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."

Re:Paranoid

[Anonymous Coward]

Discover magazine does April Fools jokes every year. Once, they even got cited by a creationist group for their story on pre-historic music.
So it's very, very possible that this is just for laughs.

Energy in vs. energy out?

[ThePyro]

This process isn't going to be free in terms of energy cost. At the very least they're heating a whole bunch of stuff up, pressurizing it, and then separating what's left. I'm curious... what's the energy cost of this method compared to the energy cost of the old way of refining oil?

Re:Odd quote

[mgessner]

I question this, too... if it's purified water, why can't it be sold? Is there some kind of federal or state regulation/legislation that prevents it?

Couldn't they use the water for drought? (Maybe there's not enough?) Couldn't they use it in products that require water but aren't for consumption (i.e. cleaners, ice packs, swimming pools ;) or SOMETHING?)

Maybe it's just not worth the effort to haul it around...