Thermal Depolymerization

Micaelis Rex

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Here is a cool article on thermal depolymerization, quite possibly the next huge technology. Changing World Technologies just might be the next 'Microsoft'. :D

This was going to be a column about oil. Instead, it's also about disease, poison, and a cool way to get rid of both. Actually, it's about a new technology — a new process that is going to make a Difference. One that's going to change things, and one you're going to be hearing a lot more about.

The process is called thermal depolymerization or TDP, and the company that's doing it is West Hempstead, N.Y.-based Changing World Technologies.

Don't be intimidated by the name. It's just a nine-syllable way of saying "using heat to break down complex material into simple material."

Specifically, TDP turns just about anything into oil and fertilizer. And when I say "anything," I mean that: animal waste, medical waste, human waste. Used diapers, used computers, used tires. Anything that's not radioactive can be tossed into the hopper.

Those things go in one end of the process and come out the other as diesel oil and fertilizer using a process that mimics the Earth's. But instead of taking millions of years to turn plants, dinosaurs, and what-have-you into Venezuelan crude, TDP takes hours to do the same to just about anything you can throw in it. No wonder the energy industry is funding pilot projects and research facilities.

And this is not just a theoretical process. It ain't cold fusion. TDP is real, out-of-the-lab stuff. It's happening on an industrial scale, today. At the ConAgra Foods facility in Carthage, Missouri, hundreds of tons of turkey waste from the company's Butterball plant are being turned into oil every day — enough oil to generate 11-12 megawatts of power, according to Changing World's chairman and CEO, Brian Appel.

The City of Philadelphia currently turns a lot of its sewage sludge into landfill. (All together now: Eww.) But working with Changing World, the city is planning a TDP project to divert that sludge — and whatever pathogens are living in it — away from the land and into oil. Local power companies can then turn the oil into electricity. Win, win, win.

At first, it was the oil angle that was TDP's selling point. In case you hadn't noticed, we get a lot of ours from countries that don't like us very much. Then they give our money to people who use it to kill us. So TDP was being touted as a way to reduce our imports. In fact, get this: According to Appel, there are more than 12 billion tons of agricultural waste generated every year in the U.S. (And that's undoubtedly a low number; it's based on 1988 figures.) Were it all to be put through the TDP process it would turn into more than four billion barrels of light crude oil.

That ain't chicken feed. (Not once the system's done processing it, anyway.) According to the U.S. Department of Energy, we imported about 3.3 billion barrels of crude oil in 2002.

In other words, if we converted just our agricultural waste to light crude using TDP, we could stop our oil imports…and then some.

Yes, yes, yes—these are perfect-world numbers. So cut 'em in half. Or more. Heck, imagine the benefit of weaning ourselves of just 10% of our oil imports.

But oil, which used to be thermal depolymerization's big story, is now its number two selling point. Thanks to Yakima, Wash., the big story is no longer what comes out, but what goes in. Yakima is where the first American case of mad cow disease — otherwise known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) — was discovered.

BSE is carried in the brain and spinal tissue of cows by an oddly-folded protein called a prion. Unlike viruses or bacteria, prions are tough to kill; just cooking meat doesn't do it. (This is because prions aren't really alive. They can't be killed; they need to be destroyed.) And — sorry to you folks who might be planning a burger for dinner tonight — a lot of cattle in the U.S. are de facto cannibals: Their feed often contains parts of other cows, including the nerve matter believed to be the most efficient carrier of the disease. If those other cows have BSE, the disease gets around. Keeping the nation's cow-feed supply clean is critical.

Right now, we keep BSE from spreading by preventing the brain and spinal cord tissue of cattle from being fed to other cattle. We destroy it instead, or at least we try to — remember, prions don't give up the ghost very easily. Europe has experimented with incinerating BSE-infected carcasses, but in fact, there's no large-scale way to get rid of that tissue, so there's always a risk of it getting back into the food chain.

That's where TDP comes in. As Changing World's Appel puts it, "The prion has achieved mythical status of being indestructible." But it's not. TDP destroys prions.

So instead of burning and burying potentially infected cows, run them through a TDP system. No prions. Instead of "destroying" brain tissue (infected or not), run it through a TDP system. No chance of prions. According to Appel, TDP can effectively "divert these proteins away from the food chain so that issues brought by cannibalism can be ended." Nothing survives: "We destroy all pathological vectors." (Want to bet that the Department of Homeland Security is interested, too?)

But wait. There's more.

Dioxins and PCBs are two particularly nasty kinds of chemical. Right now, we don't really dispose of what we make; we burn or bury it, which means it ends up forgotten but not gone. More specifically, it ends up in the grass and water, and thus back in the food chain. Remember reading about how many PCBs were in farm-raised salmon? Or that the carcass of Keiko the killer whale — better known as Willy of Free Willy fame —has so many PCBs in it, it poses an environmental threat ? PCBs and dioxins are bad news.

