AgroWaste Oil Plant Starts Production 730
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo, and others has a story about the first Waste-to-Oil plant going online, and selling the oil commercially. Using TCP (Thermal Conversion Process), the plant is producing 100-200 barrels of No. 4 oil a day, and has the capacity to produce up to 500 barrels per day. With the amount of agricultural waste in the U.S., and many more of these plants, we could possibly reduce our need for foreign oil."
Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
sure it will be no problem to set up another 10,000 of these plants, and there
will be absolutely no government or corporate resistance, and the oil will be
just as good as what comes out of the ground and just as cheap!
Seriously, the only way we will reduce our dependence on foreign oil is if we
reduce our dependence on oil, period. And that will only happen when the price
of oil goes so high we actually have to stop driving our SUVs once in a while.
Then maybe we can just fuckin' IGNORE the middle east.
Drop in the bucket (Score:3, Insightful)
Production on a MUCH larger scale will be required for these plants to have any real impact..
Absurd (Score:0, Insightful)
Three simple words: Build more refineries. (Score:2, Insightful)
So why is there not more competition and more capacity in the refining business? Probably because there hasn't been a single new refinery built in over 17+ years. Why not? Probably because of these wacko environmental laws that make it ridiculously easy for all the Not In MY Back Yard (NIMBY) people to stop any progress from ever being made. Thanks to them, it is almost completely impossible to build any new refineries anymore.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you, NIMBY people, for making me pay more for my gasoline!!
Re:TCP/IP (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
No idea how much it costs to build one of these plants, but let's guess $20M. That'd be $200B to end our dependence on foreign oil. About the cost of the Iraq war.
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, redirection of organic waste that would otherwise end up elsewhere isn't a bad plan either. Perhaps if they started adding reprocessing plants to major landfills we could exchange waste for oil.
In the meantime, while SUV's etc are definately a problem, the high oil prices provide a visible indicator that perhaps such vehicles cost more than they're worth. Lots of oil is still being used for fueling things other than automobiles though.... so to be fair it's a lot more than just SUV drivers that need to cut back - overconsumption is a much more global issue.
This *is* useful (Score:5, Insightful)
100-200 barrels a day is NOT to laugh at, many privately owned oil wells produce far less than that per day. It still pays off to run them. And yes, it is realistic to set up hundreds or even thousands of these plants - I'd imagine many municipalities would be interested in using a plant like this to turn their waste into a resource rather than a drain. The process isn't just for turkey guts, it can convert plastic scrap, old tires, and other such refuse into oil as well.
So don't knock it just because the output seems puny - this can be used not only to reduce the dependence on foreign oil, it is also useful in creating a decentralized energy infrastructure.
Is TCP oil cleaner burning? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:2, Insightful)
While 500 barrels a day doesn't sound too exciting what it does provide is a way to dispose of material that is normally put into landfills. There is a company that has been doing something similar in Hawaii for some time. They collect the waste, convert it into desiel and other useable oils. They run all of their vehicles off of the desiel and sell the surplus at a nice profit.
As far as needing 10,000 of these plants, just think of how many meat packing plants, food processing plants, ranches, and farms there are in the US all of which would be suppliers of raw materials. If they were to tap into all of them, there is no reason why we couldn't drastically reduce our dependence on foriegn oil.
Re:Not that it will change prices (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well I, for one, hope that the SUV owners are the first ones on the draft list when it comes up. If you're going to use a disproportanate amount of gas, do your part in acquiring it! FYI, most of the oil coming to the US is coming from countries whose citizens either hate the US and/or hate their government.
Another thought here... (Score:1, Insightful)
You people really make me sick the way you think oil is only good for burning.
Re:ride a damn bike (Score:4, Insightful)
I just wonder how much energy this oil production plant needs to keep going if it wouldn't be able to run itself on the products of its refinement process, then it's not a net gain.
we could possibly reduce our need for foreign oil. (Score:2, Insightful)
Kill 'em all and let the market sort 'em out. (Score:3, Insightful)
Some good starting methods for making SUV owners bear a more proportionate share of their vehicles' burden on society:
- Increase gas taxes.
- Safety surcharge based on vehicle weight/height. (My personal favorite!)
- Increase emissions standards for vehicles.
Re:Oil (Score:5, Insightful)
I just wish I could put a cow on the back of my truck so I wouldn't have to pay the high price of gas today.
Re:Oil (Score:3, Insightful)
The logical error is your own. (Score:5, Insightful)
As for driving in ways that are prone to rollover; if you drive at highway speeds, you are prone to rollover if you have to avoid any sudden obstacle. Unless you're planning to avoid driving over say, 35 miles an hour, there's not a shitload you can do to actively avoid rollovers other than drive with reasonable caution.
