A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil (newatlas.com) 181
Big Hairy Ian shares this report from New Atlas:
The U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gallons of raw sewage that Americans create every day... [T]he raw sewage is placed in a reactor that's basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit, which mimics the same geological process that turned prehistoric organic matter into crude oil by breaking it down into simple compounds, only...it takes minutes instead of epochs... The end product is very similar to fossil crude oil with a bit of oxygen and water mixed in and can be refined like crude oil using conventional fractionating plants.
After six years of development, they've licensed the process for a $6 million pilot plant that's expected to launch in 2018.
After six years of development, they've licensed the process for a $6 million pilot plant that's expected to launch in 2018.
Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA burned through 7000 million barrels of crude oil in 2015, so 32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error. Also, since the sewage comes out at many disparate locations across the country, building one of these plants at every sewer plant might not even be worth the hassle.
Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:4, Insightful)
It's almost half a percentage and it takes care of the sewage problem. It seems the process is simple enough that having one near a large city might be both useful and cheap, perhaps even farms could find it useful. Hopefully we can eventually get off crude for all our energy needs and all sorts of biodiesels might make up where oils are still necessary.
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It's going to be expensive to maintain that pressure and that temperature.
But what people miss is that the half a percentage point reduces demand for the most expensive oil.
Say Oil is produced at
$10 a barrel (19.5%)
$24 a barrel (10%)
$40 a barrel (40%)
$50 a barrel (30%)
$65 a barrel (0.5%)
The price for every barrel of oil will be $65 a barrel (out side of some hedging contracts).
So if you can reduce demand for oil by just half a percent, the price for every barrel of oil will drop to $50 a barrel.
Of cours
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That's a really neat argument, Marco. I knew oil was inelastic - as I understand it, the current situation is due to a very small imbalance between supply and demand.
With that said, I think you're still wrong and here's why : the production cost of sewage->oil is probably really high. The reason I think that is that you need a lot of sewage for very little oil, so you need a big and expensive and complex plant. And there's no way to get good economies of scale if you can't really pump sewage very far
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Incorrect. This does not take care of the sewage problem. It doesn't use the actual wastewater; instead it uses the sludge which is output as a byproduct from a conventional wastewater treatment plant. So you still need to have an entire wastewater treatment plant like we have now, and this just handles the sludge the plant produces.
Right now sludge is dewatered and partially sterilized and then goes to (typically) one of two places: either it is sent to a landfill to be used as cover (it is not the tras
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either it is sent to a landfill to be used as cover
As less and less waste goes to landfill, there will be correspondingly less need for sources of 'cover'. This new process can provide an alternative use for all that sludge.
it goes through additional sterilization and is used as fertilizer on farms or is sold as fertilizer at retail.
Then in this sense the new process is neutral as regards the energy required to sterilise the sludge. If it's used as a fuel source, it doesn't need to be made sterile. Plus, many, many people have problems with the use of sewage sludge on their fruits and veggies. Besides the diseases, another problem is that sludge contains the byprodu
Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I suspect that heavy metals would be easy to extract from "your biocrude". At least after it had been cracked into volatiles. This would mean that the residue would be rich in heavy metals, quite possibly rich enough to compete with ores. The problem with heavy metals in sludge is that the grade of the ore is too poor, but if you take, say, 75% of the non-heavy metals away you've improved the ore remarkably. (And even if the ore is still unprofitably poor, at least you've decreased the volume you need to deal with by a LOT.)
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Have you ever heard of comtil? The largest source in most places is sewage treatment. But yes, there are problems with sewage treatment and it is often tackled already at a large expense.
I'm not sure the bio-crude would suffer any ill issues with those contaminates though. Part of the crude refining process already removes or separates contamination by default. It basically removes the portions it wants and then the sludge left over gets reduced to make asphalt tars as well as petroleum coke. There are alr
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You realize that *eventually* we'll probably need to synthesize various sorts of hydrocarbon-based fuels, right? Our natural supplies aren't going to replenish themselves or last forever, and there isn't a viable fuel replacement for some types of applications, like aviation or boating.
Besides which, we need to process our sewage anyhow. Why not turn it into something useful? Certainly worth a test plant to see how well it can work.
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Fuels - maybe. But then again, industrial chemistry text books in the 1930s were berating people for being stupid enough to burn oil, instead of using it for something useful. As feedstock for the chemistry industry (most of the plastics you've ever used, including in your 3d-printer), for lubricating materials ... liquid hydrocarbons will continue to be used. Like it or lump it.
