Transforming Waste Plastic Into $10/Barrel Fuel 315
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the mr.-fusion dept.
from the mr.-fusion dept.
Mike writes "Today Washington DC-based company Envion opened a $5 million dollar facility that they claim will be able to efficiently transform plastic waste into a source of oil-like fuel. The technology uses infra-red energy to remove hydrocarbons from plastic without the use of a catalyst, transforming 82% of the original plastic material into fuel. According to Envion, the resulting fuel can then be blended with other components, providing a source for gasoline or diesel at as low as $10 per barrel."
Remove Hydrocarbons from Plastic???!!!! (Score:2, Informative)
Pyrolysis (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And In Other News (Score:5, Informative)
And in other news, a new law was finally passed making it legal to beat fraudsters to death with copies of their SEC filings.
RTFA: This company has already built a facility, and has already landed a contract for the fuel. They are using a well known technology, just with a slightly different take (IR instead of chemical catalysts). This doesn't exactly look like vaporware to me.
Re:Infra red energy? (Score:5, Informative)
Nope - IR is a photon (i.e. an energy packet). This energy matches the vibrational energy levels of a molecule, so when it's absorbed it results in the same motions that we call heat. Heat can bleed in all directions, while light can only go in straight lines. Next time you're at a campfire/bonfire, hold up a hand and put your face in the shadow - you'll notice that you feel a small amount of heat on your face, but that overall it's much colder-feeling since you're not absorbing those IR photons.
Re:And In Other News (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I hate fraudsters and vaporware, they actually opened the facility (RTFA required)... time will tell if it's working, but it's not vapor or pie-in-the-sky... it's here.
Re:Remove Hydrocarbons from Plastic???!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
That's what plastic is made of!
The summary left unsaid that it is the removed hydrocarbons that are retained, and the rest discarded.
Then the retained hydrocarbons (82% of the input) is reduced to an "oil product". Tfa linked to rather thin page which explained vary little.
Further digging at environ.com yielded this:
The reactor, a vital component of the unit, utilizes a heating system that converts plastic into oil through low temperature thermal cracking in a vacuum. Using this innovative approach, the Envion Oil Generatorâ produces oil and power safely, efficiently, and economically through an environmentally sensitive process that produces a net gain in energy recaptured.
A single Envion unit is capable of processing up to 10,000 tons of plastic waste annually, producing three to five barrels of refined petroleum product per ton of plastic waste.
Re:Washington DC based? (Score:1, Informative)
Maybe partly because around here we have fairly cheap electricity (which I expect pyrolysis uses a lot of), generated by nuclear plants (which enables them to evade the "well you're just generating carbon at the coal plant instead of in the cars that burn your fuel to replace gasoline).
Re:Can we put one of these factories on a ship? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can we put one of these factories on a ship? (Score:3, Informative)
Problem is that although the "Great Garbage Patch" does indeed contain quite a lot of refuse, it's spread over an enormous area (ie. 2x the size of the continental US). It's unlikely that collecting any meaningful quantity of garbage would be economical -- in fact, it would likely be quite expensive.
Re:Can we put one of these factories on a ship? (Score:1, Informative)
No, they aren't the secret behind the oil, they're the secret that could put moms out of business because the oil lasts a really long time and no one would have to buy her oil again.
Re:Can we put one of these factories on a ship? (Score:3, Informative)
Regardless, I think you're probably right - it would likely still be exceptionally expensive.
Probably not a bad way to generate some supplemental funding for a clean-up, though.
Re:And In Other News (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Remove Hydrocarbons from Plastic???!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
TFA quotes up top 82% recovery, the envion.com website indicates an average of 60% conversion. 1400 lbs out of 2000 lbs that would be 70% conversion.
And the amount of energy needed for cracking is not much.
Re:And In Other News (Score:2, Informative)
For most plastics, the making is energetically favourable. That's a fact. You often will have to heat up the monomer mix, and usually add a catalyst to help the reaction, but the reaction itself should be producing energy, not consuming it.
Cracking the plastics back to oil-type chunks does need a bit of energy to be added.
And finally to put things into perspective (as you obviously know nothing about the chemistry of plastics), the amounts of energy involved in these reactions are nothing compared to the energy released when burning the oil/plastics. Plastic itself is a fantastic fuel, it's just impractical to use as is in internal combustion engines.
Re:Not Recycling (Score:5, Informative)
I'm working in the plastic recycling industry.
You are correct for the fact that many plastics can be recycled. Almost all plastics can be recycled. But they have to be pure, and that's where the problem is.
Many packing films are multi-layer products: one layer for strength, one on top for gloss, another on the bottom to make it sealable, one more as moisture/oxygen/smell barrier, etc. This kind of plastic product is very hard to recycle, and often only to very low-end products. Fuel recovery is not that bad an idea.
