Turning Turkey Guts and Other Wastes Into Oil- Thermal Depolymerization

[chlamor]

My personal sentiments lean toward a high degree of skepticism about this. Another technological fix to the technological problem which creates an unforeseen technological problem which etc. Here are a few clips from an interesting article about this procedure:

Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste
into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.
<snip>
"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."
<snip>
Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world's agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, "This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this."
<snip>
Under pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this—generally thousands or millions of years—because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular bonds.
<snip>
Can Thermal Depolymerization Slow Global Warming?

If the thermal depolymerization process WORKS AS Claimed, it will clean up waste and generate new sources of energy. But its backers contend it could also stem global warming, which sounds iffy. After all, burning oil creates global warming, doesn't it?

Carbon is the major chemical constituent of most organic matter—plants take it in; animals eat plants, die, and decompose; and plants take it back in, ad infinitum. Since the industrial revolution, human beings burning fossil fuels have boosted concentrations of atmospheric carbon more than 30 percent, disrupting the ancient cycle. According to global-warming theory, as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps solar radiation, which warms the atmosphere—and, some say, disrupts the planet's ecosystems.
<snip>
Mindfully.org note: 

While it does have the bright side of getting rid of a lot of trash, burning the oil from the process is about the same as burning any oil. The combustion waste of burning the byproduct of this technology is definitely toxic and most likely causes global warming. If burning petroleum causes global warming, then so does this.

If it were used, it would prolong oil supplies. But then, we shouldn't be burning oil in the first place. 

Beyond it being a get-rich-quick scheme, it is a cure for a symptom, not the problem(s). We need to combat the problems of this world. Rather than compounding the errors of the past, we need to see things for what they really are and deal with them. Adding technology does not solve anything in a sustainable manner. 

More to the point, this technology shuffles the waste to another place and time, but after the product is burned, the waste comes back down on us through the environment and food chain. There is no way to avoid dealing with reality. Consequently, we must give Brian Appel's Changing World Technologies a unanimous and prolonged thumbs down.

http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Anything-Into-Oil1may03.htm

[whistle]

1. Why turkey guts I wonder, what about bovine guts, pig guts,....

...chicken guts, fish guts, human cadaver guts? These and other massive waste products should work equally well to keep SUVs running on the roads.

[librechik]

3. the experimental lab is next to a turkey farm

it could work on a variety of organic refuse

[Massacure]

2. 4 billion barrels is 54% of our oil needs.

The U.S. would need to double its efficiency.

[whistle]

4. 600 million tonnes of turkey guts need to be put into proper....

...perspective here, because that equates to 1.2 trillion lbs of turkey guts! Now the guts would represent about 20% of the total weight of the bird assuming that the contents of the guts would also be part of the formula (the feces as well as surrounding fat and liquid waste). So that means 4.8 trillion lbs of dressed turkey. The average weight of a turkey bird for retail purposes would run about twelve lbs, so that works out to 400 billion birds or 1,346 turkeys for every man woman and child in the United States.

Turkey gives me gas, so someone else will have to eat my share!

[Dcitizen]

5. Philadelphia becomes world center of oil tech revolution.

I am a year round Turkeyman and never thought become patriot naturally for that habit. How could God bless democratic scientists so much wisdoms?