Oil from garbage

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I have this vision … a huge vat … steaming … a circle of people who somehow seem slightly familiar … they’re chanting something … bubble … bubble … toil and trouble.

Hmmmmm.
 
There is always a way. Engineers are clever people. Make it worth their while, and they will find a way. Exxon might be hiring algologists very shortly.

Of course, this process depends on crude at present inflated prices. For now. A cleaner, sustainable source of fuel is eventually going to have to be found.

Hopefully, this is it.

BTW, it doesn’t really do much about warming, since it will produce the same CO2 levels as other organic fuels.
 
You know how much of this bacteria this would take? I don’t think you will be able to get enough bacteria to make this feasible on a national scale. Also they don’t eat ‘garbage’. They eat mulch, and other plant type material. Many companies have already come up with excellent uses for agricultural waste. Mulch is made of wood chips, stores sell loads of mulch to gardeners each year. The type of kitty litter we buy is made from wheat. This is just two examples of uses people have found for agricultural waste. Another thing, I recently read an article in Oklahoma Living about organic farming, which is a growing trend. If that trend continues to grow your going to less agricultural waste in the future. Which means less food for this bacteria to eat.
 
I honestly don’t see this as a feasible solution to our oil problem or even as a way to produce a significant amount of oil. You’d have to have trillions of the bacteria to produce enough oil to make any difference.
 
The ‘green crude’ sounds interesting. It’s promising since they don’t require feedstock, freshwater or agricultural land and can be incorporated into the existing pipelines. Hmmm, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
 
Holly3278 said:
I honestly don’t see this as a feasible solution to our oil problem or even as a way to produce a significant amount of oil. You’d have to have trillions of the bacteria to produce enough oil to make any difference.
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Oh yee of little faith.

Tch, tch.

Let’s get out there in our garage workshops and kitchen laboratories and make it work. If Steve Jobs and Debbie Fields could start off that way and make it BIG, there is certainly hope for new energy technology.

Xerox started as a DIY project. Fellow named Carlson.

The Wright Brothers sold bicycles.

For goodness sakes.
 
Sabda said:
The ‘green crude’ sounds interesting. It’s promising since they don’t require feedstock, freshwater or agricultural land and can be incorporated into the existing pipelines. Hmmm, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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Think creatively.

Don’t think “green crude”.

Think “green crud”.

If we can get mold to grow in our refrigerator cheese drawer and if we can convert a healthy tooth to an oozing puss filled abscess, then we can surely come up with some biological primoridal stew in our backyard garbage cans that will convert waste glop, sewage sludge and chopped rose bush prunings into gasoline.

Just focus. Think about how you would get into their little cellular structures and break them down and convert them.
 
Technology is advancing so rapidly the energy picture will look completely different in a just couple of years. The are a multitude of companies developing bacterias , enzymes, technologies and the likes that will increase yields of fuels. In fact, I see corn ethanol falling out of the equation sooner than later.
 
The real beauty of this is, they aren’t bacteria, and they don’t need a substrate like organic material. They make organic material out of sunlight, water,and carbon dioxide. (and a bit of minerals which are cheap and abundant)
 
I also read somewhere that another byproduct of some of the algae process is filtered water. If that mean desalinated water, that is another plus
 
I was just on-line trying to do a search … unsuccessful … a couple of years ago (?), … more recent … there was an article in the Wall Street Journal … about how a company in the midwest had hired a young chemist and told him just to do some research projects … “to make himself useful”. He had a free hand.

One of their operations was some kind of grain milling or soybean processing or some such.

He took the final leftover waste stream … whatever gunk it was … and turned it into a non-toxic deicer for sidewalks.

Started a whole new industry.
 
I have this vision … a huge vat … steaming … a circle of people who somehow seem slightly familiar … they’re chanting something … bubble … bubble … toil and trouble.
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What are you referring to the people at www.peakoil.com?
 
It should also be noted that the only producer (name removed by moderator)uts to the algae system (minerals) would be almost completely recoverable and reusable.

And yes, it looks like a mix of technologies will be the immediate future.

Not a bad thing, really. A multi-faceted system is inherently more stable.
 
That last article sounds very interesting. I know there are a couple of companies here and in Europe that are working on depolymerization techniques. Basically, you throw in organic waste (think guts and entrails from a processing plant), it heats it under pressure, and turns it into a light sweet crude, ready to be processed. I’ve heard of one process where the resultant product is ready to be used in diesel engines. You should be able to throw in any hydrocarbon-based product (like plastic water bottles) in and get oil out, although it looks like that microwave dohicky works better on that.

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BTW, it doesn’t really do much about warming, since it will produce the same CO2 levels as other organic fuels.
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Not to worry, CO2 does not cause warming, the sun does. Increased CO2 levels area by-product, not a cause of warming. We’re hitting upon a minimum period in the Sun Cycle…the globe, which hasn’t warmed since 1998, is going to get a bit chillier soon.
 
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