But thermal depolymerization is good news. It breaks down industrial and medical wastes and poisons. So instead of burning that stuff and introducing nasties like PCBs and dioxins into the environment, you can run them through a TDP system where they get broken down into their components, which include — lest we forget — oil. As Appel says, "Let's divert this nasty material away from the food chain. It's that simple."

TDP takes the worst stuff out there and turns it into something useful. It has the potential to make a huge dent in our national energy bill, to remove the nastiest waste from the environment, and to make garbage-burning and landfills a thing of the past.

It's the product of good science and hard work, and we're seeing only the first glimmers of what it can do — a dozen megawatts in Missouri, better sewage processing in Philly. But interest and investment are running high, so you can bet you'll see more of TDP in the next few years. And who knows? Maybe before the decade is out we'll be able to cut ourselves off from the Saudis. "Remember September 11?" we'll say. "So do we."
 
TDP is certainly a technology to look out for in the future. I'm excited about it, but there are a few things the article doesn't mention.

First and foremost, it takes more energy to break down the inputs than it provides in the form of oil. So current TDP processors run at a net energy loss, which makes them better than current garbage incinerators, but not yet the solution to our energy woes.

The second, thing is sort of a side note. Cow "cannibalism" was banned in the U.S. back in the late 1990's. Apart from some older cows from before that time (like the one that recently was diagnosed with mad cow in Washington) the risk of contamination in cow feed is low. There is still the possiblity that parts of a cow's nervous system may make it into feed for other animals like chickens, which may make it into the food chain, but no cases of this have been recorded.

That being said, TDP is a promising method for hazardous waste disposal that helps pay for itself by providing oil as an output, but it is not yet leading us away from foreign oil.
 
it needs to get better before it gets practical, but it does hold some hope
 
Originally posted by Pirate
So current TDP processors run at a net energy loss, which makes them better than current garbage incinerators, but not yet the solution to our energy woes.
Moreover, unless Newton was wrong about those three pesky laws, TDP processors will ALWAYS run at a net energy loss. TDP doesn't create energy, it just stores chemical energy in the form of oil.

TDP processors can certainly be helpful. As Pirate points out, they beat trash compactors. But they are not and never will be a solution for our energy needs. We still have to get the power from somewhere.
 
Even if it didnt run at a net energy loss, it would just solve one problem and create another: We would never stop burning oil and exacerbating the global warming problem.
 
Originally posted by Little Raven
Moreover, unless Newton was wrong about those three pesky laws, TDP processors will ALWAYS run at a net energy loss. TDP doesn't create energy, it just stores chemical energy in the form of oil.

Well, I wasn't referring to the second law of thermodynamics. Look at it this way. The basic process here is:

garbage + heat => oil.

You are saying that Newtons laws state that the oil energy must be less than the total of garbage + heat.

What I meant by "net loss" is that the oil doesn't even match the amount of heat put in it. The garbage energy is virtually unlimited. It's the heat energy that comes from power plants and fossil fuels and more oil. If the process produces more oil than it uses for heat (with the excess energy coming from the garbage energy) it becomes economically feasible.
 
So Pirate, how is the heat currently provided? Are there other byproducts than oil? You seem to be fairly informed on the process.

Turning agricultural waste into oil sounds like a bad idea. Most of that stuff (chicken poo, for instance) needs to go back in the ground.
 
The process isn't 100% efficient, it is only 85%. That means that for everything that goes in, 15% of the product is used to run the process, while the remaining 85% becomes useable oil, gas, and other energy.

BTW, if you don't believe me, here is the link to an article on the subject by Discovery magazine: http://www.spiritofmaat.com/announce/newoil.htm
 
I tend to think that TDP or any such process will never solve our energy problems. Here is why I think so.

In all such processes we are coverting "chemical" energy stored in some substance to "chemical" energy stored in some other substance. When I say "chemical" I mean the energy we use is released from breaking of chemical bonds between molecules. So all we are doing is just changing how energy is stored instead of harnessing a hiterto untapped energy source. By a law of thermodynamics this process must be inefficient. We cannot store more energy than what we put in during the conversion process. So how can we claim to solve the energy problem?

An argument against the above could be that energy equation from TDP may go like this.

"energy in chicken parts" (A) + "energy used to convert to oil" (B) = "energy lost in conversion" (C) + "energy in converted oil" (D)

As long as D > B (which is what may people are trying for) we are a net gainer.

However, this too is misleading since to be really energy gainer a society has to factor in the cost of raising the chickens in the first place which maybe a very energy intensive process. Just because the TDP company is not paying for that does not mean that society as a whole is not paying for it. So society as a whole is not gaining a net energy even if D > B.

IMHO, the only way a society or civilization can be a net energy gainer when the source of the energy has not put any cost (energywise) to the society. To truly alleviate future energy problems we may have to do some pretty non-trivial out of the box thinking. But that is the topic of another thread.

My knowledge of TDP is next to nothing. However, my arguments were based on principles of thermoD, so they should be right. feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
 
Originally posted by Pirate
Look at it this way. The basic process here is:
garbage + heat => oil.
I'm aware of the basic chemical process, and I'm also aware that it is an endothermic reaction.

