Garbage Into Oil – How to turn garbage into fuel.

The recipe for making crude oil is relatively simple: combine the remains of ferns, jellyfish, and dinosaurs; cover with sediment; bury deep in the earth’s crust; and apply pressure for millions of years—give or take an epoch.

By Tracy Staedter
Visualize

Or if you’re pressed for time, run some turkey parts or used tires through the thermal process owned by Changing World Technologies of West Hempstead, NY.

The system uses water, pressure, and heat to convert organic material into clean fuel gas, absorbent carbon (like that used in water filters), minerals for fertilizer, and a crude oil that is chemically similar to a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline; this oil can be sold to refineries and converted into fuel. The system produces no polluting emissions, and the only by-product is water.

In April 2003, the first commercial thermo-depolymerization plant opened in Carthage, MO. Every day, the plant handles 200 tons of unused turkey parts produced by ConAgra’s Butterball turkey plant.

Such waste is now typically reprocessed into animal feed, but this practice may not be allowed much longer in the United States: Britain has already outlawed it in the wake of hoof-and-mouth and mad-cow disease outbreaks traced to reconstituted animal feed.

The first stage of the thermal process has been around since the 1960s as a way to convert organic waste into hydrocarbon liquids. But the process has been inefficient, says Changing World chief technology officer Terry Adams, because it typically employs a single reactor both to heat the organic matter and to convert it into oil.

That creates nonuniform heating, which breaks down molecules unevenly and results in a low-grade oil. Changing World uses two main reactors that heat and pressurize much more efficiently. And the system handles not only turkey offal but tires, plastics, sludge, municipal waste, paper, and livestock remains—expanding its potential for widespread use.

“They have certainly produced the products they’ve claimed at a smaller scale,” says MIT chemical engineer Jefferson Tester, who visited a pilot plant in Philadelphia and is intrigued by the larger-scale possibilities. Mother Nature can definitely transform the same products into usable fuel; you’d just have to wait a little longer.

Tracy Staedter is the managing editor at Technology Review.

Copyright 2003 Technology Review, Inc. All rights reserved

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/visualize0603.asp

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Entrepreneur’s plants cook wastes into oil

16 May 2003
By Bill Bergstrom, Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA — The versatile turkey has been chopped, pressed, and processed into foods as diverse as burgers and bacon. Now a Long Island entrepreneur wants to put a turkey in your tank.

Brian S. Appel, chief executive of Changing World Technologies, has developed a process for cooking and pressurizing waste turkey parts — and lots of other things — into a golden liquid that can be refined into heating oil, diesel fuel, or gasoline.

He has attracted the attention of former CIA Director James Woolsey, who says the process can reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. An adviser to Appel’s West Hempstead, N.Y., company, Woolsey traveled to Philadelphia last month for a demonstration of how the process could turn tires into oil.

Appel’s process, called thermal depolymerization, is essentially an accelerated version of "the oldest of technologies, one that the Earth uses when it puts vegetables and dinosaurs under pressure" to form petroleum deposits, Woolsey said.

A $20 million facility at ConAgra’s Butterball turkey plant in Carthage, Mo., is undergoing testing and is expected to start using the technique by the end of May, said Terry Adams, chief technology officer for Changing World Technologies. The plant ultimately will grind up, heat, pressurize, and process 200 tons a day of leftover turkey innards, bones, feathers, fats, and grease — enough to produce 600 barrels of oil daily, officials say.

Appel recently showed off the techniques at a pilot plant at the Philadelphia Naval Business Center. In one end went tires, ground to quarter-inch bits by a giant industrial shredder. Out the other end came a caramel-colored liquid that resembles crude oil. The plants can sell the oil to fuel blenders for use in home heating or power-generating fuel. Refineries could process it as they do crude oil. Utilities could burn it for power. The process will digest just about anything: garbage, medical waste, hog manure, old tires.

Robert C. Brown, an engineering professor at the Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies at Iowa State University, said scientists have known for years how to use thermal depolymerization to convert waste into energy. The problem, he said, is cost.

Biological materials, like turkey byproducts, contain water that must be removed before they can be turned into fuel. Brown said biomatter also contains oxygen, which gives it less explosive kick than fossil fuels. "I’d be surprised if they can do it at a good price," he said.

Appel acknowledged his process isn’t competitive with crude oil. The Missouri plant will need to spend $15 a barrel to turn turkey waste into oil, compared with about $13 a barrel for small exploration and production companies and $5 for a major oil company, he said. Appel, 44, said the cost will fall as more plants are built. He is also pushing Congress for a clean-fuel subsidy to help it compete.

"If we take the plastics and the tires and the fats and the bones and we turn that into fuels, that will mean much less fossil fuel will need to be dug up out of the ground," Appel said.

Appel said byproducts from the process can be recycled: water pumped into a community water treatment facility, carbon and minerals sold to make tires and fertilizer, and gases like methane piped to generate the plant’s electricity.

Environmental officials have shown interest. In 2001, the federal Environmental Protection Agency announced a $5 million grant to help develop the Missouri plant.

Changing World Technologies and the $27 billion ConAgra Foods conglomerate formed a partnership to share the rest of the $20 million cost and continue to commercialize the technique. ConAgra sees it not only as a business opportunity but also as a way to get rid of its own waste, said company spokeswoman Julie DeYoung.

Appel said 11 more projects are planned, including ones at a ConAgra turkey plant in Longmont, Colo.; a poultry plant in Enterprise, Ala.; and an onion dehydration plant in Fernley, Nev. The three projects received nearly $10 million in grants from the Department of Energy.

Source: Associated Press

http://www.enn.com/news/2003-05-16/s_4479.asp

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Thermal Depolymerization plant closed

by Ron Graber

http://energybulletin.net/1666.html

August 8, 2004

Despite the nasty odor that drifted through much of downtown Carthage on Thursday, Renewable Environmental Solutions Plant Manager Don Sanders says his plant will be odor free.

"Our goal is to operate at 100 percent with little to no odors," said Sanders on Friday morning. "We will do that."

Carthage Fire Chief John Cooper said Thursday’s northeast wind brought numerous phone calls to his department regarding the smell which was determined to be coming from the RES plant just east of Butterball.

"It’s kind of like singed hair," said Cooper.

He said the RES plant shut down production after complaints about the smell were raised. They later resumed production, then shut the plant down again after the smell resurfaced.

Sanders said the plant was operating Friday morning until another problem surfaced.

Sanders said odor complaints were first made back when the plant was operating at 20 percent of capacity. Modifications were then made to the process, and production was increased to 50 percent, then 75 percent, with modifications at each step.

Lately, the RES plant has been operating at 100 percent of capacity, and once again, modifications are being made to the thermal depolymerization process that converts materials from the Butterball plant into oils, gases, carbons and materials that can be used as fertilizer.

Plant officials have "bent over backwards" to eliminate the odor problem, said Cooper.

"They are trying to alleviate the problem," he said, also noting that he estimates that about half the time the Fire Department receives calls about RES odors, the smell is coming from elsewhere.

Regardless, RES officials say that as the plant is fine-tuned, they will eliminate the odor problem.

"We are optimistic," said Sanders. "It’s just a matter of time."

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