EDIT: Energy Apocalypse Day within the next decade?

[Alistar7]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Alistar, demand for India and China will outpace ours only if there is infinite oil. There isn't enough oil for China to get in that position any time soon.
The US is a good example though, we import 12.5 million barrels of oil a day. We consume 20 million barrels a day. That's a 4th of all oil produced each day.

In regards to oil, we are the #1 abuser.

I was not only speaking about oil, specifically regarding China and India.

 

[0marTheZealot]

bump

 

[Zebo]

Originally posted by: assemblage
Oil prices are going up and up for sure. To say Saddam was overthrown for oil is a red herring. In 2001 the US imported the most oil ever from Iraq and that only constituted 6.7%. In contrast, Canada supplies 17.3% of our oil. That?s only 3% less then all Persian Gulf producers. We import more oil from Canada than any other single country. We also import a lot of oil from Mexico, 13.7%. They are our third largest supplier. Those two countries supply the US with 10.7% more oil then all Persian Gulf producers combined.

That's not the way supply and demand works. Demand is the world market not us alone. Supply is also taken as an aggregate. Meaning even if we the US gets ZERO oil from SA or Iraq, but instead all from Mexico and south america. Iraq and SA produceing more lowers all prices globally even from the countries from wence we get it.


Anyway re topic Gas is STILL super cheap compared to any other source, it's basically a free energy source. Maybe electric comes close for cars. But then you have severe mass and distance limitations. Maybe we all just need to accept the fact the "free ride" is over?

 

[BaliBabyDoc]

Originally posted by: Zebo

Originally posted by: BaliBabyDoc

Originally posted by: Alistar7

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
USGS says we have 35 years of oil left. BPL says we got 30 years.

the world using up 80,000,000 barrels every single day, and its rising even faster so we might only have 25 yrs or 15.

america has 280 million ppl and 300 million cars.
china has 1.2 billion people and 6 million cars.

That's going to change, China and India will begin to suck up resources at a pace that will dawrf America.....

I think you underestimate the ability of the American consumer to waste resources. We are not relinquishing the title of "Global Glutton" without a fight.

Editied

WTF . . . English language Nazi! Go bother the President . . .

 

[phantom309]

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
USGS says we have 35 years of oil left. BPL says we got 30 years.

the world using up 80,000,000 barrels every single day, and its rising even faster so we might only have 25 yrs or 15.

america has 280 million ppl and 300 million cars.
china has 1.2 billion people and 6 million cars.

It's worse than that. Production isn't going to continue at a steady state until the last drop is pumped. It will steadily decline, and it may have already started. Oil will become progressively more expensive as the reserves of easily accessible oil run out.

Much more than any other country, US economic growth depends on cheap oil. Our entire infrastructure is designed around the automobile. Our agricultural industry depends heavily on petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides. Our manufacturing sector has declined drastically in the last 30 years largely because it's cheaper to transport goods here from far away than it is to make them locally.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: Zebo

Originally posted by: assemblage
Oil prices are going up and up for sure. To say Saddam was overthrown for oil is a red herring. In 2001 the US imported the most oil ever from Iraq and that only constituted 6.7%. In contrast, Canada supplies 17.3% of our oil. That?s only 3% less then all Persian Gulf producers. We import more oil from Canada than any other single country. We also import a lot of oil from Mexico, 13.7%. They are our third largest supplier. Those two countries supply the US with 10.7% more oil then all Persian Gulf producers combined.

That's not the way supply and demand works. Demand is the world market not us alone. Supply is also taken as an aggregate. Meaning even if we the US gets ZERO oil from SA or Iraq, but instead all from Mexico and south america. Iraq and SA produceing more lowers all prices globally even from the countries from wence we get it.


Anyway re topic Gas is STILL super cheap compared to any other source, it's basically a free energy source. Maybe electric comes close for cars. But then you have severe mass and distance limitations. Maybe we all just need to accept the fact the "free ride" is over?

I wish that could happen, but the pandering by the politicians and the mindset of the average American, who deems cheap fuel as his/her birthright, it just won't happen.

If anyone read that quote by Cheney, in which the world will need to make up 50 million barrels of new production by 2010, and then reads how we haven't found a single 1+ billion field outside the caspian oil fields can understand the predicament we will be in.

