Discover - Anything into Oil

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: JELyon <jelyon () mac com>
Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 07:41:15 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Discover - Anything into Oil

I haven't seen this on IP, and think it might be of interest. I'm
wondering about the ecological ramifications of actually burning this
oil.

Full text at:

     http://www.discover.com/may_03/gthere.html?article=featoil.html

Begin forwarded message:

Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and
other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year

By Brad Lemley

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 a! ssembled 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."

--
Posted by John Lyon to :: JELyon's Rampage :: at 4/17/2003
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