SUVs are bad mojo from a safety perspective. Arguing that they'd be safer than cars if everyone drove a certain way is absolutely asinine in light of clear evidence that people don't drive that way.
Damn - Still no free lunch! (Score:3, Insightful)
I still want to know where this vast amount of agro waste is... U.S. farmers, in general, make use of everything they possibly can, to reduce their costs. What some classify as "waste" is reincorporated into the soil to replace nutrients that would otherwise require use of chemical fertilizers, which cause money. Farms don't have manure spreaders just because the farmers don't want a large trash bill! There have been farmers working with municipalities for decades to recycle our post-sewage-treatment crap as fertilizer, when the goverment will allow it.
That's not to say there isn't bio waste that could be recycled. Consumer food waste, for example, after you separate out the inorganics that don't fit municipal recycling rules. But that isn't free - someone (i.e., consumers) is going to have to pay the additional cost to do the separation, or make sure that those costs are less than what landfills charge to accept the waste. The aforementioned output of sewage plants, when blocked by government regulation from being incorporated into the soil, is another source.
The fact is, we don't have enough farm land under tillage in the world to supply both our food and energy needs. And I doubt environmentalists would enthusiastically support any efforts to correct that. This article describes an interesting side note in energy history, and it does point a way towards a way to truly incorporate "solar energy" into our current environment that does not require repaving our world with solar cells.
But (and this is where my hotbutton is triggered) the source of the "waste" used isn't going to be farms as we think of them today. Unless, of course, we find (or design!) a fast-growing plant that doesn't leach away the nutrients needed for food plants in the process, preferably one that can be used to reclaim land by breaking up "bad" soils, and working like legumes [osu.edu] to reduce land erosion and add nitrogen to the soil for later food crops, yet provide plenty of biomass for production of fuel. Maybe something socially acceptable enough to turn any vacant city lot into a "fuel farm", rather than using grass. Oh, and it can't kill off any exotic bugs or slugs in the process!
Gee, I wonder if the future biomass fuel companies will make it worth my time and money to take my 3+ acres of grass clippings for fuel production, rather than me just composting them?
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Example:
Aaron has 50 thousand dollars in the bank. The IRS has recently sent him a bill for delinquent taxes. Aaron must then consider if he needs to stay out of Federal PMITA prison, if he needs a new automobile and if he needs a United States address before he decides how much of his tax bill he can afford to pay. These needs fluctuate over time--for instance, few people thought they needed a SUV before 1990 or so, but gosh darn it, what if a cape buffalo starts charging down I-95, and those safari-tested features come in handy? Ah, the malleable subconscious...
Additionally, there's the whole societal thing. Tax subsidies, the cost of the occasional invasion, the possibility of global warming, the public health effects of air pollution... But as a egoist, you probably discount those as ephemeral next to your ability to pay for for the latest and greatest in penis engorgement systems.
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Feh. I can't speak for your country, but the only reason goddamn soccer mothers can afford SUV's in my country is because the government only tarrifs them at 5% instead of the regular 15% for passenger cars - i.e. the very opposite of free capitalism, government price interference.
This tarrif break was originally for farmers who required 4WD's/SUV's to work their land - it should not apply to people who aren't making their primary income from primary industry.
YLFII feel obliged to point out, btw, that not all SUV's/4WD's are gas guzzling monsters - Landrover Freelander is a good exception.
Planes and trains beat cars for fuel efficiency. (Score:5, Insightful)
To burst your bubble a little more, diesel-powered trains are significantly more efficient than planes or cars. A representative example would be the aggregate fuel efficiency of Burlington Northern [bnsf.com], a large freight railroad. 751.2 GTM (gross ton-miles per gallon) in 2003 for their entire fleet of trains. We'll stick with the previous poster's comparison to the Cadillac Escalade EXT. With a gross curb weight of 3175kg (3.5 standard tons) and highway fuel efficiency of 16 miles per gallon, the Escalade weighs in with a whopping 56.0 GTM.
So, freight trains are 13.41x as fuel-efficient as Escalades. Now that must be a surprise...
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, you've got it about right.
US demand is closer to 11 million barrels per day, and with over 20,000 factory farms in the US that could apply the technology, 10,000 is optimistic but not impossible. 5 million barrels a day won't supply all the demand, but it could reduce it 50% which means a lot.
Of course, since the net effect is to reduce the waste produced by factory farms, the government might actually mandate the building of the plants, but since the plants make money they'd probably be built anyway - government involvement will just make it happen faster. American oil is mostly in the oil refining business so they won't really mind have a second source for raw materials. The only companies likely to dislike it would are the oil drillers, oil shippers and of course OPEC.