50 million barrels per day of new production is 5 saudi arabias. A typical implementation time from finding a viable field to production takes ~4 years with production usually escalating to it's max after about 10 years. 2004 is the peak year of new mega projects (projects with more than 500 million barrels of oil in a field), with 11 coming online this year. Afterwards, it's downhill. By 2007, zero mega projects will be online.

 

[Zebo]

Now you know why we must suceed in Iraq, even kerry knows it, to put more oil on global market as a stop gap. Eventually though with China and India consumption we will have to get used to higher prices and poor not driving. The "free ride" is over.

 

[0marTheZealot]

^

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
USGS says we have 35 years of oil left. BPL says we got 30 years.

the world using up 80,000,000 barrels every single day, and its rising even faster so we might only have 25 yrs or 15.

america has 280 million ppl and 300 million cars.
china has 1.2 billion people and 6 million cars.

The USGS incorporates "non-technical" factors when figuring out these projections. That's engineer speak for making sh!t up. They place oil-ultimately-recoverable at 3 trillion barrels. That's probably a P10 number. Most industry people place the number at 1.8-2.6 trillion, confidence interval of 95%.

 

[OFFascist]

I dont doubt that we will run out of oil in the near future, its not as if there is an infinate supply of the stuff in the ground.


For this reason alone I support the war in Iraq, we need to obtain the fuel we are going to need to keep our country running in the immediate future. I wish the situation in Iraq was going better so that we could do a better job of sucking that place dry and filling up our own reserves for the immediate future.

I pray that our government and scientists are working in secret to come up with a real plan though. More nuclear and biodiesel could reduce our need on oil a bit more but we still need to come up with something better to power our civillization.

 

[OFFascist]

Originally posted by: Alistar7
That's going to change, China and India will begin to suck up resources at a pace that will dawrf America.....

Almost sort of makes you wish China, India, and Pakistan went into a three way nuclear war back when tensions were high.

 

[OFFascist]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Biobased fuels are great (hell I'm getting my degree in Bioengineering in that area), but they come with a caveat. Much of this technology needs massive investment, arable land and petrolchemicals. We are running out of arable land and petrochemicals and the US isn't exactly the best place to start investing.

I think biodiesel is great, we can pretty much grow the stuff to make it, unfortunately we cant grow near enough to replace the ammount of gasoline that is used today.

However I definately think switching over to biodiesel is one of the more better solutions, as diesel vehicles can already use it. So more Americans will have to make due without cars so be it.

Instead of American farms making little money off of lots of food that usually goes to waste they could literally be making gas that will fetch a decent price.

It would be rather funny if instead of farmers selling thier land to develops to make homes and other urban areas for people if famers ended up buying back urban land and converting it to agricultural use to make more fuel.

 

[Engineer]

http://www.changingworldtech.com/

Anything into OIL.

Good read...not sure how true or possible this is, but it COULD be a solution to several problems facing the US today (energy and trash). This article was originally from Discover magazine.

DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 5 (May 2003)
Table of Contents

Anything into Oil
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other
waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
By Brad Lemley
Photography by Tony Law


Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will
no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted
to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently
completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful
products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change
almost anything into oil.
Really.
"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind,"
says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the
company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first
industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the
world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it
can slow down global warming."
Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that
sounds too good to be true.
"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur
who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and
deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal
depolymerization process, or TDP. 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. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion
with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.
"The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior
chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research
group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about
distributed generation of oil all over the world."
"This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees
Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a
former Bell Laboratories director.

The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two
fuel oil used to heat homes.

Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world's
agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal
depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process
works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste
problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the
U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy
equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United
States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil. Referring to U.S. dependence
on oil from the volatile Middle East, R. James Woolsey, former CIA
director and an adviser to Changing World Technologies, says, "This
technology offers a beginning of a way away from this."
But first things first. Today, here at the plant at Philadelphia's
Naval Business Center, the experimental feedstock is turkey
processing-plant waste: feathers, bones, skin, blood, fat, guts. A
forklift dumps 1,400 pounds of the nasty stuff into the machine's first
stage, a 350-horsepower grinder that masticates it into gray brown
slurry. From there it flows into a series of tanks and pipes, which hum
and hiss as they heat, digest, and break down the mixture. Two hours
later, a white-jacketed technician turns a spigot. Out pours a
honey-colored fluid, steaming a bit in the cold warehouse as it fills a
glass beaker.
It really is a lovely oil.
"The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the
liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially the same as a mix of
half fuel oil, half gasoline."
Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the
process, aren't the only ones who are impressed. The federal government
has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be
able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor
of the process. "We are going to be able to switch to a carbohydrate
economy."

Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth
mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and
animals that die, settle to ocean floors, decompose, and are mashed by
sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under
pressure and heat, the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen,
and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose into
short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet
time doing this?generally thousands or millions of years?because
subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic. Thermal
depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising
heat and pressure to levels that break the feedstock's long molecular
bonds.
Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel
using waste products before, but their efforts have been notoriously
inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried
to do the transformation in one step?superheat the material to drive off
the water and simultaneously break down the molecules," says Appel. That
leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous
substances to pollute the finished product. Very wet waste?and much of
the world's waste is wet?is particularly difficult to process efficiently
because driving off the water requires so much energy. Usually, the Btu
content in the resulting oil or gas barely exceeds the amount needed to
make the stuff.
That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who
lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the late 1980s. He says he "had
a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind another
inventor's waste-reforming process. "The prototype I saw produced a
heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement and filed
the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors and, in
1996, met Appel, a former commodities trader. "I saw what this could be
and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a partnership with the
Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration plant up and running by
1999.
Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent
energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That
means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the
process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry
raw materials, such as plastics.
So how does it work? In the cold Philadelphia warehouse, Appel waves a
long arm at the apparatus, which looks surprisingly low tech: a tangle of
pressure vessels, pipes, valves, and heat exchangers terminating in
storage tanks. It resembles the oil refineries that stretch to the
horizon on either side of the New Jersey Turnpike, and in part, that's
exactly what it is.
Appel strides to a silver gray pressure tank that is 20 feet long,
three feet wide, heavily insulated, and wrapped with electric heating
coils. He raps on its side. "The chief difference in our process is that
we make water a friend rather than an enemy," he says. "The other
processes all tried to drive out water. We drive it in, inside this tank,
with heat and pressure. We super-hydrate the material." Thus temperatures
and pressures need only be modest, because water helps to convey heat
into the feedstock. "We're talking about temperatures of 500 degrees
Fahrenheit and pressures of about 600 pounds for most organic
material?not at all extreme or energy intensive. And the cooking times
are pretty short, usually about 15 minutes."
Once the organic soup is heated and partially depolymerized in the
reactor vessel, phase two begins. "We quickly drop the slurry to a lower
pressure," says Appel, pointing at a branching series of pipes. The rapid
depressurization releases about 90 percent of the slurry's free water.
Dehydration via depressurization is far cheaper in terms of energy
consumed than is heating and boiling off the water, particularly because
no heat is wasted. "We send the flashed-off water back up there," Appel
says, pointing to a pipe that leads to the beginning of the process, "to
heat the incoming stream."
At this stage, the minerals?in turkey waste, they come mostly from
bones?settle out and are shunted to storage tanks. Rich in calcium and
magnesium, the dried brown powder "is a perfect balanced fertilizer,"
Appel says.
The remaining concentrated organic soup gushes into a second-stage
reactor similar to the coke ovens used to refine oil into gasoline. "This
technology is as old as the hills," says Appel, grinning broadly. The
reactor heats the soup to about 900 degrees Fahrenheit to further break
apart long molecular chains. Next, in vertical distillation columns, hot
vapor flows up, condenses, and flows out from different levels: gases
from the top of the column, light oils from the upper middle, heavier
oils from the middle, water from the lower middle, and powdered
carbon?used to manufacture tires, filters, and printer toners?from the
bottom. "Gas is expensive to transport, so we use it on-site in the plant
to heat the process," Appel says. The oil, minerals, and carbon are sold
to the highest bidders.
Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the
process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even
more profitable than oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to
produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl
chloride, or PVC?the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic
pipes?yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially
valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. "That's what's so
great about making water a friend," says Appel. "The hydrogen in water
combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a
municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin?very toxic."

