Alright, this is just damned cool stuff.
Potentially change-the-world type stuff… if it works you say? Well, it appears it already is!
What the heck am I talking about?
A Thermo-Depolymerization and Chemical Reformer
In English:
It turns anything made out of carbon (you, me, waste, food, plastic, computers, metals)…. into:
- Natural Gas
- Oil
- Sterilized water
- solid, almost pure, carbon
Depending on what you’re processing, you’ll end up with different products… but they all have common properties:
- they are benign both environmentally and biologically
- they are reusable
- they consume the entire “feedstock”, completely, with no leftovers that must be disposed of besides water. The water is clean enough to be put through a regular water treatment plant before being returned to the system.
Here’s a
If a 175-pound man fell into one end , he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.
I also knew I was full of Gas!
Depending on the feedstock and the cooking and coking times, the process can be tweaked to make other specialty chemicals that may be even more profitable that oil. Turkey offal, for example, can be used to produce fatty acids for soap, tires, paints, and lubricants. Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC—the stuff of house siding, wallpapers, and plastic pipes—yields hydrochloric acid, a relatively benign and industrially valuable chemical used to make cleaners and solvents. “That’s what’s so great about making water a friend,” says Appel. “The hydrogen in water combines with the chlorine in PVC to make it safe. If you burn PVC [in a municipal-waste incinerator], you get dioxin—very toxic.”
Looks like this is a technology, and a company, that we’re going to have to keep an eye on in the next few years.
I’ll have more on the possible implications of this technology tomorrow.