Another issue is that it is often not known what plastic a product is made of. That becomes even more an issue when it is all mixed, such as post-consumer waste like we are now dumping in landfills or burning in incinerators. Those plastics need sorting (difficult if you have no way to tell what it is), washing, etc. A lot of work, very expensive to do, and as sorting is never 100% you will again end up with relative low end applications for the recycled plastic.
A lot of the plastics collected in USA and Europe is shipped to China for recycling, especially the post consumer waste. These fractions often have a negative price at the source: Chinese users pay a little bit for the material, but less than transport cost let alone collection cost. Sorting cost is high, recovery rates low. Pyrolysis may well be a cheaper and even environmentally favourable solution for these mixed plastics compared to shipping them to China or India for recovery.
Any higher-value stream will not go for pyrolysis. Higher value as in post-industrial wastes (they are generally clean and pure), or sorted fractions from domestic (think PET bottles (soda, water), HDPE bottles (soap, milk), PE film (wrapping film, shrink film, carrybags) or agricultural film). Those fractions are now being traded and recycled on a commercial basis.
Re:Remove Hydrocarbons from Plastic???!!!! (Score:5, Informative)
The chlorine will not be "liberated" to Cl2 as it is not chemically stable in this case. As soon as there would be a Cl2 molecule in the mix, and it finds a hydrocarbon with a double bond, it will react with this hydrocarbon. And double bonds there will be plenty of considering it is a cracking process. So no chance to get Cl2 gas out of it without taking special measures beyond just thermal cracking of the plastic.
Re:And In Other News (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And In Other News (Score:2, Informative)
And you obviously don't know what a catalyst is doing really.
A catalyst will never, ever make a reaction go the other way than it would naturally do. What a catalyst is doing, is lowering the energy barrier for a reaction to take place, increasing the speed of a reaction. In some cases without a catalyst the energy barrier is so high that a reaction would be so slow that it basically does not occur.
You can however change the favourable end products by increasing the temperature - in the extreme, when temperature is high enough, all atoms will break bonds with each other and go free. This is what is done in oil cracking: heat it up, so smaller molecules are more favourable than larger molecules in terms of energy and entropy.
Another way to crack molecules is to use radiation like IR. IR with the correct wavelength will energise and resonate the bonds of molecules to the point of breaking, thereby cracking the molecules. Again a catalyst can help in this process, lowering the energy required to get enough resonance to break a bond. As the reaction takes place inside the molecule there may be not much a catalyst can do in this case, or the reaction is fast enough by itself that adding a catalyst is not helping enough to justify the cost.
The energy barrier to re-make the bond is at low temperatures so high that it can not be formed anymore. That is why ethylene gas is stable, and will not spontaneously polymerise to polyethylene. This in contrast to e.g. styrene or terephtalates which do tend to polymerise over time when stored at room temperature.
Re:In the future... (Score:5, Informative)
You've failed basic research.
Wood gas generators, called Gasogene or GazogÃne, were used to power motor vehicles in Europe during World War II fuel shortages. These are just gasification devices which can use pretty much any organic fuel. Gasification is a common process technique for power plants around the world.
the Fischerâ"Tropsch process was invented in WWII by chemists in fossil-fuel poor Germany, and can convert the synthesis gas from gasification devices into low-sulphur diesel fuel. Companies in the United States, South Africa, Malaysia, Germany and Finland all either have functioning process plants or companies planning on creating process plants.
It hasn't been suppressed or killed, it's in use today. Don't mistake "Gas and oil prices are too low to justify investing in this stuff" for "we don't want this technology to exist".
Re:What can you actually do with 5Mil (Score:5, Informative)
The way industry works is this: After a process is deemed to have potential, first you spend a small amount (5 million dollars is a drop in the bucket in the cashflow of a real company or process plant) on a proof-of-concept plant called a 'pilot plant'. If the pilot plant shows the process is both viable and economical, then you can convince investors to put a few hundred million dollars into a full-scale process plant.
This seems to be a new technology, it makes sense that it'd be a pilot plant right now.
Re:Remove Hydrocarbons from Plastic???!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
The law of conservation of energy only applies to a closed system. This isn't a closed system.
The plastic feedstock contains vast amounts of energy, where the point of the process is to change it from a solid to a liquid that can be used in vehicles. Since we've established that the feedstock contains a vast amount of energy, it's only reasonable that some of that energy can be burned to power the process of converting from a solid to a liquid.
Re:Can we put one of these factories on a ship? (Score:4, Informative)
The US "system" of measures strikes again! (Score:3, Informative)