Brian Appel, CEO of Changing World Technologies, strolls through a
thermal depolymerization plant in Philadelphia. Experiments at the pilot
facility revealed that the process is scalable?plants can sprawl over
acres and handle 4,000 tons of waste a day or be "small enough to go on
the back of a flatbed truck" and handle just one ton daily, says Appel.

The technicians here have spent three years feeding different kinds of
waste into their machinery to formulate recipes. In a little trailer next
to the plant, Appel picks up a handful of one-gallon plastic bags sent by
a potential customer in Japan. The first is full of ground-up appliances,
each piece no larger than a pea. "Put a computer and a refrigerator into
a grinder, and that's what you get," he says, shaking the bag. "It's PVC,
wood, fiberglass, metal, just a mess of different things. This process
handles mixed waste beautifully." Next to the ground-up appliances is a
plastic bucket of municipal sewage. Appel pops the lid and instantly
regrets it. "Whew," he says. "That is nasty."
Experimentation revealed that different waste streams require different
cooking and coking times and yield different finished products. "It's a
two-step process, and you do more in step one or step two depending on
what you are processing," Terry Adams says. "With the turkey guts, you do
the lion's share in the first stage. With mixed plastics, most of the
breakdown happens in the second stage." The oil-to-mineral ratios vary
too. Plastic bottles, for example, yield copious amounts of oil, while
tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says Adams, "nothing
hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try."
"The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel
says. "If it contains carbon, we can do it." à
This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a
day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards
from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits the
company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20
million facility, scheduled to go online any day, is expected to digest
more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours.

The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving all the time. At the
Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package 30,000
turkeys each workday, filling the air with the distinctive tang of
boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of large-scale
poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging carcasses clanks
past knife-wielding laborers who slash away. Outside, a tanker truck
idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many years, ConAgra
Foods has trucked the plant's waste?feathers, organs, and other nonusable
parts?to a rendering facility where it was ground and dried to make
animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products. But bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can spread
among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease has been
found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about feeding animals
to animals. In Europe the practice is illegal for all livestock. Since
1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of most recycled
animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of European-style mad-cow
regulations may kick-start the acceptance of thermal depolymerization.
"In Europe, there are mountains of bones piling up," says Alf Andreassen.
"When recycling waste into feed stops in this country, it will change
everything."
Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level,
Appel says, it is "the perfect process for destroying pathogens." On a
wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant?an artless
assemblage of gray and dun-colored buildings?as if it were his favorite
child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day, which will go back
into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make
21,000 gallons of water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a
municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be completely gone. It
will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff,
the same specs as a number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as
if he can't believe it. "It's amazing. The Environmental Protection
Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually
manufacturers?that's what our permit says. This process changes the whole
industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit."
He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops
of piping. A group of 15 investors and corporate advisers, including
Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among
the sparks and hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager
Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders emphasizes that
once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to oil
refining. The equipment, the procedures, the safety factors, the
maintenance?it's all proven technology."
And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing
in Philadelphia, we already know the costs," he says. "This is our
first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three
to five years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil
exploration and production company. And it will get cheaper from there."
"We've got a lot of confidence in this," Buffett says. "I represent
ConAgra's investment. We wouldn't be doing this if we didn't anticipate
success." Buffett isn't alone. Appel has lined up federal grant money to
help build demonstration plants to process chicken offal and manure in
Alabama and crop residuals and grease in Nevada. Also in the works are
plants to process turkey waste and manure in Colorado and pork and cheese
waste in Italy. He says the first generation of depolymerization centers
will be up and running in 2005. By then it should be clear whether the
technology is as miraculous as its backers claim.



EUREKA:

Chemistry, not alchemy, turns (A) turkey offal?guts, skin, bones, fat,
blood, and feathers?into a variety of useful products. After the
first-stage heat-and-pressure reaction, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates
break down into (B) carboxylic oil, which is composed of fatty acids,
carbohydrates, and amino acids. The second-stage reaction strips off the
fatty acids' carboxyl group (a carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, and a
hydrogen atom) and breaks the remaining hydrocarbon chains into smaller
fragments, yielding (C) a light oil. This oil can be used as is, or
further distilled (using a larger version of the bench-top distiller in
the background) into lighter fuels such as (D) naphtha, (E) gasoline, and
(F) kerosene. The process also yields (G) fertilizer-grade minerals
derived mostly from bones and (H) industrially useful carbon black.


