Biomass Conversion Process Means No End to Oil
By Michael LeGault, editor
As I write, the price of a barrel of crude oil has topped US$41, the highest price (in today's dollars) since 1983. The cover of the June issue of National Geographic reads "The End of Cheap Oil". All of you, our readers, are dealing with the dire...
As I write, the price of a barrel of crude oil has topped US$41, the highest price (in today’s dollars) since 1983. The cover of the June issue of National Geographic reads “The End of Cheap Oil”. All of you, our readers, are dealing with the direct and indirect impact of these higher costs on your bottom line. Oil prices, according to many analysts, are expected to stay high for the near term, in part because oil-producing companies are pretty much pumping at full capacity. With the growing economies of China and India ramping up demand, some experts are predicting oil could rise to $50 a barrel.
Relief, however, may be on the horizon. Have petroleum engineers discovered some large, new untapped oil fields? The answer, in the form of the millions of tons of animal and agricultural waste produced each year, is a qualified yes.
Engineers have known how to convert biomass into fuel for almost a century. Development of the technology was pushed along by scores of R&D projects throughout the ’70s. Then in the 1990s, Paul Baskis, a U.S. biologist and inventor, achieved a breakthrough with a process called thermal depolymerization (TDP). The TDP process duplicates the way pressure and heat inside the earth turns organic mater into fuels, but it does so in hours instead of millennia. With the help of investor/entrepreneur Brian Appel, Baskis formed Changing World Technologies, a company with a mission to commercialize this technology.
And commercial it is. The company has built a $25 million plant at a Butterball turkey facility in Carthage, MO, to turn waste guts, feathers and bones into oil. At full capacity the plant, which went into commercial production last month, will transform 200 tons of turkey parts into fertilizer, a heating-grade oil and powdered carbon used in water filters.
The process can be used on any organic-based waste stream, from tires to human feces. The oil generated from TDP can be refined into gas. The only by-product of the process is water. Oil made using TDP is still more costly than oil pumped from the ground, even at $40 per barrel. It is even more costly if the waste streams aren’t rigorously separated, as mixed waste makes the process less efficient. Scalability, as always, brings cost down.
And, potentially, the scalability of the process is huge. Changing World Technologies has plans to open plants in Alabama, Nevada and Colorado, using everything from chicken droppings to cow stomachs as feedstock. Company president Appel estimates that U.S. agricultural waste alone could yield 4 billion barrels of oil annually, nearly equal to the amount currently imported by the United States. If other wastes were included, such as sludge from municipal wastewater, the figure could be easily doubled.
But economies of scale aren’t the only factor figuring in the long-term viability of this technology. As with general recycling, there is the problem of creating an infrastructure that can cost-effectively provide the quantities of waste feed stocks needed for this process. On the positive side, companies should have an incentive to subsidize some of these costs if they can realize a net savings by selling oil and eliminating high disposal costs from their overhead.
TDP is a nifty demonstration of the law of conservation of energy. Someday, no doubt, there will be an end to cheap oil extracted from the ground. But it won’t be the end of oil.
