Wastage is a real problem in our modern economy. Look at this nonsense - we buy everything packaged in plastic of one sort or another, right? And then we use it once or twice and throw it out. There's plastic recycling for two kinds of plastic, but there's no demand for the other kinds; so they just end up in landfills, where they take up space and do no good, or in incinerators, where they give up their chemical energy and reform into various extremely poisonous compounds. Not good.
That's just packaging, too. What about food waste? There's tons of that too. You know, I bet meat-packing plants throw away a fair amount of stuff. I bet restaurants do too - not just the used oil, which can be filtered and put into Diesel tanks, but pan scrapings and other kinds of smelly crap that are less obviously useful and just get thrown out to go into, yes, landfills.
There are two ways that present themselves immediately, in terms of reducing wastage. One is getting people to buy less stuff, and getting them to buy it in more reusable containers. It's a great idea, and there is plenty of future in it, but it requires broad behavior modification on a more or less national, maybe even global scale. The other way is to find a way to turn the stuff you throw away into something useful.
Along comes a new technology that says, "Give me your organic garbage, your sludge and slime you have little use for, and I'll take it, munch it up on a molecular level and give you fuel oil."
What can you say to that?
I, for one, will say "HELL YEAH."
Why do we need fuel oil, anyway? Well, one thing about it that's really useful as portable energy. Unlike solid fuels (like wood, coal, or uranium), liquids are readily vaporized or aerosolized, so the technology for turning liquid fuels into work can be made fairly compact. Solid fuels require bulky and complex machinery to do the same - boilers, heat exchangers, all that in addition to pistons or turbines. And unlike gaseous fuels, liquid fuels are easy to pump and carry around. Petrochemical liquid fuels, like automotive fuel, packs a pretty hefty amount of energy into a relatively small and lightweight package. What's not to like? Where electric power is impractical but you just can't do without portable energy, fuel oil will be in high demand.
Fundamentally, fuel oils - and most fuel gases, and solid fuels - store energy in the form of carbon chains. The precise structure of the chains varies, which varies the available energy content of a given molecule, but the details are not too important.
The interesting thing is that most plastics, cooking oils, meat scraps, and so on are also made up of carbon chains, but in different arrangements - more complex bonds, usually, and often much larger molecules, plus various other compounds mixed in that alter the hardness, strength, color, or other properties.
A long time ago, someone invented a method of turning organically complex matter into fuel - turning wood into charcoal. That's just a simple example of what I mean, though, and it has plenty of associated problems, ranging from deforestation to the fact that charcoal just doesn't burn that cleanly and it's often used for cooking. (Have you had your daily dose of mega-carcinogens?) But, well... our modern industry relies more on oil to feed its hunger for high-energy fuel and for feedstock. What if we could turn organic stuff, not into charcoal, but into oil?
There's a way to do it, surely enough. It's called thermal depolymerization, and it's marketed as the thermal conversion process by Changing World Technologies.
I'm not an organic chemist. I only got a C in organic chemistry. I will try to be both concise and factually accurate with the next bit. If you see problems, please point them out.
The thermal conversion process takes more or less any organic waste you please, grinds it up, and then heats it under high pressure. The water in the feedstock (which may have water added to it, on the way in) reacts with the organic chains, adding hydrogen atoms to them (which reduces triple carbon-carbon bonds to double, and double to single). The stuff is then dried, leaving behind various minerals and a thick organic sludge similar to crude oil. The minerals are separated out, the sludge is pumped into a different set of tanks, and, well, the rest is just refining.
Plant operators involved in running such factories - such as the one in Carthage, MO, which uses the politely named "offal" from a nearby ConAgra turkey processing plant - have made claims of efficiencies up to 85%. That is to say, if you look at the total energy content of everything that goes into the plant, including the turkey bits, electricity, and fuel, the output has 85% of that energy available in it. Only 15% (so they say) is wasted. To compare, a very well-designed piston engine wastes "only" about 70%, maybe 75% of the energy you feed to it (25%-30% of the gasoline's energy turns into useful work), and a human body's muscles are about 10% effective at turning food into work. The Carthage plant is said to be self-sufficient in terms of fuel, because some of the oil it produces is burned to heat the reaction vessels. Interestingly, most oil refineries have flame stacks that, if I understand correctly, are burning off volatile hydrocarbons. I wonder why they don't draw those off to use or sell them as fuel.
Just as a minor ending point, I would like to point out that chemical reactions don't care where outside heat is coming from. Sure, you could burn hydrocarbons to heat up your reaction vessels, but you could also heat them with a heat exchanger driven by, say, nuclear fission. If the USA were to adopt nuclear power on a large scale as one of the energy technologies for a less petroleum-dependent economy, including the use of fast breeder reactors to recycle spent fuel, then the abundance of extremely hot reactor cores would mean some entrepreneurial-minded plant owner could divert some of that heat away from generating electricity and toward powering something like this waste-to-oil technology.
In summary, it works like this:
- Acquire heat. If it belongs to someone else and he'll pay you to take away some of the heat, even better.
- Acquire organic garbage. If it comes from someone who'll pay you to take it away, even better.
- Combine heat and garbage to make oil. Sell the oil.
- Profit. Obscenely.
And that just about wraps that up.
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Previous MSPW diaries can be found as follows (and don't read them if you're trying to preserve your unwarped mind):
Nuclear airplanes, psychic powers, transgenic bacteria that make useful compounds, lightning in a jar, neural interfaces, powered armor, sonic weapons, rapid prototyping, putting Mentos and Diet Coke to good use, life on life support, combining farming and electrical generation, pigeon pilots, cuttlefish behind the wheel, the hafnium bomb, and building a better skunk.