Garbage In, Oil Out

Feedstock is funneled into a grinder and mixed with water to create a
slurry that is pumped into the first-stage reactor, where heat and
pressure partially break apart long molecular chains. The resulting
organic soup flows into a flash vessel where pressure drops dramatically,
liberating some of the water, which returns back upstream to preheat the
flow into the first-stage reactor. In the second-stage reactor, the
remaining organic material is subjected to more intense heat, continuing
the breakup of molecular chains. The resulting hot vapor then goes into
vertical distillation tanks, which separate it into gases, light oils,
heavy oils, water, and solid carbon. The gases are burned on-site to make
heat to power the process, and the water, which is pathogen free, goes to
a municipal waste plant. The oils and carbon are deposited in storage
tanks, ready for sale.
? Brad Lemley




A Boon to Oil and Coal Companies

One might expect fossil-fuel companies to fight thermal depolymerization.
If the process can make oil out of waste, why would anyone bother to get
it out of the ground? But switching to an energy economy based entirely
on reformed waste will be a long process, requiring the construction of
thousands of thermal depolymerization plants. In the meantime, thermal
depolymerization can make the petroleum industry itself cleaner and more
profitable, says John Riordan, president and CEO of the Gas Technology
Institute, an industry research organization. Experiments at the
Philadelphia thermal depolymerization plant have converted heavy crude
oil, shale, and tar sands into light oils, gases, and graphite-type
carbon. "When you refine petroleum, you end up with a heavy solid-waste
product that's a big problem," Riordan says. "This technology will
convert these waste materials into natural gas, oil, and carbon. It will
fit right into the existing infrastructure."
Appel says a modified version of thermal depolymerization could be used
to inject steam into underground tar-sand deposits and then refine them
into light oils at the surface, making this abundant, difficult-to-access
resource far more available. But the coal industry may become thermal
depolymerization's biggest fossil-fuel beneficiary. "We can clean up coal
dramatically," says Appel. So far, experiments show the process can
extract sulfur, mercury, naphtha, and olefins?all salable
commodities?from coal, making it burn hotter and cleaner. Pretreating
with thermal depolymerization also makes coal more friable, so less
energy is needed to crush it before combustion in electricity-generating
plants.
? B.L.


Can Thermal Depolymerization Slow Global Warming?

If the thermal depolymerization process WORKS AS Claimed, it will clean
up waste and generate new sources of energy. But its backers contend it
could also stem global warming, which sounds iffy. After all, burning oil
creates global warming, doesn't it?
Carbon is the major chemical constituent of most organic matter?plants
take it in; animals eat plants, die, and decompose; and plants take it
back in, ad infinitum. Since the industrial revolution, human beings
burning fossil fuels have boosted concentrations of atmospheric carbon
more than 30 percent, disrupting the ancient cycle. According to
global-warming theory, as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide
accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps solar radiation, which warms the
atmosphere?and, some say, disrupts the planet's ecosystems.
But if there were a global shift to thermal depolymerization
technologies, belowground carbon would remain there. The accoutrements of
the civilized world?domestic animals and plants, buildings, artificial
objects of all kinds?would then be regarded as temporary carbon sinks. At
the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in thermal
depolymerization machines into short-chain fuels, fertilizers, and
industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back
into long chains again. So the only carbon used would be that which
already existed above the surface; it could no longer dangerously
accumulate in the atmosphere. "Suddenly, the whole built world just
becomes a temporary carbon sink," says Paul Baskis, inventor of the
thermal depolymerization process. "We would be honoring the balance of
nature."
? B.L.

 

[0marTheZealot]

^
I've read about TD, and I've come to the conclusion it will only be a bit player, much like "alternative" oils like shale, sands, and kerogen. It sounds nice, but it is not unsustainable (600 million tons of turkey guts?! wow!, the amount of grain needed to feed that would be enormous).

The problem is scale. If we had a sustainable population, like around 2 billion world wide, then this technology would be all we would really need to offset declines from elsewhere. Right now, it is a proverbial drop in the bucket (or 5 if you wish )

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
^
I've read about TD, and I've come to the conclusion it will only be a bit player, much like "alternative" oils like shale, sands, and kerogen. It sounds nice, but it is not unsustainable (600 million tons of turkey guts?! wow!, the amount of grain needed to feed that would be enormous).