But while you may not have been talking about Newton's laws in your post, they most certainly apply here. While there is some chemical energy stored in the garbage, (the amount varying with the type of garbage) it is almost certainly never going to be equal to the amount of chemical energy stored in oil. Oil is a fantastic source of chemical energy; that's why we rely on it so heavily. Which means that transforming said garbage into oil is virtually guaranteed to cost energy in the form of heat. And we're never going to get 100% efficiency, so the amount of oil we get out of it will never equal the amount of oil that had to be burned in order to generate the heat to produce it. In fact, it's likely to fall short by a considerable amount.

Now, this doesn't mean that TDP is useless. Far from it. We need oil for things besides energy, and TDP provides a compelling alternative to incineration or landfills. But it's important to realize that TDP is a waste-disposal solution, maybe even a oil-production solution, but not an energy solution. We will never get an appreciable amount of energy from TDP, even if we someday get an appreciable amount of oil from TDP. The energy to create the oil via TDP is still going to have to come from some other source.
 
Originally posted by betazed

An argument against the above could be that energy equation from TDP may go like this.

"energy in chicken parts" (A) + "energy used to convert to oil" (B) = "energy lost in conversion" (C) + "energy in converted oil" (D)

As long as D > B (which is what may people are trying for) we are a net gainer.

However, this too is misleading since to be really energy gainer a society has to factor in the cost of raising the chickens in the first place which maybe a very energy intensive process. Just because the TDP company is not paying for that does not mean that society as a whole is not paying for it. So society as a whole is not gaining a net energy even if D > B.

IMHO, the only way a society or civilization can be a net energy gainer when the source of the energy has not put any cost (energywise) to the society.

it says right in the article that Micaelis Rex linked for us that B+C=~(.15)D
and how is this not free, a penny saved is a penny earned: 85% of the energy that was in the garbage will, insted of going to a landfill, power a car, generator, heater. energy that would have been completly lost to us otherwise.
and there's no reason to ad the cost of raising the chickens or whatever the input to the system because the whole point of this is that it's stuff that was being made anyway, we're just getting the energy back.
if you want to include the chicken farm in the equation by using this you're making one component of their energy usage 85% more efficent! that's a free gain if I've ever seen one.
 
Originally posted by Little Raven
But while you may not have been talking about Newton's laws in your post, they most certainly apply here. While there is some chemical energy stored in the garbage, (the amount varying with the type of garbage) it is almost certainly never going to be equal to the amount of chemical energy stored in oil.

All the data I have seen states that you DO get more energy out of oil created than you need to make the oil; for every 100 barrels of oil you make only 15 are needed to run the process, leaving you will lots left over for other uses. Actually, this thing is sort of an indirect solar power source, since the energy stored in the biomass converted into oil originally came from the sun via plants.

Now, the real concern is figuring out if there is enough biomass that is cheaply available to throw in these things; there might not be enough sewage and chicken guts to replace conventional oil, which would mean we would have to dedicate some plant production for fuel use.
 
@Suki, @ DreadCthulu:

As little Raven also pointed out in the post after mine, neither of us are arguing the benefits of TDP. It can easily be seen that there are many benefits.

However, what we were saying is that it is not an energy solution.

To be a energy solution it must satisfy D > (A + B) {society as a whole must get more energy from the output than society as a whole put into it } and this is thermodynamically impossible in the TDP process.

But of course, if TDP works as claimed then it can alleviate our energy problems a lot.
 
Originally posted by betazed

To be a energy solution it must satisfy D > (A + B) {society as a whole must get more energy from the output than society as a whole put into it } and this is thermodynamically impossible in the TDP process.

wouldn't 'D' have to be larger than the component of 'A' that society actually provides. if you're powering one of these things with lawn clippings, the energy society provided is to mow the lawn and collect the clippings. The Sun provides the rest, in that respect it's slightly displaced solar power

and as far as global warming goes if you run the grass clippings through then burn the oil you're just returning to the air the carbon that the grass absorbed while growing, so you've added no carbon to the atmosphere, except that your emissons will also contain some CO, NH4, NOx... which as far as global warming is concerned count as a lot of CO2. the carbon in the ground would stay in the ground.
 
Well, it seems I misinterpreted some facts. Early TPD was very inefficient and didn't break even, so when i read the 85% statistic I assumed it meant the heat input and not the garbage input.
Sorry for the misinformation. But the technology still has the problems that others have mentioned. Oh, and oil isn't the only byproduct:

According to a Discover Magazine article:
"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."

heh heh, some sick person figured that one out...
 
Originally posted by Suki


wouldn't 'D' have to be larger than the component of 'A' that society actually provides.

You are right. I should have wrote

D > (Component of A society provides + B)

and this is thermodynamically possible.

So then the question becomes is the above true?

If it is then this could be a energy solution. Then we try to figure out the greenhouse gases and emission problems. :D
 
85% return certainly beats 0%. (or throwing the stuff in a landfill)

I'll all for it.
 
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