And while the price will naturally be the same as the stuff that comes out of the ground, the price of both is likely to be lower than it would be without the plants online.
As for quality, it's supposedly the same, but since most oil is simply burned, I doubt it matters much if it's little higher or lower.
-- not a
It all has to do with the carbon cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, no. The waste would decay on its own naturally, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere upon doing so. At least through Thermal Depolymerization, we are harnessing the energy from that process. The reason fossil fuels in general cause global warming is that by drilling and burning them we are taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the air. Carbon from conventional petroleum has been sequestered in the ground for millions of years, while carbon from turkey guts has been part of the closed carbon loop, and thus does not add to the total amount of carbon in the cycle.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One Up-manship (Score:3, Insightful)
That is about average these days, and the "econobox" cars like the Civic (not including hybrid) get about 30 - 35MPG on the highway (the high end civic si being 30MPG). a whopping 4 - 9 miles per gallon increase.
Not to mention you can't tow a damn thing with a civic, and forget about merging onto the highway with four passengers as well.
more HP != worse gas mileage. It can if the car is geared towards performance, but thats not always the case. Any car thats in the 22MPG + range is fine. above 32MPG is outstanding.
Are we all supposed to get in a circle and sing hymns or some shit ? live in the exact same house, marry the exact same person and drive the exact same cars ? Not to mention having the exact same wants/uses for those cars ?
There is pointless - SUV, and there is slight overkill (350 HP) which would you preffer ? (oh and the reason most SUV's get bad mileage is because the engines are typically underpowered.)
Wrong view (Score:5, Insightful)
I also hear people say "the oil industry has too much power here for anything to change." This is also the wrong view. Sure, the oil industry does have a lot of power, but the result of their machinations is that our entire economy is dependent on a commodity which we must import from politically unstable and hostile parts of the world which are far away. There are plenty of other powerful industries in the US that have nothing to do with oil that must see this as a hazardous situation, one which should be remedied by moving the US to having multiple energy options to choose from, including cost-competitive domestic solutions. Is the oil industry in the US more powerful than all the other non-oil industries? I don't think so.
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Create a WAP server [chiralsoftware.net]
Untrue, the actuarial tables are interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be charitable, I will assume that you are considering only bodily injury liability, since most other insurance coverage is directly related to a vehicle's cost.
The actual costs to an insurance company from an SUV accident are masked by the following factors:
In multiple-vehicle accidents:
Responsibility: The cost of the accident is covered by the insurance of the party who caused the accident. Which vehicle caused the most damage or which vehicle is unsafe has little to no correlation with who pays.
In single-vehicle accidents:
Rollover accident spread: In rollovers, the typical range of injuries is far more narrow than in the aggregate of auto accidents. Typically, either the passengers remain in the vehicle and do not sustain serious injuries, or they are ejected from the vehicle and die. Dead people cost the insurance company significantly less than ongoing hospitalization for serious/chronic injuries.
In a microcosm of the SUV concept in general, the overall increased insurance cost of having SUVs on the road is distributed across the entire spectrum of auto owners.
Look back at historical examples of unsafe vehicles and you will see a similar trend. The risk posed by one model of vehicle has very little relation to the cost of insuring a person driving that vehicle.
Re:Oil (Score:3, Insightful)
Producing oil from agricultural products can only release carbon that has been extracted from the air before.
This gives you a net zero effect on CO2. Great, isn't it?
Re:Wrong view (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that we need government incentives (like no taxes, even after making a profit, for a period of time). I'm no expert, but there has to be thousands of creative incentives for getting these things going instead of putting up barriers to hinder their progress. The oil industry already benefits from corporate welfare. There is no reason that alternative energy shouldn't. Once it ramps up, the costs will come down, and output should go up.
Good news! (Score:4, Insightful)
1. 500 barrels is of course nearly nothing, but this does has the potential to become significant - see other posts.
2. The primary aim is to solve a waste problem, which this technology seems to do in a brilliant way.
3. It may also help reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. When you burn farm waste, you release CO2 into the athmosphere, true, but that's where it came from - the plants have taken CO2 out to build up carbohydrates. Contrast this with fossil fuel, where you produce CO2 that was taken out many hundred million years ago, which can only increase the levels of CO2. On top of that, when the farm waste isn't left to rot, less methane is produced, which again can make a big difference.
All in all - this seems good and sensible through and through. Which makes me fear that some narrowminded and greedy idiot with too much money and power will want to kill it off.
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Future plants will be bigger, and make more.