The problem is scale. If we had a sustainable population, like around 2 billion world wide, then this technology would be all we would really need to offset declines from elsewhere. Right now, it is a proverbial drop in the bucket (or 5 if you wish )

Well, it does use other forms of waste (other than turkey guts) and it could cut our landfill trash problems tremendously. Also, for a 15% useage in energy to get 100% (i.e. 85% efficient), I can't see how it would be bad at all. When the world runs out of oil from pumping, this may go a long way to helping.

Also, is there any follow ups to this (written in 2003)?

 

[0marTheZealot]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

This is what I used mainly in my decisions along with numbers of oil production. It just doesn't look feasible to ramp production up that much to offset decline (on the order of 2 mbd per year every year after the peak).

 

[charrison]

Originally posted by: Engineer

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
^
I've read about TD, and I've come to the conclusion it will only be a bit player, much like "alternative" oils like shale, sands, and kerogen. It sounds nice, but it is not unsustainable (600 million tons of turkey guts?! wow!, the amount of grain needed to feed that would be enormous).

The problem is scale. If we had a sustainable population, like around 2 billion world wide, then this technology would be all we would really need to offset declines from elsewhere. Right now, it is a proverbial drop in the bucket (or 5 if you wish )

Well, it does use other forms of waste (other than turkey guts) and it could cut our landfill trash problems tremendously. Also, for a 15% useage in energy to get 100% (i.e. 85% efficient), I can't see how it would be bad at all. When the world runs out of oil from pumping, this may go a long way to helping.

Also, is there any follow ups to this (written in 2003)?

I have been watching them, no news lately. IF this technology works, it solves alot of problems.

 

[Gen Stonewall]

america has 280 million ppl and 300 million cars.

Hold it, that means that means more than one car for every man, woman and child living in the U.S. 30 million is a more reasonable number.

(I haven't read the thread, so I apologize if this has already been brought up.)

 

[Engineer]

Originally posted by: Gen Stonewall

america has 280 million ppl and 300 million cars.

Hold it, that means that means more than one car for every man, woman and child living in the U.S. 30 million is a more reasonable number.

(I haven't read the thread, so I apologize if this has already been brought up.)

Working in the automotive industry, I assure you it's closer to 300 million than 30. The US has manufactured and sold more than 17 million cars for each of the last 3 years (expanded in each of the last 3 years as more and more incentives are kicked in - at my company's expense). That is not counting buses or other heavy trucks (semi's). There are towns in the US that have more cars than people (forget source, but read recently).

 

[OFFascist]

Originally posted by: Gen Stonewall
Hold it, that means that means more than one car for every man, woman and child living in the U.S. 30 million is a more reasonable number.

You would find that suprising? I thought it was common knowledge.

There are more vehicles in America than there are people.

 

[charrison]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

This is what I used mainly in my decisions along with numbers of oil production. It just doesn't look feasible to ramp production up that much to offset decline (on the order of 2 mbd per year every year after the peak).

There is alot of trash that could be run though this thing.

 

[Rainsford]

I don't get why people talk about oil like it has some special properties. True, our economy and the economies of most countries require vast amounts of oil, but our core demand is ENERGY, not oil itself. The natural progression will be rarer oil, more expensive oil, higher cost for many industries, better economics in alternative sources of energy so alternative sources are used more, the system balances out.

The "doomsday" predictions require either oil production to suddenly STOP without us having time to adjust, or people to do nothing about increased rarity (and thus increased cost) of oil. Neither of those make a lot of sense to me.

The comparison I prefer is the following. Back when everybody farmed to feed themselves, a lot of land was required for each person. As populations grew, farming methods improved to the point where a lot less land was required to feed an individual person. If farming methods hadn't improved and if we hadn't started making better use of that land, there is no way the Earth could support the population we currently have. But that point is moot, because something needed to be done, so it was done.

I don't see what makes oil such a special problem that we won't adapt like we have with everything else in our history.

 

[judasmachine]

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
USGS says we have 35 years of oil left. BPL says we got 30 years.

