[Tanada]

The good thing about TD is it can be used to refine heavy oils into diesel 4, which is still a popular shipping fuel, and they also claim they can convert Lignite to oil more efficiently than Fisher-Tropsch, but I want to see proof of that one before I beleive it.

[MD]

We will always generate waste, and that waste must be processed.

The most environmentally friendly method of waste handling looks something like this:

Waste disposal should be very expensive by mandate, in order to reduce frivolous behavior.

Thorough recycling of inorganics follow, again by mandate, and at no cost to the consumer.

Organics are composted.

What little remains, go ahead and burn, preferably with plasma to minimize the pile of poisonous material left over.

No matter what you do, the whole process is an energy sink, but it is far better than covering it all with dirt.

[Frank]

I agree with MD. But, we can't even get a national bottle bill in this country! This was discussed in Congress five years ago but got lost in the shuffle after 9/11. Most of the aluminum in beverage cans is still landfilled. What a waste. We can't even do the easy things correctly.

[OneLoneClone]

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[Veritas]

Sounds like nobody actually has any numbers or evidence against this technology, but rather a fervent commitment to doomsday scenarios.

Human beings have and always will produce waste, oil or no oil.

To me the questions that should be answered regarding TDP are:

1. What are the "Waste products" that can be used? (is it quite literally anything organic?)

2. How much waste yields how much fuel?

3. What is the cost/feasibility of building TDP facilities, what size of region is optimum for providing a stream of input and capturing economies of scale?

I mean, can you toss in all the junk from your attic into a TDP vat and get 4 barrels of oil out? Could we take the vast majority of whats in landfill sites (and what is currently destined for those sites) today and turn that into oil?

The example always relates to the turkey facility, but my understanding is TDP is not a Turkey into Oil recipe, but an Anything Organic into oil recipe. So it is not reliant on a butterball factory to operate, and debunks that hinge on explaining why mass produced turkey will not exist in the future are fallacious.

Ideally you could give a scenario of a current community and the waste it generates as is, and talk about how much of that waste could be changed into fuel, and compare that to the current fuel consumption of the community.

I find people on this board are real quick to show how each individual alternative cannot replace oil, but reluctant to talk about an aggregate of alternative energies paired with conservation efforts.

Yes we need 10 000 nuclear plants if nuclear replaced oil. Or 200 000 km squared of PV panels, or thousands upon thousands of acres for biomass/corn. But what is a real scenario of photovoltaic + wind + biodiesel + TDP + hydroelectric + everything else. What is the future shortfall of energy if we add all of the alternatives (in viable quantities) together, how much could be met by reducing demand through conservation, and could the remainder be made up by nuclear?

I hear all these polemic examples, but not many realistic ones. No wind won't replace oil, not even close, but how much could it replace? And how much could PV replace? How much could TDP replace? And when we add it all up whats our shortfall? Are we at 50% of oil or 5% of oil or 80%?

I was right there with everyone seeing a huge problem coming down, but the real problem is nobody is talking about energy in aggregate. They pick one technology and show how it can't replace oil, rather than talking about how much it could provide and then adding it with other sources to see where we might be at.

[nocar]

Rich countries, and rich people create lots of waste, poor countries and poor people create little waste. If you are hungry most of the time, you will eat the turkey parts that today are waste, like the liver, heart, gizzard, perhaps lungs. And you might lick your plate clean. If you are really poor, you will not throw out your old furniture, but repair it, or perhaps put it to other uses. Wooden things that are seriously without any other value can always end up in the fireplace to provide heat.
In Sweden (rich country, lots of waste) lots of waste end up in incinerators that provide district heating. It is an efficiency thing, rather than a technology, but it means that we already use the waste, and we will have less waste to heat houses when the peak oil effects really sets in, some decades into the future.

You can never make more energy out of any material than the energy that it contains. All organic material contains some energy, and will burn if dry. Making heat directly is probable the most efficient way of utilizing the energy (besides composting or feeding pigs or chickens, if we are talking leftovers). I believe it is possible to make car fuel out of many organic things but the process is complicated and you lose energy in the many transformations. Most car fuel (about 70-80 percent from my understanding) end up as heat anyway. Only about 20 percent of the energy content of gasoline actually drives the car.

So: After peak oil when most of us will get much poorer, our stream of waste will evaporate to a trickle. And then, when energy becomes scarce, why waste energy on driving cars and aeroplanes?
nocar

[JRP3]

One thing they found is that while they can get oil from anything the reality is that different feedstocks take different processing parameters so it's most efficient to setup for one type, (turkey guts in this case), and you need a steady supply of it.
Also, the plant needs to be near the supply or transport costs kill the efficiency.
As long as we have a large supply of crap to feed it TD probably can work.
But when resources become limited we won't have so much readily available "fuel" for TD, and again, the transport costs become astronomical.

[Veritas]

Update - I was reading the bit on TDP in Kunstler's Long Emergency and he gives a few numbers...

TDP has "85% efficiency", meaning that it takes 15 BTU's to run the process for each 100 BTU's of energy produced.