And this is totally worth doing. They are taking stuff that is currently garbage, that somebody must pay to dispose of, and they are turning it into oil. And the process will rip apart any bacteria (and even prions) in the input.
If I understand it correctly, they could actually process sewage into oil! You could actually dig up garbage dumps, process them, and get oil and minerals back.
This is totally great, and I wish them all success.
steveha
.. and you think this is a GOOD thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Our demand is decided upon access. If we have a low oilprice, we WILL use more oil. If we use more oil we will have more exhaustion. This merely means we will be using _more_ oil than before since we have a larger pool of it.
Its an catch-22 argument, but when we humans find new resources to exploit we always increase the surrounding effects on environment. Lets say we succeed to create efficient fusion-power. Yes! Instant o-rama deluxe flying cars with jetpacks. Great thing dr Wilchenstein?
We'll have to build new skyroads, new cars, new jetpacks. Using this new resource will allow us to build other things from the resources we are now already using. With new energy-resources we will be able to do "new things" like going to the moon,
flying more, generally travel more. All of this might sound good, but it will in the long term put more and more strain on the resources we use from earth.
Re:Don't be so quick to judge... (Score:3, Insightful)
One more thing. If the demand for oil continues to increase at the rate it currently is, in whatever form, then there is no way we could hope to grow enough biomass to replace traditional oil supplies.
How much is a barrel? (Score:3, Insightful)
The plant produces 500 barrels per day, that's $20,500 per day or $7.5 million per year turnover. They are very cagey about the costs and payback period. This kind of thing has been possible for years, it just has never been economically feasable. It all depends on how much a plant costs to build, how much the waste costs and what the running costs are.
Definitely a good idea to see your waste as a resource though.
how about cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It all has to do with the carbon cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course not, but you're overlooking some critical parts of the process:
First, All of the carbon involved was taken out of the air to begin with as the plants grow. (which are the start of the cycle, whether you are using plant or animal wastes as feedstock). So Even in the worst case scenario, the net increase in CO2 from straight burning of the waste is ZERO.
Second, the TCP process yields more products than just light crude oil:
1) Light Crude oil
2) High quality fertilizer (as a solid)
3) Solid carbon
4) Medium to high quality fuel gas (methane, used internally to the process)
And a few other products in no real quantity...
The key here is that one of the products is solid carbon, which is almost as good as coal in terms of energy density should you use it as fuel. However, it is more useful (physically and economically) to use as an activated carbon filter for water treatment, because of the quality of the product.
In other words, at worst the process has a zero net increase of carbon from the atmosphere if you use 100% of the products as fuel and at best a net decrease if you don't. Plus it produces fertilizers and materials that can be used for water treatment! Talk about eco-friendly!
=Smidge=
Reduce demand (Score:2, Insightful)
Turn you car off when stopped and never leave it idling.
Common misconceptions (Score:2, Insightful)
The crude supply is drying up
Indeed it is, in 100 years or more.
why else would we be invading other countries despite the human, military, political, and fiscal cost?
Are you suggesting we invaded Afghanistan for oil? We invaded Iraq because it was run by a genocidal maniac who reneged on a previous surrender agreement. The Clinton administration showed us once again that you cannot allow threats to national security to grow unchecked. Clinton's dereliction forced President Bush to clean up the mess.
The White House is full of oil execs - they're just trying to ensure future profitability.
I would say that they are trying to insure future prosperity for America. That is their job after all.
Re:Planes and trains beat cars for fuel efficiency (Score:2, Insightful)
(a) an Escalade that took 15 minutes to go from a dead stop to full speed and took 3 miles to stop
OR
(b) a train that could go from dead stop to full speed in 20 seconds and execute a full-speed brake maneuver in 300 feet.
- Tony
Re:New RFC? (Score:4, Insightful)
If there was a silver bullet to our tricky problems, the Lone Ranger would have showed up by now. I think our energy dependancy and reliance on fossil fuels will need to change incrementally (not to discount a sense of urgency either). It is a workable problem (always the optimist) and fortunately the business drivers will increase as oil supplies become more both financially and environmentally costly to extract.
Re:SUVs are a subset of the transportation sector (Score:2, Insightful)
It's this attitude that bothers me. In many cases it's not that we don't choose to use mass transit, it's that we CAN'T choose to use mass transit. Europeans are generally blessed in that nearly every major city in Europe has efficient mass transit. Europe also has a much higher population density, which results in mass transit being more efficient in non-urban areas as well.
In the U.S., however, the population is much more spread out. I currently live in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, where subway and bus lines are convenient, and I use them when I can (I am very fortunate in that I live about a mile from my office and can actually walk to work). Only crazy people and those whose office is too distant from a metro station actually drive into the city.
