I was on my way back from New York a couple of weeks ago and I kept glancing over to see what the guy next to me was reading because he kept making sound of “epiphany”. Something was definitely resonating with him and it drew my curiosity. As it turns out, he was reading an article in DISCOVER magazine about Thermal Conversion (the process of using high-temperature systems for converting low-value hydrocarbons and wastes into valuable chemical feedstocks – like oil).
The man was kind enough to offer me the magazine when he was finished and this is what I found:
Basically, truck loads of waste (slaughterhouse waste, municipal sewage, old tires, mixed plastics, virtually all the wretched detritus of modern life) move into a factory at one end and clean high-quality burning oil comes out of the other. It sounds like a futuristic fantasy, but believe it or not, it’s a reality of today. There has been a functioning plant that has been refining this process here in the US for the past couple of years through a company by the name of Changing World Technologies - http://www.changingworldtech.com/.
The process involves pushes raw materials from receiving hopper into a brawny grinder that chews them up into pea-sized bits. Dry feedstocks like tires and plastics need additional water at this stage, but offal matter like slaughterhouse waste is wet enough. A first-stage reactor breaks down the stuff with heat and pressure, after which the pressure rapidly drops, flashing off excess water and minerals. In turnkeys, the minerals come mostly from bones; these are shunted to a storage bin to be sold later as a high-calcium powdered fertilizer. The remaining concentrated organic soup then pours into a second reaction tank where it is heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressurized to a 600 pound per square inch. In 20 minutes, the process replicates what the deep earth does to dead plants and animals over centuries, chopping molecular chains of hydrogen and carbon into short-chain molecules. Next, the pressure and temperature drop, and the soup swirls through a centrifuge that separates any remaining water from the oil. Water that is laden with nitrogen and amino acids (from slaughterhouse waste) is then stored and sold as potent liquid fertilizer. The oil then goes into storage tanks and awaits a truck.
NICE!
15% of what is produced is recycled back to running the plant and the remaining 85% is embodied in the output of oil and other products.
It seems that CWT is having a difficult time here in the US making this work from an economical point of view because of the lack of subsidies for alternative fuels from the US government. So, it looks like Europe will be the recipient of the amazing technology. The functioning plant currently working in Carthage, Missouri.
DISCOVER
Science, Technology, and The Future
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-04/features/anything-into-oil/
