But this....is truly exciting, if not revolutionary:
Speeding up Mother Nature
The difference is that it takes millions of years for the buried remains of plants, dinosaurs and other organic matter to break down into crude oil and natural gas.
Changing World Technologies gets it done in less than three hours and ends up with purer products.
Now the company's bold claim that it can turn a profit by turning garbage into oil is getting its first full-scale test in a small town at the edge of the Ozark Mountains.
In the last few weeks, a brand-new $31 million factory in Carthage, Mo., has begun taking in truckloads of bones, feathers, blood and guts from a nearby Butterball turkey-processing plant. The unique garbage-to-oil facility is a joint venture between Changing World and Omaha-based ConAgra foods, which owns Butterball.
At the experimental factory, which can handle up to 250 tons of animal waste per day, the turkey parts are mixed with leftover restaurant grease and with lots of water. The sticky, smelly mixture then runs a gauntlet of grinders, boilers, and separation tanks. Along the way, the mixture is heated up twice -- to about 500 and 1,000 degrees, respectively, and subjected to air pressures 50 times greater than what we feel on the Earth's surface.
The end results
For every ton of turkey slop that goes in, what comes out at the end are 640 pounds of clean-burning oils that are sold for use in fuels and manufacturing, 100 pounds of propane, butane and methane gases that are burned at the factory site to generate the electricity that powers the garbage-to-fuel process, and 60 pounds of solid minerals that are sold as fertilizer. Because each type of raw material -- tires, plastics or sewage, for example -- produces different grades and quantities of oil and gas, the company prefers to limit the process to one kind of garbage at a time.
Incredibly, the only "waste" that's left behind is distilled water. There are no smokestacks bellowing chemical-laden smoke, and no pipes discharging fetid wastewater. Plus, the plant produces more than enough fuel gases to power itself without using any additional energy.
"It's way too soon to know how successful they'll be, there's some real excitement out there" about the company, said Dan Reicher, who was in charge of renewable energy programs at the Department of Energy during the Clinton administration. He now runs a Massachusetts-based company that develops clean energy projects.
"This technology," Reicher added, "could be a real game-changer."
Changing World Technologies is just one of hundreds of small, start-up "biomass" companies all over the world experimenting with high-tech processes to extract energy from plants and animals. People have been getting energy from biomass ever since the first bonfire, and today biomass provides about 4 percent of the nation's energy, mostly through the burning of wood or garbage.
But many of the recent attempts to ratchet up the use of biomass through better technology haven't gotten off the drawing board because they're more expensive than conventional oil and gas production, or because they make fuel products no one wants.
'The next big thing'
Changing World, however, has managed to break out of the pack by building a commercial facility that is actually making quality fuel that can be sold at a profit, according to Appel.
It all sounds too good to be true. And that's exactly the problem Appel faces in selling the world on his company's "thermal conversion" technology.
Although Discover, Money and Scientific American magazines have all written wildly enthusiastic stories about the company recently -- Money called it "The Next Big Thing" -- competitors and independent researchers point out that Changing World Technologies has released very little information about the details of its patented process.
"You have to remember that people have been pressure-cooking different types of biomass for a long time now, and we really haven't seen these kinds of breakthroughs," said Ralph Overend, a leading authority in the bio-energy field and a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
"People always stay skeptical until they can see the real data," added Overend, editor of the academic journal Biomass & Bioenergy.
Appel said the company's focus has been on building the Missouri plant, not on publishing scientific papers that he worries could tip off potential competitors.
http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2004/Changing-World-Technologies4apr04.htm
ent. As for silly regulations, what are silly regulations? Is the clean air act a silly regulation? Then in contrast to merely making pointless attacks why not stick with the issue at hand and explain what would be a solution to global warming.Or are you one of those who deny any human involvement in global warming.
