From Turkey Guts to Fuel Oil

Untimely Ripp'd writes "The latest issue of Discover Magazine reports that any day now a plant will go online in Carthage, Missouri that processes turkey guts into high grade oil, natural gas, some minerals, and water. Unfortunately, the Discover article isn't online yet, but here's a newspaper article. The system, developed by Changing World Technologies uses thermal depolymerization and apparently works on almost any and every kind of organic waste. They assert that applying it to 100% of the US' agricultural waste would produce about 4 billion barrels of oil per year -- about the amount we currently import. It sounds too good to be true, it sounds like one of those fly-by-night-in-the-face-of-the-second-law deals, but it isn't happening in somebody's basement -- it's happening in a multi-million dollar facility developed with Con-Agra."

This is wonderful

[madfgurtbn]

Something like this could really help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. I betcha the oil industry is going to try to discredit this breakthrough in energy technology.

Re:Paranoid

[Anonymous Coward]

And Discover would never run an April [museumofhoaxes.com] fools [museumofhoaxes.com] article.

Economics of disposal/recycling

[jonbrewer]

But [James Stoffer] added that while the plant may be a "tough go" economically, it's worth the investment because of what it promises for the environment.

If such companies [factoryfarm.org] actually paid fines for breaking environmental laws by polluting with livestock wastes, they would not find reprocessing a "tough go" economically. Unfortunately, the EPA doesn't have the balls to go after even the most blatant of violators, and thus the food-processors get away with murder.

When Con-Agra rolls out such zero-emissions factories everywhere (As William McDonough writes of in Cradle to Cradle [slashdot.org]) I will happily invest in their stock and buy their products.

If it's not a joke...

[Anonymous Coward]

... it's a tragedy. This clearly demonstrates that the government has plenty of money to support the development of new energy technologies. What we ought to be spending all this cash on, though, is alternative energy sources. Perhaps if we started behaving responsibly we could become an oil-independent economy. Just think: no more needless pollution, no more economic slavery to foreign powers, and no need to meddle in the middle east and piss off the rest of the world! Instead (again, if this article is legit), this technology lets us generate even more oil, and we're just going to continue polluting the atmosphere and remove all pressure for the development of cleaner energy technologies.

-Jadrian

Re:THIS IS NOT AN APRIL'S FOOLS DAY STORY

[nanojath]

It's not an April Fool's day story, and it isn't exactly new news - it's another process for converting biomass (the use of turkey as the prime example is unfortunate because it promotes the hoax claim, but given the article was originally published early December it was probably a post-Thanksgiving kind of novel angle thing.

There are a lot of biomass reduction techniques going on to produce combustible fuels. As the article states they all run into the same problem - economics. Nature did all the heavy work on crude oil for us - so naturally from the perspective of in the ground to a watt or a mile or whatever, the price of oil is hard to beat, particularly given its enormous infrastructure advantage. Even if you're using "free" feedstocks (i.e. wastes) the processing cost can be a killer.

So, for these fuels to make any impact, they generally need to be subsidized somehow. The article makes it clear that the economics of this fuel source are far from proven.

There are little startups like this all over the place. So far none of the techniques developed have made a serious impact on our use of oil. Without real public and government support for changing our energy base, this one probably won't either.

Question

[lobsterGun]

I have to think that the amount of energy required to heat all that organic matter up to 500 degrees is not going to be insubstancial.

So just how energy efficient is this process?