[Waaaaay OT but who cares its cool] We might be able to turn anything in Oil soon.

[Fast Learner]

I think the government should start by buying these gentlemen out for a TON of money and then going into full scale use of this idea.

IMO that would be the absolute least ideal direction, as the technology would be nearly frozen at its current state. Rather I'd like to see the gov't supporting such research much more heavily (though moreso in alternatives to polluting oil) and let the open market compete to produce a superior product (more efficient, less polluting, etc.).

Governments don't have good track records at such things, while the free market tends to do much better (with appropriate incentives and regulation).

 

[s/LaSH]

Things are rarely as clear-cut as they appear... here in New Zealand, the government-owned power generation and transmission facilities were split up and sold off years ago, and now prices suck and everything's a confusing mess and the government is desparately trying to get things back in order. Don't ask me more, the limit of my interest in the matter was the comment "Well, the centralised structure may work in practice, but it doesn't work in theory."

Right, that's out of me system. I've been wondering about the availability of plastics in a hypothetical human-expansive future; if we expand our population base (into space or wherever), eventually we'll run out of oil deposits on Earth to make plastics with, and (correct me if I'm wrong) but isn't Earth the only planet with oil? A process like this makes 'slush' asteroids just as awesomely profitable as megaton gold asteroids, because you can turn them into plastics just by shipping a reactor onto them then 'dropping' the produce back to a viable market.

Suddenly, carbon compounds become an awesomely valuable resource. That's my prediction for the next hundred years, anyway - carbon's so versatile an atom, I bet we'll be using nothing but carbon compounds in a hundred years (down on a molecular level).

Heck, maybe humans will have an excuse not to pillage Antarctica!

 

[kenjib]

You put in 100 btu of turkey. You use 15 btu to run the process, and you get 85 btu of stuff (oil and gas). You are getting out less than you put in. The loss of 15% means that you cannot run this as a closed cycle.

That is what I mean by it only mostly powers itself. My pardon if I didn't say it clearly. Somewhere, you must add energy to the system. In the case of turkey, that energy comes from the sun - via the grain the turkey eats.

Ah, okay. I meant the same thing. The turkey giblets are the fuel. We're on the same page.

While the system may be able to handle glass and metal as inputs, there's not much chemical energy in them. I am not sure of the btu content of the organic and plastic bits of typical home garbage. Nor am I aware about how many btu get thrown away by all the organics-processors (meat and vegetable processing). People sure use a lot of BTU to heat their homes in the winter...

Hmm...good point. It would be really cool to see these kinds of numbers. My family of four weekly uses most of a 32 gallon trash can plus another similar amount of recyclables. I'd say that at least 95% of that in volume is animal, plant, and plastic (we have no garbage disposal in the sink, unfortunately). What's not is mostly glass and metal that gets recycled in other ways anyway. Oh, and there are yard clippings as well. No idea about BTU though.

I'd say it would be close to 100 lb. in total only on a trash-heavy week. Judging from the chart in the article my super-rough guess is that I'd be getting around 40 pounds of oil, 11 pounds of gas, 7 pounds of carbon solids, and 25 pounds of water.

Probably take 2/3 of that for a more typical week though. It could get quite a bit higher sometimes in the fall though when I collect leaves. I've got a few very waste-heavy trees.

So 40 pounds of oil I think is around 5 gallons. We'd be looking at 3-4 on a typical week plus gas. That would probably be enough to run a hybrid car for our needs as long as I don't have a long commute (definitely more than enough for home office and only recreational car use). How much heat for the house would 11 pounds of gas generate? I don't know.

This is not including sewage though. Ideally the system would be tied into sewage as well. I'm not sure how much material each person generate per week. I couldn't find any statistics with a google search, but this would probably noticably raise the amount of energy generated for a family of four.

 

[DM_Matt]

Only one problem - only one known energy source has the same kind of power output that gasoline and diesel engines have, and that would be a portable nuclear fission reactor. Auto accidents would be some kinda fun!

However, hybrid gasoline/hydrogen fuel cell autos are showing promise, but their strongest suit is in city driving less than 45 mph or so. On interstate travel, where long-haul commuters and diesel trucks prevail, I don't think one gets very good mileage.

The day we see newer forms of battery technology, or cold and affordable fusion reactions, is the day we see a massive revolution in transportation. Until then, electricity in any form is not going to be an easy replacement for piston-driven fossil fuel engines.

