[Optimist]

No and no.

Turkey offal may be animal feed, but it should not be - not while there are diseases like Mad Cow around. Incidentally, TDP is a good way to destroy the prions that cause Mad Cow and CJD. I don't know what percentage of animal feed is from animal waste but overall, it should be low (<10%). I believe the practice of feeding animal waste to animals has been abolished in Europe, without bringing agriculture to a screeching halt.

No need to pump turkey. The first TDP plant happens to be located next to a turkey processing plant. Eventually TDP plants would probably be located at landfill sites, to process wastes already transported there. Thus, there is no need to transport the wastes any further than is currently the case.

[SmokeStack]

This is great stuff-as one facet of a sustainable distributed system. But as a panacea for a broken centralized industrial society, or even peak-oil delay, it feels to be another Titanic deck chair mambo.

1. Turkey (chicken for that matter) entrails are food. (to paraphrase Soylent Green). They become feed for other turkeys and other barnyards animals. So this gasoline feed stock is no longer available as human feed stock.

2. Turkey offal does not pump nor flow easily. Poultry production is dispersed all over this country while we now rely on centralized oil refineries. Will people drive up to the turkey farm for a fill up?

Peter

Turkey offal is only one source of feedstock for TDP. Sewage, most garbage, just about anything carbon based is said to work. I'm not too worried about the logistics of potential feedstocks at this point. The first commercial plant is still cutting its teeth with turkey offal, and other commercial plants using different feedstocks have yet to come on line. The technology has a lot of maturing to do at this point.

[RepubCarrier]

as peak oil comes and goes, oil will skyrocket, which will drive up the prices of energy and various products. I beleive that energy will still be widely available (at a higher price) with the coming of wind, solar, hydro and wave power. oil for products is a different story...

I was wondering what types of products the light crude produced by biomass plants is useful for? Assuming the plants could be made more efficient and widespread, this might eventually supply enough oil for a lot of a smaller society's needs (at a higher cost). Fuel efficiency in vehicles and industry would be paramount. population controls would also be necessary.

seperate question, how is china's 1-child policy working? is population starting to shrink?

[RepubCarrier]

ADDENDUM: while the plants currently produce 500 barrels of oil, at a global net loss (as a moderator pointed out, the biomass fed into the plant took oil to maintain, etc. I meant in my original post to say that the biomass could and will be sustained by the alternative energy sources, thus making 500 barrels of oil = 500 barrels of oil net.)

This technology isn't widely invested in, so I suppose that explains its horrible 500 barrel per plant ratio. But it's not as bad as I thought... the plants actually produce gas and fertilizers at the same time as oil.

I don't really think there's enough biomass waste in industry, even if all of it was processed, to meet even 5% of our oil needs. but assuming energy and vehicles are powered by something other than oil, things like plastic and medicine might still be produced from oil coming from these plants in the future (again at a higher price. cheap plastic will end very soon).

[BlueGhost]

The chinese 1 child thing is working to reduce the pop. It is also educating people that more people == lower quality of life for those people. Something that doesn't really affect people in the west when they think about having kids.

However it isn't without its problems as time goes by there average population age is shifting, so the shinking group of workers have to maintain more non-workers.

[RepubCarrier]

Well, another thought:

At the risk of sounding racist.... most industrialized nations of the world (US, canada, East and West Europe, Japan, Russia and some of the former USSR), the population increase is 2% or lower in all of them (and one has to wonder how much of that is actually natural birth, considering massive immigration to these countries. many eastern european countries, and italy, have NEGATIVE population growth despite immigration exceeding emmigration). http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_d ... _countries

According to this site, for data which I did not extrapolate, the average population growth annualy for industrialized nations is .3% (this does not consider immigration from poorer nations). The average population growth for developing nations is 1.5% (this does not consider emmigration to richer nations).

Nations in africa, asia, and latin america have populations growths as higher than that, between 2 and 4% annually, despite relatively bad living conditions there.

I am not statistically knowledgeable (and Im lazy) enough to calculate the actual BIRTH rates in these nations, but I suspect the industrialized world would come to barely above 0% birthrate (i.e. sustaining the current population), and developing nations around 2%.

It would make sense for a richer nation to have more children, but it isnt the current reality. If these poor populations, growing on average 5 times faster than ours cannot be controlled, they are going to bear the brunt of the worldwide depression that follows peak oil.

[Kingcoal]

Back on topic. The key phrase is "our energy needs." Right now that is defined by a cheap oil market. As oil becomes very expensive what we need will be redefined downward. I don't have any figures right now, but the biggest use of oil is for transportation. We can do a lot of cutting back, especially autos, before we are starving in the streets.

