From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 00:37:53 MDT
http://anyboard.net/soc/2think/posts/21372.html
This article is not yet available on Discover.com; but I did find this
comentary on the article I have read, and agree with the poster, Gunnar.
Thermal de-polymerization is an area to watch, because of it low energy
production usage, its high return, its contribution to elimination
carbonaceous waste. Looks light a decent solution whose time, economically,
is finally arriving. I am going to be reading up on thermal
de-polymerization.
<<"In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change
almost anything into oil. Really."So begins a fascinating article in the May
2003 issue of Discover magazine that I recently received in the mail. The
article goes on to describe a fascinating and exciting new process that can
convert virtually any kind of waste now going to landfills into useful
amounts of oil and other benign products. According to the author of the
article, "If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would
most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil."
The process is called "Thermal Depolymerization" and was developed by a team
of scientists, former Government leaders and deep pocketed investors
assembled by Brian Appel, Chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies. It
can handle almost any kind of waste product imaginable, including
agricultural wastes, tires, sewage, medical wastes, old computers, oil
refinery residues, and even biological weapons such as anthrax spores.
According to Appel, "waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three
products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high quality oil,
clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels,
fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.
The proportions of each of those three products depends, of course, on what
one runs through the machine. The first industrial-scale thermal
depolymerization plant, recently completed in a lot adjacent to a Butterball
Turkey plant in Carthage Illinois, will be used to daily transform 200 tons
of formerly useless and disgusting turkey offal into various useful products,
including 600 barrels of light oil. "The offal derived oil is chemically
almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes."
According the article, "Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into
oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil
annually. Compare that to the 4.2 billion barrels of oil that the U.S.
imported in 2001! One great benefit of this is that the burning of such oil
would not contribute to global warming, because the carbon dioxide released
into the atmosphere from burning it could not possibly do any more than just
barely replace the carbon dioxide taken from the atmosphere in the first
place by the growing plants from which the agricultural waste came.
I urge all of you to find this article and read it. I think you will find it
quite interesting.
Gunnar>>
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