Actually there might be some gain (Score:3)
32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error.
Or a drop in the bucket.
since the sewage comes out at many disparate locations across the country, building one of these plants at every sewer plant might not even be worth the hassle.
It depends entirely on the size and complexity of the plant. Plus fuel production may not be the only benefit. This new system also replaces whatever the current treatment and processing system is. There might be some sort of gain there.
Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA burned through 7000 million barrels of crude oil in 2015, so 32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error.
If you need to walk a kilometer, each step is only 0.1% of that distance, so there is obviously no point in taking a step. Thus, walking a kilometer is impossible.
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They never said they were trying to solve America's energy supply problems.
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The USA burned through 7000 million barrels of crude oil in 2015, so 32 million from sewage conversion is just a rounding error. Also, since the sewage comes out at many disparate locations across the country, building one of these plants at every sewer plant might not even be worth the hassle.
I don't think this is particularly new. I read about something similar probably 10-15 years ago already.
Thing is, the same process should work on a lot more than just sewage. Certain types of trash, butcher scraps, yard trimmings, maybe even pureed plastics could probably all be used as raw material. Really depends on how much a plant has to be "tuned" for a certain feed stock.
It would be really cool if it could get to a point where the entire waste stream is ground up, the sewage is added to liquefy it so
Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:5, Interesting)
To stoop down and pick up a penny takes 1 sec. $.01 for 1 sec is equivalent to $36 per hour pay for 1 second.
I here the same argument for nickels ($180 per hour), dimes ($360 per hour), quarters ($900 per hour), dollar bills ($3,600 dollars per hour), 5 dollar bills ($18,000 per hour). People couldn't be bothered unless we were talking about $20 laying on the ground. ($72,000 per hour).
So let's see 32 million barrels of oil of sewage from 34 billion gallons of sewage. So typical smaller city for a year. (New York produces for perspective 474B gallons per year) 32 million times $44 dollar on the barrel. $1.34 BILLION dollars. (New York would net $18.6B per year vs their $78B budget. Doubt they would be interested.) Yeah I can't think of too many cities that would like those kinds of numbers added to their tax base, considering most cities OWN all the sewage by way of public utility and just already happen to be collecting it and oh yeah already fork out truck loads of money to get rid of it.
Not worth doing you say? Dumb idea you say?
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Check TFA, the article switched units while distracting us with big numbers. In fact, they switched two sets of units just to *ahem* muddy the waters.
The 36 million *barrels* of oil *per year* is processed from a supply that creates 34 billion *gallons* *per day*.
365.25 days per year, 42 US gallons per barrel, mumble...mutter...kcalc
OK, you'll get 36Mbbl oil from 295Gbbl sewage, 0.00012 oil/sewage, or 8208 sewage/oil.
At US$45/bbl, you have to process 7660 gallons of sewage per dollar to break even.
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...and of course I typo'ed the 30Mbbl as 36Mbbl.
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The only small scale stuff I've heard of that makes more sense are the dairy ranchers that use the manure pits to generate methane gas which is directly fed in
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To stoop down and pick up a penny takes 1 sec. $.01 for 1 sec is equivalent to $36 per hour pay for 1 second.
That's a totally bogus calculation. There only one penny, so it's irrelevant how many theoretical pennies you could pick up in a hour.
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If you convert sewage into energy you'll have a bit more energy than you did before. If you won't do it until it can fully power all our energy needs then you will have gained nothing.
In other words its worth doing if it is profitable, but only if it is worth more than the time and effort to do it.
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It's not at all insignificant. The carbon needs to be removed from the sewage before it is released to the environment, and that isn't free no matter how it's done. Heat+Pressure isn't that complicated to do, especially if some of the heat can be generated from exothermic processes. However, I'm not sure it would actually compare too well with processes involving bacteria.
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The real savings might be in no longer needing vast sewage treatment plants, which for metro areas, and areas with high ground water, can be a financial and ecological adventure. And instead of construction cost followed by your taxes or sewer fees going up to maintain it, it would be construction cost followed by income (probably enough to cover operating costs) as the product was sold at something close to crude prices. Even if the cost/income was a wash (and I didn't look for operational costs for the co
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I agree there. It's just not something to run around shouting Eureka! about. Discovering a workable form of fusion power, or battery costs + solar panels dropping to the point that they make sense for the baseload, that's a Eureka moment.
Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:4, Insightful)
the end of oil as we know it is less than 20 years away
That was true when I was at school in 1980 and learned the word conservation.
Fucking bullshit back then too.
Re:Neat that it's possible, but insignificant (Score:4, Insightful)
In 20 years, if not taxed, oil will probably be cheaper than it is today thanks it becoming much easier to access in the arctic.
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But its relatively expensive to drill there still, more likely it'll be cheaper by then as solar gains more and more energy marketshare lessening the need of oil
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Actually, it did happen.
We have had to move offshore, with its inherent risks, and switch to tar sands and oil shale, which are lower grade and harder to process. Plus, we have moved a lot of power generation from burning oil to natural gas that we are getting from fracking.
So, oil "as we knew it" ended. We have just found ways of compensating. However, we have always known about those sources and known that, at a certain price, they became viable. Now, we are already into those reserves and haven't fou
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You've left out the factor of cost. As the price increases, fields that were too poor to consider as sources become worth considering. If we were still paying the prices of 20 years ago, most modern fields wouldn't pay for themselves. We HAVE run out of oil recoverable at the prices of 20 years ago. And if the price keeps increasing without limit, we'll find that we have lots of other sources of oil. You can turn coal into oil with enough work.
What this process does is get rid of waste while simultaneo
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20 years ago (1996) crude oil prices were remarkably close ($27-$39/bbl)to what they are today ($46/bbl)
The 1980 and 2008 spikes mess with our perceptions. We are right around Embargo-era pricing (+/-$50/bbl.) from the 70s.
And global economic decline along with fracking has driven global oil prices off the 2008 highs, with no end in sight.
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This is due to the fact that while modern fields need more stuff in order to produce, the cost of delivering that stuff has also declined. Better automation, better equipment, the fracking gear is produced on a larger scale, and so forth.
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Well, also fracking gets mainly gas, not oil. That doesn't need much (any?) cracking, refining, etc.
And the price at the pump isn't what it was in the 1960-80's. I don't know about most of the period as I only drove for a short time. It certainly isn't what it was in the early 1960's...$0.35/gallon at the pump. Of course, there's also been a lot of inflation, so if you factor that in the price rise hasn't been very much. (A gallon of gas used to cost the same amount as an Ace double novel, but what do
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I can't argue one way or another if inflation is being over or understated. Certainly, essential goods like medical care and education are incredibly more expensive than they used to be, and I don't think they are included in the CPI at all. Also, in some real estate markets, it's the same story.
What I can say is that if you use the UNDERstated numbers for $0.35 in 1963, that would be $2.76 today. Right now, it's $1.87 near me. So that would be $0.24 a gallon in 1963 dollars. You can't have it both way
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Well, I live in the same area I did when gas was $0.35/gallon, and now it's well over $3.00/gallon...though it does vary a lot. There was a period when it was around $5.00/gallon a few years ago, and it frequently varies by over $1.00/gallon within a year.
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Ok, but if you convert $3.00 a gallon back to what it was back then (what year was it?), I bet it'll turn out to be LESS than you were paying then. Again, that's using the CPI, which as you said, understates inflation. (the reason it understates inflation is college tuition and medical care are not even factored in to the CPI !)
Those reserves are a taxable asset, they'd pay mor (Score:2)
> It is well known that the oil companies are lying about their "proven reserves" because the end of oil means the end of their business.
Reserves controlled by an oil company are a taxable asset. The more they have, the more taxes they pay. Do you think they're lying so they pay MORE taxes?
One of the biggest "oil company tax subsidies" that the tinfoil crowd whines about is that as those reserves are used up, oil companies no longer pay taxes on the reserves that they no longer have.
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But but but technology will solve all our problems! 3D printers! Elon Musk! Mars colonies!
No, butt butt butt technology...
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You're wrong.
"the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil PER YEAR from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day"
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You're entirely missing the point. Sewage comes out of EVERY part of the country. Local micro-refinery stations (not entirely unlike local water treatment generally) could be turning that into a usable product with less effort than paying foreign despots to ship it to you from around the world, obviously.
Unfortunately, today's crude oil refineries are physically big, ugly plants that produce nasty smelling (and toxic) pollution. Boiling liquefied crude is already bad enough; imagine boiling sewage (hint: amplify the smell of a feedlot and picture it traveling about 10 miles along the ground.) Fractionating towers for petroleum are tall, ugly beasts because they need to be; they have to be on a large area, with lots of storage tanks, and they need round the clock lighting and security. Nothing about them
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I can imagine that an existing refinery could retrofitted to handle the material; but I can't imagine that they could build micro-refineries near cities.