An interesting note, here, however, is that it is actually more economical for my wife to drive to work rather than to metro, even though there is a train station within a couple of blocks of each end of the trip and the trip takes about the same time each way. The cost of the metro for a week is not less than the cost of gas and parking. Why is this? I wish I knew. Fixing this problem would make mass transit a much more attractive solution.
However, in redneck America (rural Michigan) where I grew up, it was twenty miles to the nearest grocery store. Mass transit is nonexistent for a reason: The population is so spread out that it's simply not economical to establish a mass transit system. A sizable percentage of Americans live in locations with similar problems.
Now, with regard to the Maryland and Virginia residents around me who spend three hours in their Ford Battlecruiser or Toyota Juggernaught to get to work when they could have hopped the bus or the train within a block or two of their house... I have no excuse for them. I assume they are mentally incompetent and have too much money, as they seem to be throwing it away on gas and parking. If they are the problem you are referring to, then by all means, flame away. They suck.
Re:It all has to do with the carbon cycle (Score:4, Insightful)
1) More CO2 is released by burning argicultural waste (either directly or from fuels refined from it) than if you just buried it and let it rot. This is what you explained in your original post.
BUT
2) The TCP process, and the burning of fuels recovered from it, does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. This is what I was explaining in my original post. (Incidentally, the original post to which you replied was not mine.) I then suggested that it could, depending on the use of the products, REDUCE atmospheric CO2.
AND
3) Using fuels refined from the TCP process can offset use of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels increases CO2 because it is using carbon that has been buried for millions of years, and our ecosystem has adjusted to be balanced without it. This is what the first reply (by Mr. AC) was talking about.
PLUS
4) By manufacturing a suitable fuel (and somed other goodies) "in house", countries can decrease their dependency on imported oil and fossil fuels in general.
Add it all up, and you get a Very Good Thing(tm), so in summary the thread starter AC was an uninformed dipsh*t, and let's hope economics and politics don't kill TCP waste-processing plants which could be the very solution to many our fuel problems and many others.
=Smidge=
Re:Oil (Score:3, Insightful)
Firstly it's not called Thermal Conversion Process. The actual process is called "Thermal Depolymerization".
Secondly, I see it as a two step process.
Firsly, since you can feed anything you want into these plants, I think that if you built a couple plants in each state (it would depend on the number of people) you could send..
a) all agro waste (corn cobs, etc)
b) human waste (poop, etc)
c) all non metal trash.
Plus these machines have proven themselves capable of digesting Antrax and pretty much every other biological and chemical weapon into inert substances.
What we need is for our (US) government to put Apollo type money into this project.
Right now we (Americans) are being held hostage by OPEC and our dependance of foreign oil.
Now, once we have lots of these plants operational, we move into Step 2. This would consist of taking the oil that these plants produce and cracking the hydrogen out of it.
I do understand that this second process would create C02, that aspect would have to be addressed.
The mod system on slashdot isn't perfect. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually the mark of a good mod because the points just aren't supposed rewards for good writing, they're ways to bring interesting ideas, questions and answers to the forefront.
Re:Oil (Score:2, Insightful)
If we can move most or all of our fixed electrical grid to renewable resources like solar, wind, and hydro-electric power, a sufficiently large network of these conversion plants could create all the automotive fuel we need.
AND remove our dependence upon foreign nations for energy.
AND keep all of the money spent on energy in the hands of businesses based in the US.
AND keep tens of thousands of Americans employed.
I'm all for it.
Re:500?? 500???????!!!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SUVs are a subset of the transportation sector (Score:2, Insightful)
Most, not all but MOST, Europeans have no idea how LARGE the United States really is. I've seen even well education Englishman come away awe struck at the size of our country when all they did was visit the east coast and the southern US!
Our country is AWESOMELY large and outside of the coastal areas our population density is fairly low. For instance in Wyoming, where I live, the population density is 13.13 per square kilometer. The state of Nebraska, a next door neighbor, is 25.2 per square kilomter.
For contrast the UK is roughly **242** per square kilometer! France is at 107, Germany 235 and Italy 195!
Now that you can see the difference in population density it is not difficult to understand why many Americans do not have Mass Transit as an option, it is simply not economically feasible to provide them with it.
In all while most of the civilized world bashes on us for our "Car Centric Culture" they are failing to understand the challenges presented to our population by the sheer scale of our landmass.
You can drive across most countries in Europe in less time then it would take me to cross the State of Nebraska!
As for morons driving SUV's in the city, they should be beaten with large sticks.