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There's a new alternative fuel process out there that is showing promise in not only providing a cheap, renewable fuel, but also for solving a landfill crisis.  Odds are you haven't even heard about it.  While the news media has been busy talking about pipe dreams like corn ethanol, wind power, or gas/electric hybrids, an experimental factory in Carthage, MO is turning turkey offal from the nearby Butterball plant into API 40+ crude oil, using a technology called thermal depolymerization.

A company called Changing World Technologies developed the process, and is currently using it in the Carthage plant with plans to open another in Pennsylvania.  One ton of turkey offal is eventually processed into 600 lbs of petroleum, 100 lbs of butane/methane, and 60 lbs of minerals.  The rest is water, which is recycled back into the system.  Turkey guts are only the beginning, as CWT has also converted plastic bottles, paper, medical waste, and tires.

The process is as follows (as described by Wikipedia):

The feedstock material is first ground into small chunks, and mixed with water if it is especially dry. It is then fed into a reaction chamber where it is heated to around 250 °C and subjected to 600 psi (4 MPa) for approximately 15 minutes, after which the pressure is rapidly released to boil off most of the water. The result is a mix of crude hydrocarbons and solid minerals, which are separated out. The hydrocarbons are sent to a second-stage reactor where they are heated to 500 °C, further breaking down the longer chains, and the resulting mix of hydrocarbons is then distilled in a manner similar to conventional oil refining.

Working with turkey offal as the feedstock, the process proved to have yield efficiencies of approximately 85%; in other words, the energy contained in the end products of the process is 85% of the energy contained in the inputs to the process (most notably the energy content of the feedstock, but also including electricity for pumps and natural gas for heating). Alternatively, if one considers the energy content of the feedstock to be free (i.e., waste material from some other process), one could consider the energy efficiency of the process to be 560% (85 units of energy made available for 15 units of energy consumed). The company claims that 15 to 20% of feedstock energy is used to provide energy for the plant. The remaining energy is available in the converted product. Higher efficiencies may be possible with drier and more carbon-rich feedstocks, such as waste plastic.

Essentially, thermal depolymerization is similar to the process the earth uses to create fossil fuels, it's just done on a much shorter time scale.  For more information, check out the Wikipedia page here.

You'd think an amazing technology like this would be on the news.  Yet strangely enough, it isn't.  The news media prefers to talk about methods that are long-shots compared to this one, but don't want to talk about a process that may one day be converting our garbage into energy.

Now that we're finally starting to wake up and realize ethanol isn't the answer, that it's causing more harm than good and is just another pit for our government to sink money into, I feel it's important that more of us are aware of TDP and other technologies that are making use of our waste products.  Thankfully, the government is funding CWT.  I really feel that this technology is going to be a major push to get us out of our energy crisis, among others.