* * * * *
“There's oil in them thar' garbage … ”
> The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable,
> including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old
> computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious
> medical waste, oil-refinery residues, 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.
>
> Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into
> ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. 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. While no one plans to put people into a thermal
> depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime
> feedstock. “There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human
> excrement, into a glorious oil,” says engineer Terry Adams, a project
> consultant.
>
Via jwz [1], “Anything into Oil [2]”
Not much to add here other than I hope this actually works. If it does, then
perhaps we will get something useful out of the tons of garbage we produce
each year (and in the article, they state that anything short of nuclear
waste can be processed) as well as the tons and tons of garbage we already
have! And this has the added benefit, if it does indeed work as well as they
claim it does, to keep places like Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico free of oil
drills.
[1]
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/188657.html
[2]
http://www.discover.com/may_03/featoil.html
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