You could and for multiple reasons, but the primary one is that sewage is a much more benign feedstock than is petroleum. Once you've segregated it into organics and non-organics by floculation and settling then everything in it came out of someone's ass. By definition, it's not as dangerous as petroleum.
However, you wouldn't and for multiple reasons, and the primary one is that it's stupid. This whole idea is stupid. There are much easier, cheaper, cleaner, and energy-positive ways to process sewage.
Article full of shit (Score:5, Funny)
...in a good way
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Oh, wait, so long as we have politicians, energy will be cheap.
Now we finally know how Trump will make America rich again!
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He said great not rich. We are already rich. But not great. Why? Too many of those people are also rich... So we need a Turmp in the White House. BTW the President has hardly any power to do anything on domestic policy if Congress does not agree. He does have a lot of power on foreign policy so when electing a President you are electing more for what America's relationship with the world will be rather than Washington's relationship with you. And on that front we are SOL.
We got Trump who wants to start trad
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That sounds like a lot of power to make oil (Score:3)
It sure sounds like it's not a cost effective way of making oil, but it might be very cost and space effective in sewage treatment.
It would be carbon neutral, very fast in comparison to traditional treatment, and sounds like there's no methane release (an issue in normal sewage treatment). If they can separate it on site, they can use the fuel generated to power the plant.
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Why is everyone saying this is carbon neutral? It doesn't sound to me like this is a part of any carbon cycle, nor is it sequestering carbon. It's, in fact, freeing carbon from the cycle by turning it in to oil then burning it, releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere.
This is as far from "carbon neutral" as you can get.
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Erm, which school did you attend to?
Perhaps you should try to sue them for your stupidity?
What would happen if you drop the sewage somewhere? Hm?
You have no idea?
Wow ...
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It doesn't sound to me like this is a part of any carbon cycle
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human -> Fuel -> Atmosphere
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> Fuel -> Atmosphere
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But what if it's actually Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Fuel -> Atmosphere?
Why do humans have to be in the equation for it to be carbon neutral?
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Plants pull carbon from both the ground and the air. Rich topsoil is full of carbon by definition.
Thus Human->ground (assuming you mean whole, preserved corpses going into the ground) doesn't really mean much, and means even less when you consider that sequestering bodies in caskets isn't done in most places (preferring non-preserving, or burning), the meat that is buried is insignificant. Even with 55 million humans dying per year, consider that we kill over 50 billion chickens every year, 40 million co
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Oil has additional uses, other than as a fuel.
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It's, in fact, freeing carbon from the cycle by turning it in to oil then burning it, releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere.
No, it's doing no such thing. All it does is that it inserts one more link into the chain. How could you ever put "freeing carbon from the cycle" and "releasing the exhaust into the atmosphere" into one sentence? Either you believe that the atmosphere is not a part of the cycle, or your thinking is incoherent, or both.
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This begs the question of what the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) of the process is, that's what is most important I think.
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As they haven't yet built the pilot plant yet, I doubt they could give a decent answer to that. If you got one it would be from the marketing department.
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Bergius process? (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds a lot like the German Bergius [wikipedia.org] process to convert coal to oil (which largely kept Nazi Germany running in World War II). That ran at ~500 C and ~50 MegaPascals; although it ran on coal, what it really did was hydrogenate carbon into oil. I suspect that they have just adopted this for use on carbon-rich garbage. I also suspect it will be tough to make a profit on it, at least at the present price of fuel oil and gasoline.
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I also suspect it will be tough to make a profit on it, at least at the present price of fuel oil and gasoline.
Since treating and disposing of sewage is a very real need, this process wouldn't necessarily have to be profitable on its own to still be worthwhile.
Missing From The Story: THE COST (Score:2)
Really no damn mention of the cost ? That should be a giant red flag to anyone.
Smells like (Score:2)
Yeah, the pressures and temperatures of this process are different and breaks things into simpler molecules so there is probably no "special odor".
30M barrels per year, 34B gallons per day... (Score:2)
Convert both to barrels per year, and we get ONE barrel of crude out of ~226000 barrels of sewage.
Hardly an efficient process. Not even sure it's more efficient than just filtering the sewer water for the waste oil that might have been dumped....
Uh...math? (Score:2)
This article says that 34 billion gallons of sewage a day ....
Can be turned into 30 million gallons per year.