One problem seems to be that its not as simple as just dumping a bunch of waste in and cooking it into oil. Different waste requires different processing. So a plant has to be setup to process a certain way. I'd imagine the same plant could be changed to different temperature/pressure to cook various types of inputs, but sorting those inputs in the first place would be an issue.



While there's no citation or math behind this estimate, he states:

"Even if all the garbage produced every day in the US under current conditions was converted into oil by TDP it would not amoutn to even 5% of our current consumption of oil."

Which answers a bit of what I wanted to know. The best-case-scenario is that TDP could provide 5% of current oil consumption. And this best-case scenario is not likely to be reached or even approximated, given the nature of the inputs required (the infamous turkey example).

[zoidberg]

As I read somewhere else the best way to look at TDP is as a high tech recycling method. Not an energy source, so please dont get too hung up on the eating shit analogies.

Personally I think that setting up a few plants to work on raw sewage is a good way to process the damn stuff and get something useful from it. As things stand now we process the stuff and get no useful byproducts.(well maybe we get to avoid cholera, but you know what I mean).

On the same note reprocessing our landfills will surely become viable industry down the road.

To sum up TDP - not a cure or even an acutal oil source, but a good way to stretch our resources a little. That is assuming we can get it to work in an economical fashion. Which we cant yet. So I'd have to say its a nonstarter, but potentially useful.

[zoidberg]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'Y')es zoilberg the analogy might be closer to a shit-powered toilet paper.

TDP is a slight mitigation for the waste produced by our industrial food system. In a more sustainable, localized, and decentralized world the turkey poop would fertilize the garden and the guts would feed the chickens/pigs.

[pup55]

The long time viewers of PO.com no doubt remember the Thermal Depolymerization plant in Carthage MO, designed to take "offal" from a nearby turkey processing plant, and turn it into crude oil. So as to keep an ever watchful PO.com eye on this development, here is an update:

As a reminder, the operation was discussed in detail in the following threads:

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic505-0-asc-75.html

http://peakoil.com/fortopic25084.html+depolymerization

http://peakoil.com/fortopic2189.html

To summarize, this plant was constructed out in the country in the 2004 time frame, and had two problems: Tyson refused to give away the feedstock (turkey guts), preferring instead to sell it to someone who was using it for feed, and the odor from the plant was so excessive that the townspeople could not stand it.

Update: the plant, now operating under the name Renewable Environmental Resources:

RES Website

....has made #6 on the list of Top 10 stories of 2006, in the Carthage Press, the town newspaper:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n June, the state Attorney General's Office and Renewable Environmental Solutions in Jasper County Circuit Court to settle a lawsuit for six Notice of Violations for alleged odor at a penalty of $100,000.

[fluffy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pup55', '
')Anyway, it remains to be seen if these guys will ever make a dime at this. We will continue to follow this story periodically just for the pure joy of seeing what it takes to get an alternative energy process off the ground.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('fluffy', '
')(b) The actual amount of available feedstock simply isn't that big. How many turkeys did you eat today?

[Kingcoal]

Sure, turkey crude is cool, but as with many, many other "alternatives," I doubt it has a real EROEI above 1. Turkeys will go extinct long before we ever even get to a billion barrels.

[fluffy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kingcoal', 'S')ure, turkey crude is cool, but as with many, many other "alternatives," I doubt it has a real EROEI above 1. Turkeys will go extinct long before we ever even get to a billion barrels.

[piper]

This process seems to be up and running now.

Fractional depolymerization

http://www.globalfinest.com/tech

Worth a look

[Veritas]

Isn't TDP just one big BS scam? I read the article there by Paul Palmer, PhD Chemist - sorry I dont have the link copied but its the mindfully.org one earlier in the thread.

From page 3:

"Do you know what is being described here? A mountain of turkey guts, conssiting of protein, water, grease, saccharides, bones, and more is being subjected to steam. Out of all this, the grease is melted, steamed out, and collected. All the rest of it is left over. Some protein may be actually depolymerized leaving amino acids or just protein fragmetns. Most everything else is probably unchanged. As a pure guess, I would guess that 90% of the mass passes thru without significant change. Feathers, bone, dirt, are not going to be affected and if they are, or were, their breakdown products don't even resemble oil (excuse me, Texas light crude).

Let me speak to the attitude of marvel you surround this trivial operation with. This is something I learned to do from my mother and my guess is you did too. How many times have I put a turkey or chicken carcass into a pot of boiling water, cooled it down, and skimmed off the grease? Is this a revolutionary technological breakthrough in your book?" Paul Palmer.

What I've seen:

1. The only operational plant uses turkey guts/offal.
2. No scientific study has ever been done on how TDP "works".
3. The plants are strictly off-limits to the public, journalists, etc and the process is a "safely guarded secret".

Despite the claim that they can turn "garbage" into oil, is it not true that all we know is that they skimmed the grease off of boiled turkey?

[bmcics]

Looks good, they are selling these to landfills the claim is the ability to process all landfill waste into high quality diesel fuel

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