mrfixit
Chief Chaotic Engineer
We all know the drawbacks of fossil fuels, like our dependence on a dwindling resource buried inconveniently in the Middle East. We also know we generate too much trash. So wouldn't the world be a better place if we could solve both problems at once and turn garbage into oil?
As it happens, this transformation has just begun in Carthage, Mo. A new $25-million factory started turning castoff feathers, guts and bones into energy. ConAgra Foods, which owns Butterball, put up half the money; 200 tons of turkey per day will become fertilizer, a heating-grade oil, a powdered carbon suitable for home water filters and, as a bonus, enough natural gas to power the process.
Engineers since the 20's have known how to convert biomass into fuel, but no one has ever figured out how to do it profitably. Government research dollars pushed the science along starting in the 70's, and by the early 90's, Paul Baskis, an Illinois biologist and inventor, had made several crucial leaps. Baskis's thermal depolymerization (TDP) mimics the way magma in the earth's crust turns fossils into fuels, but it does so in a matter of hours instead of millennia. An entrepreneur named Brian Appel became a majority holder of Baskis's patents and in 1997 formed a company called Changing World Technologies to try to make TDP commercially viable.
We have started using this at the company I work for. We're keeping close tabs on how it works out.
As it happens, this transformation has just begun in Carthage, Mo. A new $25-million factory started turning castoff feathers, guts and bones into energy. ConAgra Foods, which owns Butterball, put up half the money; 200 tons of turkey per day will become fertilizer, a heating-grade oil, a powdered carbon suitable for home water filters and, as a bonus, enough natural gas to power the process.
Engineers since the 20's have known how to convert biomass into fuel, but no one has ever figured out how to do it profitably. Government research dollars pushed the science along starting in the 70's, and by the early 90's, Paul Baskis, an Illinois biologist and inventor, had made several crucial leaps. Baskis's thermal depolymerization (TDP) mimics the way magma in the earth's crust turns fossils into fuels, but it does so in a matter of hours instead of millennia. An entrepreneur named Brian Appel became a majority holder of Baskis's patents and in 1997 formed a company called Changing World Technologies to try to make TDP commercially viable.
We have started using this at the company I work for. We're keeping close tabs on how it works out.
