Update on thermal depolymerization (TDP)

[TheFarseer]

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2450#more

scroll down to 'The Hype Begins to Unravel', just a few paragraphs down. This is really unfortunate. I loved the idea that we could make our own oil here in the Midwest. Maybe we still can, but it's stalled out for now.

[Warpy]

1. Since it's efficient enough

it's probably the ultimate solution to all those plastic choked, leaking landfills around the country.

[Vincardog]

2. IF it worked which it does not

[ChrisF66]

3. Do it yourself

I thermally depolymerized some rice in my microwave last week. Just nuke it on high for about 25 minutes. Black oily nasty residue is what you get (and a stinky microwave). It's a usable oil, after some refining, but the energy put into the system is WAAAAY more than that extracted as fuel.

The same is going to be true with any thermal depolymerization process. Everyone who has tried to set these things up (the Germans in '40s and the South Africans in the '80s were the first) has had an abundance of coal to provide the energy to produce liquid fuels, but efficiency was a joke. They weren't doing TD as a more efficient process, they used it because they had no available sources of liquid petroleum.

But for a useless technology, the dude made good money. Great work if you can get it.

[Vincardog]

4. That is your definition of working?

[ChrisF66]

7. Working is such a relative term

The rice thermally depolymerized. It certainly wasn't a useful product. Maybe if I filled the bowl with Argon first (to exclude the Oxygen) I'd get a better product.

Either way, the wife was unimpressed with my science project.

[Warpy]

5. It actually does work. A pilot project was set up at a Butterball

turkey processing plant and was commercially successful until the feed industry bid up the price of turkey, ahem, by products above what the plant could afford at the time.

This article is about the hype of $15.00/bbl oil, something we knew at the time was a lot of hooey. However the process does work and it is efficient enough to be viable, especially when it's being used to clean up plastic trash in sanitary landfills, something that would increase the efficiency over the turkey guts, produce oil, and clean up the environment.

Personally, I don't think an outfit called "The Oil Drum" did a very good job here. They said nothing about the process itself or its output efficiency. All they yelled about was the initially laughable estimate on how cheap the oil was going to be.

[depakid]

6. "The Law of Receding Horizons"

Yep- that's certainly an astute observation about these sorts of technologies.

[bhikkhu]

9. My attempt at illustrating the "law"

after browsing a bit and finding no specific write-up:

The Law of Receding Horizons:

First, assume that oil is $10 a barrel. There is a promising alternative energy, but its practicality is just over the horizon – it costs $15 to produce the equivalent of a barrel of oil energy.

Oil goes to $20 a barrel. We should now be able to make money producing our alternative energy...but all of the costs involved have increased, and its practicality remains just over the horizon – it is reassessed to cost $30 to produce the equivalent of a barrel of oil energy.

Oil goes to $40 a barrel. We should now be able to ramp up our alternative energy source...but the costs involved have increased again, and practicality remains just over the horizon. It will now cost $60 to produce the equivalent of a barrel of oil energy...

...and so on.

[bhikkhu]

8. Good article, and one thing I like about TOD

The quality of the conversations. You can read the article and then the comments, and find in the comments a hundred questions raised and debated and answered. This article has a bunch of topics well handled in the commentary, an education in itself.