Yes, hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear eergy are not good solutions individually. Hydrogen feul cells are, and will probably always be, energy intensive to produce if they dont want to create greenhouse gasses (using electrolysis to extract the hydrogen from water rather than splitting it from hydrocarbons and reeasing the carbon into the atmosphere). Thats where nuclear fission can come in: It can provide the electricity for the production of the fuel cells. The combination of fuel cells with nuclear energy thus in effect creates portable nuclear energy. (BTW, this is sometihng that the Bush Administration is seeking to make happen)

However, that does leave the problem of nuclear waste. Also, nuclear fuel is harder to come by than one would expect: the total known world reserves of Uranium would only last the world 10 yearts if they were powering everything. Then again, no one except a handful of countries seeking nuclear weapons (Iran, Iraq, and possibly Libya) has been looking for new Uranium reserves for a couple decades now.

Uranium can be recycled, and plutonium reactors and breeder reactors that extract plutonium from sea water can be made, but the problem is that all of these promote nuclear proliferation. Recycling Uranium enriches it to weapons grade pretty fast, and plutonium in the form that is used in these other reactors is more or less already fissable.



And Cedric, et al. Cedric's initial comments were somewhat random and unrelated to the topic, and very well might produce a flame war and get it closed. Everyone please refrain from discussing the reletive merits of state-run and privitized energy production.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Uranium can be recycled, and plutonium reactors and breeder reactors that extract plutonium from sea water can be made, but the problem is that all of these promote nuclear proliferation. Recycling Uranium enriches it to weapons grade pretty fast, and plutonium in the form that is used in these other reactors is more or less already fissable.

Yep, which is why the USA has been so against the North Korean reactor being used and why Israel blew up the Iraqi reactor all those years ago.

Unfortunately there seem to be few large scale power sources available until fusion comes along. Being a complete layman on that subject I do not know if there is any waste at all that we would get from fusion reactors.

On the plus side this process can be used on coal to clean it up and make it burn much more effectively and with much less pollution. Coal is one resource we have plenty of still around.

 

[Will]

hee. I was goobing about this to all my friends...

Re: Pollution, plastics, and 'still burning oil'...

One addendum to the article is that this technology may promise the end to fears of global warming... because all of our civilization just becomes another carbon sink.

Consider... you suck CO2 out of the air to make plants, it goes into turkeys, turkey into oil, oil into plastic... plastic back into oil, repeat.

Or oil into fuel, burned, creates CO2... which goes back to the plants and back into the process.


It completely loops back, and turns nonrenewable resources into renewable ones.

 

[Henry]

It's a great plan, as long as TANSTAAFL is remembered.

Umbran, thanks for the data. Those are DEFINITELY better figures than I was hearing a couple of years ago. You still have problems of fuel cell creation and availability, and there is still a dependence on fossil fuels, though the dependence is lessened.

And I have a strong feeling that until the price range suffers serious drops due to supply and demand, I won't be driving a fuel cell-fossil ybrid car for quite some time.

 

[Utrecht]

Another thing to consider is that there is a huge infrasturcture out there designed to support the refining of oil into consumer products.

So when they talk about the costs - none of them address the macro level costs of actually integrating this with an economy - so I suspect that it will be quite some time before we see any legitimate impact from it.

 

[Conaill]

One addendum to the article is that this technology may promise the end to fears of global warming... because all of our civilization just becomes another carbon sink.

No it doesn't.

If anything, landfills and especially non-decaying plastic waste could be considered a "carbon sink". If you take those landfills, extract the useful hydrocarbons from them, and then burn those hydrocarbons, the net effect is to release MORE carbon (as CO2) in the atmosphere.

Yes, this technology looks promising, but TANSTAAFL...

Actually, the main reason why it looks promising is because it can deal with mixed waste. Mixed waste is a real PITA to deal with, even though all its components could be quite useful if only they were separated. For example, you don't need a big hunking processing plant to extract oil from plastic waste. You could just recycle it! You can bet that will be MUCH more effcicent than extracting oil at 85% efficiency, and then making plastic out of that oil again. If only we could convince the consumers to keep their waste separated into its different components, 90% of the "mixed waste" problem would go away.

But notice how the article says that they've spent two years formulating "recipes" for processing different types of waste? That doesn't really sound like "mixed" waste at all. Likely, the system needs a very carefully calibrated type of waste to achieve the 85% efficiency quoted.

Right now, I would expect this technology to be useful for some very specific indistrial waste sources. But don't expect to see it being used on random municipal waste any time soon...

 

[Utrecht]

Also the purified water is huge, unless of course it tastes like turkey guts.

Actually, this is no problem at all - simply run it through a Reverse Osmosis filter and all smell should be gone. - Anyone who owns a salt water fish tank can attest to this.