because of government subsidies. The company is now moving to Europe, because the subsidies are better there.

[Veritas]

I first saw this in one of the books I'm reading, where it was regarded as an "unproven source" and dismissed as a bit of a fairy tale. In another book it was debunked on the basis that it requires a petroleum based economy of mass production in order to provide the inputs for the process - ie without a butterball turkey plant next door, the cost of shipping the materials into the TDP plant would be too prohibitive.

Now I've seen it pop up a few times on here and am wondering if people know the facts about this technology? Specifically, things like the cost of building and operating a TDP plant and its output capacity.

So far it seems to me the only negative comments about this technology have been that it requires heavy input of organic matter for depolymerization, which needs to be transported to the plant.

I'm wondering scenario-wise, lets say a community of 5,000 puts all of its waste into TDP instead of landfills, would the plant yield enough fuel to meet the demand of that community? Or is it the kind of scenario where its a lot of input for a very modest output? I keep seeing the number 85% efficiency, but it doesnt mean a whole lot out of context.

I've also heard you can use ANY organic matter for TDP.

It sounds an awful lot like a miracle cure for our energy woes, since we can just convert waste into gasoline... but as others have noted the company has been in operation for like 10 years and we haven't seen any massive TDP plants being built, so there must be something else afoot.

[Kingcoal]

Peak oil is about the end of cheap oil and the beginning of expensive oil, going on to more expensive oil and ending up with prohibitively expensive oil. TD is a prohibitively expensive solution. With the way our economy is structured, if it ain't cheap, it ain't gona work. What people don't understand is that most of our oil pushes itself out of the ground under it's own pressure. It was manufactured by the earth over millions of years with heat and pressure. Much more energy went into making the oil from the earth than is released when we burn it. It's the same with TD, you have to input much more energy than is realized when it is burned in your engine. While the "free" oil from the earth allows us to live so frivolously, the other alternatives do not. Ever heard of EROEI?

[codesuidae]

TD is a cool way to process a waste stream, and as oil costs go up the oil it produces may be economically competitive. The wikipedia article on thermal depolymerization may be informative.

TD could certainly be a valuable contributor to a post-fossil fuel world, but it does require feedstock that has to come from somewhere. In the case of the Carthage plant, there is a turkey plant next door. If transport prices go way up, so will the cost of turkey resulting in lower demand (or lower volume of production anyway), and thus so will waste output from the turkey plant, and therefore also oil output from the TD plant.

Also, to be part of the solution the plants must exist when they are needed. Once the slide begins it may be too late*. Considering that there is only one commercial scale plant right now, it doesn't look good.

*If the slide is not too rapid and the right people are in the right place the government might have the managment and construction resources necessary to perform the necessary rapid ramp-up and legislative restructuring (to redirect feedstocks to the plants for the purpose of oil production) to avoid a crash, but it's a long shot.

[gego]

As I understand it, the Carthage, MO plant is losing money. Money represents resources, so they are using more resources than they are gaining when they have a net loss.

I had to laugh when the management of the plant said they were planning to focus on European countries where the government was willing to subsidize their operations to make them profitable.

If you are concerned about the environment, then you should abhor operations like this which are net negative to the planet.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kingcoal', ' ') While the "free" oil from the earth allows us to live so frivolously, the other alternatives do not. Ever heard of EROEI?

[coyote]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('codesuidae', 'T')D is a cool way to process a waste stream...