I'm too lazy to math that out (and my fingers are greasy right now from this egg roll) but that's a few assfulls of shit (more than a few), and a logistical nightmare to turn the theoretical into actuals.
Ridiculously inefficient (Score:4)
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Yes, and from what I calculated the energy needed to heat the sewage would be approximately equal to the energy in the oil produced (~34 kJ to produce ~46 kJ), although I imagine that a good portion of that would come from exothermic reactions from the ~40% carbon that doesn't end up as oil.
The more important thing though, is that what's being processed is not sewage as many people got the impression, but sewage sludge, the solid portion. This means that this would not replace any of the sewage processing (
An old process turns sewage into natural gas (Score:3)
You put the sewage into a bag, you tap the bag, you use a membrane to separate the methane, you compress it and it has many uses.
For a fancier bag, use AIWPS [sdsu.edu].
To replace gasoline, use Butanol [wikipedia.org].
To replace diesel fuel, use "green diesel" — not transesterified biodiesel, but you actually use a fractional distillation column to "crack" waste fats as you would petroleum. It has none of the usual problems of biodiesel, namely acidity or a high gel point.
HTH, HAND
Sounds like a load of crap to me! (Score:2)
New?? How about Thermal Depolymerization.. (Score:5, Informative)
There's been a pilot plant for the process since 2004 in Carthage Missouri. Last reports were that it was running at a loss, but it did successfully turn sewage and offal from meat processing plants into crude oil.
Link [wikipedia.org]
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basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit
I didn't need to read more than this to know someone would mention TDP. :) It seems to be the obvious conclusion that is essentially the same process. Not to mention that Fischer-Tropsch, of the 1920s vintage, can apparently use biomass as well.
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There's been a pilot plant for the process since 2004 in Carthage Missouri. Last reports were that it was running at a loss, but it did successfully turn sewage and offal from meat processing plants into crude oil.
And what an incredibly idiotic idea that is. You turn the waste fat into diesel fuel and you compost the rest (meat can be composted if mixed with other material and if the right organisms are introduced) and make methane which has a million and one uses.
how is this beneficial? (Score:2)
[T]he raw sewage is placed in a reactor that's basically a tube pressurized to 3,000 pounds per square inch and heated to 660 degrees Fahrenheit,
A) Where are you going to get all that energy to pressurized and heat the tube?
B) Is the overall energy loss greater or less than existing battery systems?
C) Why not use that energy directly instead of making crude oil that has to be refined?
Efficiency (Score:2)
So efficient imagine that: It only takes 1.6 gallons of petroleum energy to produce one gallon of crude shit. Of course the crude shit must still be refined to make it usable so that drops the efficiency a bit more...
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Now, add thorium nuke plant, with desalnaiton,... (Score:2)
Sounds like Supercritical Water Oxidization (Score:2)
Basically, put water at 4000 PSI and you can dump loads of heat into it without it turning into steam. Now dump Oxygen into it and it will basically break down any organic molecule.
The problem has always been how to scale a reactor vessel large enough and strong enough to make it suitable for commercial use.
The big question is whether it can economically scale.
Energy balance anyone? (Score:2)
Is this going to require more energy in than out like the ethanol scam? In this case it wouldn't be unreasonable to ignore energy spent producing the food, IMO, as it has already served an important purpose. But I still want to see how it stacks up to say drilling, transporting, and cracking petroleum.
Remember oil from turkey guts? (Score:2)
Slashdot fell hard for this stuff over 10 years ago. It isn't any more practical now than it was then. Classify it with flying cars, cold fusion, and any significant energy source at all environmentalists won't protest.
Maybe Useless (Score:2)
What? (Score:2)
Standing at the Gas Pump (Score:2)
It all comes down to efficiency (Score:2)
How many barrels of oil (energy) is needed to generate the reaction?
If it eats 10bbl of oil to make 2 bbl of biooil, I'm not sure that's super interesting...
Now, of course, if we could ever get fusion going.. I hear it's only about 30 years away.
I have a perpetual motion machine, too! (Score:2)
Oh, for FSM's sake, how many links in the chain of energy extraction / production there are? The article is just cherry-picking on one step that is more efficient.
And to what end? To generate more fuel for CO2-producing engines?
PNNL, WTF are you thinking?!?
This process is thermodynamically negative once other factors (like heat capacity, efficiency of recovery of that heat, and whole slew of other details) are included. That is these relevant factors are not ignored.
