The New Alchemy: Turn Anything Into Oil

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fbg1

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I submitted this to /., but I'll post it here too. This sounds too good to be true, so I'm curious as to what some of the more informed B3D readers think of it. A simple yet promising innovation to Thermal Depolymerization appears to provide a very efficient process for getting oil and other useful materials out of industrial waste. Briefly, any carbon-based refuse can be decomposed into light crude oil, natural gas, industrially useful minerals, and sterilized water, with 85% efficiency and no toxic byproducts. Proof of concept is done, pilot projects are in the works, and widespread industry adaptation is expected by 2005. Here's the Discover article. The article gives all pros and no cons; is that b/c there are no cons to this new invention?

http://www.discover.com/may_03/gthere.html?article=featoil.html
 
Actually this has been possible for a long long long time, the problem is economics it is generally cheaper to pump oil from the ground and refine it than to get it from other products.

If you know what oil actually it i.e. 95% octane, it is not surprising you can make complex hydrocarbon chains into oil, such as cracking which is what refineries do anyway.

"This technology is as old as the hills,"
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As he says lol.

As I said the problem is simply which is cheaper to do. I mean we could use solar power to make eletricity, but it is an expensive investment.
 
Sxotty said:
Actually this has been possible for a long long long time, the problem is economics it is generally cheaper to pump oil from the ground and refine it than to get it from other products.
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The whole point of the article is that this process solves exactly that problem. Did you read it all? With this new process, it is cheaper and more efficient to get oil from waste products than from the ground. They estimate it can provide $15 - $20 barrels of oil, vs. the current ~$23 - ~$30 per barrel.
 
Sorry mate,
I did skim it and did not see that stated, however as always i'll believe it when I see it. I do no question it is valuable though even if it were twice as expensive as getting it from the ground, it would still be cheaper in 30 years. You see what I mean, so it is a good thing anyway. Reducing our reliance on despots for oil would also be a side benefit. Then maybe we can let them all squable over their worthless product :).

Remember that oil from the ground is way way cheaper than what it is listed if OPEC did not artifically inflate the price. Might start a little price war.

I liked the part about global warming, and I did read that carefully because I had doubts about their claims. I still do have doubts but at least it made sense once I read it.
 
Cool.

Does that mean that a country which, for example, produces more rubbish than any other will be a potential target for future military actions to ensure that their political regime is acceptable to the rest of the world?
 
IMHO the US of A is probably the country which produces more rubbish than any others :)
 
Heh, I'd imagine it would go something like this:

UN: You can't invade without UN authorization!
US: Oh yes we can! They're the world's largest producers of trash oil, we have to stabilize their regime!
UN: No you can't, it's illegetimate without UN permission!
US: You have no credibility anyway!

[US invades itself while the French impotently complain about hyperpower unilateralism, Russia supplies military technology to all sides, peaceniks protest that "it's all about oil".]
 
pcchen said:
IMHO the US of A is probably the country which produces more rubbish than any others :)
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Yep. Afaik, that's an undisputed fact. Which is why this TDP process could be a truly paradigm-shifting technology if it works as claimed. The US could produce all its own oil and will no longer have to get it from Mideast dictatorships and islmofascists. Also, for the first time in human history we will have a closed economy, in which trash is recycled into non-toxic, useful byproducts. A major triumph of entrepeneurialism and free-markets. Since this process is already up and running, and it isn't some university experiment or overhyped bauble, it looks like it just may be the real deal.
 
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.
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I always had the feeling "organ donor" cards were only the first step, "bodily resource donor" here I come! Just imagine the possibilities, people stalking the streets pulling a cart, ringing a bell and calling out "bring out yer dead" to earn an extra penny. Or think about capital punishment, the words "are you ready to repay your debt to society" could REALLY mean something in the future... ;)
 
I understand that many Americans have problems with Obesity. I wonder, would self-funded liposuction be economical?

Get 200lbs of excess fat sucked out, stick it into the TDP process and sell the byproducts to fund the liposuction. ( :p , obviously). :p
 
Mariner said:
I understand that many Americans have problems with Obesity. I wonder, would self-funded liposuction be economical?

Get 200lbs of excess fat sucked out, stick it into the TDP process and sell the byproducts to fund the liposuction. ( :p , obviously). :p
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You just turned me off eating for about 10 years. :LOL:
 
In Germany all major automotive companies ( VW, Audi, BMW ) work on something similiar. They try to produce "sunfuel" if I remember the name correct. This synthetic fuel is said to allow higher mpg, and you get lower waste out of the exhaust. This should allow ULEV or EU4 compliant cars more easily.

The sunfuel is produces from waste too, but from farming waste, like hay, wheat etc..

One major drawback of this sort of fuel is, that you need a very large amount of factories to produce the fuel, cause otherwise you increase the cost of the fuel beyond economic sense due to the high transportation costs of the waste products you have to collect from all the farmers and waste-producers.

Otherwise this drawback is an advantage too. You have to employ more people for the same amount of fuel produced and so the economy in all the regions of the country get an boost.

edit : sunfuel is correct :

http://www.sunfuel.de/kss_engl/top_ks.html
 
fbg1 said:
Heh, I'd imagine it would go something like this:

UN: You can't invade without UN authorization!
US: Oh yes we can! They're the world's largest producers of trash oil, we have to stabilize their regime!
UN: No you can't, it's illegetimate without UN permission!
US: You have no credibility anyway!

[US invades itself while the French impotently complain about hyperpower unilateralism, Russia supplies military technology to all sides, peaceniks protest that "it's all about oil".]
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You forgot: Blair orders London bombed in show of solidarity with US.
 
:LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: :LOL: i cant stop laughing its so funny yet so TRUE!!!!! BWAHAHAHAHA ok anyhow, and you actually think that this new cheap oil will make it into common use? there's a lot of very rich people that would end up loosing money on a deal like that and, in the US dollars have much more powerful votes than people and, lets not forget, the US seems to now have taken the job of neighborhoob bully and is willing to go to war without the approval of the internaional approval with unbelievably strong support of its over-zealous citizens and with Blair telling everyone "it will be ok, they are right, we would be better off with the US's #&%$ up the worlds @$$."

oh, and yes, im an american.
 
Sage said:
there's a lot of very rich people that would end up loosing money on a deal like that and,
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Precisely how so?

On the other hand, America's crude oil refining and reprocessing companies could find this source of oil a much more profitable one than the OPEC cartel controlled MidEast sources. For example, say OPEC sets the price at $25/barrel, which is about the recent average. The US companies have to buy it, ship it over here, and process it into whatever petroleum products they make. Plus, they have to deal with the perennial uncertainty inherent in the MidEast, which makes financial planning difficult and tends to increase various costs of doing business there.

On the other hand, say TDP produces 4 billion barrels of oil right here in the US, straight from a spigot. No drilling, no potential oil well fires or accidental well uncaps, no shipping across the Atlantic or Pacific so no oil spills. Rather, it is cheaply trucked or trained a few hundred miles across America to the oil processing companies, which buy it for $10 - $15 a barrel (as estimated by Changing World Technologies).

Now you do the math. Which method do you think will be the most profitable? Of course, if you have a rational, informed explanation for why this will cost a lot of very rich people a lot of money, do tell. But TDP is not without its own very rich supporters who intend to make a lot of money on it - Warren Buffet Jr., for one.
 
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