It's not running out of oil we have to fear, it's 'peak oil.' The point where it's simply too expensive to drill it out of the ground. The 'oil wars' will get worse.

 

[charrison]

Originally posted by: judasmachine

Originally posted by: ReiAyanami
USGS says we have 35 years of oil left. BPL says we got 30 years.

It's not running out of oil we have to fear, it's 'peak oil.' The point where it's simply too expensive to drill it out of the ground. The 'oil wars' will get worse.

When it is simply too expensive, we will do something else. Problem solved.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: Rainsford
I don't get why people talk about oil like it has some special properties. True, our economy and the economies of most countries require vast amounts of oil, but our core demand is ENERGY, not oil itself. The natural progression will be rarer oil, more expensive oil, higher cost for many industries, better economics in alternative sources of energy so alternative sources are used more, the system balances out.

The "doomsday" predictions require either oil production to suddenly STOP without us having time to adjust, or people to do nothing about increased rarity (and thus increased cost) of oil. Neither of those make a lot of sense to me.

The comparison I prefer is the following. Back when everybody farmed to feed themselves, a lot of land was required for each person. As populations grew, farming methods improved to the point where a lot less land was required to feed an individual person. If farming methods hadn't improved and if we hadn't started making better use of that land, there is no way the Earth could support the population we currently have. But that point is moot, because something needed to be done, so it was done.

I don't see what makes oil such a special problem that we won't adapt like we have with everything else in our history.

Because oil is the most important fuel man has ever discovered.

1. It is abundant. Worldwide estimates are around 2 trillion barrels (or 110 or so trillion gallons).
2. It is easy to extract. A few pumps and off you go.
3. It is easy to transport. A tanker can hold several million barrels of oil.
4. It burns cleaner than coal.
5. It is the base for millions of industrial products.

Agriculture is suffering. Without the input of petrochemicals, much of the arable land declines exponentially (due to the abuse we gave it over 30 years).

Remember, a temporary shortage in 1973 of about 3% produced a decades long recession. Imagine if each year, production came less and less.

Different energies for different purposes. We aren't at a point of unified energy, so we have different sources for different needs. We can't use windmill energy to produce crops, just like using oil for electricity would be fool-hardy. We don't require energy, otherwise we would simply build coal plants and such out the wazoo. We need an infusion of oil. Oil is what sustains modern industrial society. High oil prices drive EVERY piece of equipment and utility higher. Unfortunately, we don't have new oil to find nor productive capability to come online to deal with a shortage, which was the usual solution when oil prices escalated (at least we don't have many new sources of oil, 2004 had 11 mega projects come online, 2005 is set to have 9 published projects and 6 unpublished (which is why I said this year was the peak but was wrong), by 2008, we will have no mega projects come online). This is the main problem for oil. We have no substitutes. Hydrogen fuel cells require copious amount of platinum to work (about 20grams) and only last for 4-5 years when the catalyst gets too degraded from contact with the environment. However, fuel cells can't work in planes, large trucks, refining vehicles needed for coal and mineral extraction etc etc. Also, hydrogen isn't an energy source (at least w/o fusion, but that's a different story) but an energy carrier. For one thing, it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than hydrogen contains. Secondly, the production of hydrogen comes from fossil fuels, namely natural gas (which isn't exactly plentiful on the North American continent). The hydrogen economy is best a diverson from a real solution and at worst a suicide pact. Currently, there exists no fuel readily available nor versatile like oil. Coal to liquids works, but at current rates of energy profit declines, coal will cease being an energy source by 2040 (as stated by Heinburg in "The Party's Over"). This is because it will require the same amount of energy to extract as it will provide.

Oil forms many things from perfumes, plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, solvents, source for polymer carbon, detergants, basically just about anything with carbon in it (RE: anything that isn't metal) is derived either directly from petroleum or indirectly, through the transportation of the product. It should be noted that our economy is based on transportation for the most part. When costs of transportation grow higher and higher (and they will when oil is either in decline or prohibitively expensive), the costs are passed on to the consumer. Stagflation insues.

A decline for an economy that requires to grow is catastrophic. When a person gets sick and weary, that is when the effects of cancer is most felt. Likewise, we will feel the effects of oil depletion when we need it least. As it stands, we are already a precipitous edge.