Dumb. dumb, dumb of you, PNNL. One re
turns one kind of crap into another kind of crap (Score:2)
so we can use it to pollute the air instead of the water.
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Yeah, but the sewage is gone... Isn't that a good thing? Besides we can also extract the water. Kill two birds with one turd.
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Yeah, but the sewage is gone... Isn't that a good thing? Besides we can also extract the water.
Well... not gone:
... produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gallons of raw sewage ...
30 million from 34 billion leaves a LOT of other stuff left over. Sure, some, maybe much, of that is water, but the rest? TFA doesn't say.
Oil and internal combustion are not the problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah cuz we really need more oil OK??
Oil and internal combustion engines are not the problems. The problem is a fuel that is made from sequestered carbon, carbon not part of the current atmosphere. If the fuel is made from carbon already in the atmosphere it does not necessarily contribute to climate change. Only introducing additional carbon contributes to climate change.
The preceding is more apparent when the carbon is coming out of the atmosphere directly, for example when bacteria/algae/etc create the fuel. Of course when the carbon is coming out of a "solid" there could very well be a problem, it was "sequestered" and not part of the atmosphere. However that is only looking at one "step". It seems there are two paths for that "solid". (1) Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human and (2) Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human. So perhaps there is no net carbon gain?
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I don't disagree, but keep in mind that the production of fertilizer is a major consumer of fossil hydrocarbons.
Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem (Score:4, Informative)
True, which is what makes this process attractive.
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Fuel: More plants need to be grown using more fertilizer and possibly replacing food crops
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human -> Sewage -> Fuel or
Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> Sewage -> Fuel: means there is no point in growing more plants because humans are only going to eat so much of it to produce the sewage waste needed for the process.
That is the benefit of this, over other processes that claim to leverage current waste as the feed-stock. It isn't practical to generate more sewage to feed the beast ... unless you envision a Matrix like poo farm ;-) Put another way, the sum total of all human digestive systems can be counted on to produce sewage feed-stock without fail (it just needs to be collected) but it isn't subject to scaling it up beyond how much we all poop.
The counter example of course being Cellulosic fuel processes which can be fed by the current remnants of human activity BUT ALSO by intentionally growing more cellulosic fuel crops (like sugarcane, switchgrass, etc) using more fertilizer and possibly supplanting food crops. It would be silly to not leverage cellulosic waste, but there needs to be effective policy to make sure we don't do more harm than good as farmers start deciding what crops to plant.
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Problem here is this process is highly inefficient and would turn the entire ANNUAL "output" of American rectums into 1.5 days worth of oil consumption.
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Problem here is this process is highly inefficient and would turn the entire ANNUAL "output" of American rectums into 1.5 days worth of oil consumption.
As we increase our use of electric that waste will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption.
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More accurately, as we increase our use of renewables, this will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption. And as other posters have indicated, traditional methods of treating sewage release lots of greenhouse gases anyway. I do have to question how much energy comes out of this vs. all the energy that gets put in by both the conversion process and the refining process.
Maybe this will satisfy the needs for petroleum-based lubricants when most of our fuel needs are met by other methods.
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That waste from the farms is not merely disgusting, it is a health hazard. When one of the ponds breaks it bounds, the waste drains the way the rest of the land drains, right into rivers. Worse, when there's a flood, it can send that waste directly into city centers.
Animal Waste is Also a Major Source of Methane. (Score:3)
Normal disposal of placing the waste into a pond really encourages anaerobic bacteria, which produce methane, which is an important greenhouse gas.
Any handling method that prevents that is a nice plus. Even if it converts it to CO2 instead. If they capture the energy and use it to replace fossil fuels - hey, big plus.
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Yeah cuz we really need more oil OK??
No is forcing you to buy any oil. If you don't like oil, don't buy it.
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Where are you getting the energy to perform this process?
It needs heat. Geothermal and solar come to mind.
Don't quit your day job.
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Geothermal and solar are possibilities, but a better guess is that they get the heat by burning some of their output. Geothermal would be too expensive, and solar would require a stable source of sunlight. OK for a desert, but not for someplace that often cloudy. 300 C isn't intensely hot, but maintaining it can be a problem if you depend on sunlight, and the shit doesn't stop coming. (And though it does slow down at times, those aren't necessarily the times when the sun is out of the sky, or when it's
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"America is an unstoppable oil-dependency-breaking machine. Unfortunately, the machine runs on oil" - John Stewart, The Daily Show
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And that's different from natural crude oil in what way?
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