[EnviroEngr]

Per Thread Restart: http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic3118.html

[EnviroEngr]

Cross Ref - http://www.peakoil.com/post36012.html#36012

[EnviroEngr]

Cross Ref - http://www.peakoil.com/post36012.html#36012

[0mar]

I know they can't be scaled up in time or ever really, nor can they recycle everything.

However, at a forum I visit, people seem to cling onto this as the last savior (along with fusion). I have been formulating some sort of rebuttal but it doesn't look as solid as it can be.

So far I have:

1. TD needs electricity, which requires gas/coal. Gas is plateau, and coal could be useless by 2040 if the current decline in EPR continues.
2. As oil peaks, we will need an incredible amount (I did caculations on a 3% decline, showing that within the first two years, we will lose 4 million barrels of crudge production which would require about 4,000 plants at 1,000 barrels each, and the number would only exponetially rise, assuming inputs remained the same).
3. TD can only produce oil from wastes, which will turn into products and back into waste. Because of the 2nd law, we will be getting diminishing returns.
4. All oil isn't equal, and TD has very few scientific studies (that I have found at least) done on it regarding the quality and quantity truly obtained.
5. Producing TD plants is expensive and a massive overhaul will costs time, money and tons of oil, for what amounts to a high tech recycling unit.
6. There is only one TD plant operating in the US and its profitability remains to be seen.
7. Oil operations are on a scale that we can barely comprehend. After a while, numbers start looking the same, but as it stands, TD is only a bit player in the world of oil and probably will always be a bit player in the grand scheme of things.

I still can't convince these folks. They keep spouting "TEST PLANT" and "PRODUCTION IS SCALABLE" and "AGRICULTURAL WASTES = 7 BILLION BARRELS BECAUSE THE PR PAGE SAID SO" Is there really anything more I can bring up?

[_sluimers_]

TD?

[Taskforce_Unity]

Thermo Depolarisation, Or the recycling of organic waste (bodies, corpses, manure etc.) into Oil.

I believe it is also called thermo Carbon depolarisation sometimes.

[nocar]

Obiously, you need some biological waste to start with. How much wast do we really produce? Even if we use all our waste, including human shit, which is a good idea, I doubt that we can get mroe than 1-2 percent (just guessing, someone else do the calculation) of our current oil to run cars. Good, less traffic, good. How much energy do you think there is in one turd?

[nocar]

Don't you think that if biological waste like turds were so full of energy, they would have been used a lot? Indians use cow dung to cook, but to get petrol how many cows will you need?

[scareduck]

I know they can't be scaled up in time or ever really, nor can they recycle everything.

However, at a forum I visit, people seem to cling onto this as the last savior (along with fusion). I have been formulating some sort of rebuttal but it doesn't look as solid as it can be.

So far I have:

1. TD needs electricity, which requires gas/coal. Gas is plateau, and coal could be useless by 2040 if the current decline in EPR continues.

The process generates its own fuel gas which is used to run the plant, thus claims that the process front to back is 85% efficient. It does not run off the grid.

3. TD can only produce oil from wastes, which will turn into products and back into waste. Because of the 2nd law, we will be getting diminishing returns.

What if some other feedstock were used (crops, algae grown at sea, etc.)?

4. All oil isn't equal, and TD has very few scientific studies (that I have found at least) done on it regarding the quality and quantity truly obtained.

This is sort of saying you don't know, either.

5. Producing TD plants is expensive and a massive overhaul will costs time, money and tons of oil, for what amounts to a high tech recycling unit.
6. There is only one TD plant operating in the US and its profitability remains to be seen.

These are probably the single biggest charges: TD is at best a recycling effort, unless scaled very, very large. The economics of such activities remains to be seen. At present, it is, at most, a nice way for ADM to clean up hog ponds and turkey entrails. But, see also my comment above; there's no reason we couldn't find some biotic feedstock for it. Of course, the current scale of the transportation uses of oil would make it very difficult to replace as much as we presently use, let alone would use in the future.

7. Oil operations are on a scale that we can barely comprehend. After a while, numbers start looking the same, but as it stands, TD is only a bit player in the world of oil and probably will always be a bit player in the grand scheme of things.

I think that depends on the size of oil consumption, don't you?

TDP could have other uses, such as reducing heavy oil to lighter grades, or converting coal to petroleum. Whether those activities are EROEI effective remains a speculative exercise.

[Optimist]

3. TD can only produce oil from wastes, which will turn into products and back into waste. Because of the 2nd law, we will be getting diminishing returns.

This is TD's claim to fame. Things that we currently have no use for (aka trash, sewage sludge, agri waste, etc.) has the potential to replace crude. Since we will always produce waste, this means TD will never run out of feedstock. The diminished returns you refer to will be made up with energy from the sun, by a well known process called photosynthesis.

Instead of eating 1 - 10% of our agricultural produce and letting the rest rot in landfills, we will be using the remaining 90 - 99% to produce fuel. I suggest that this is as close to sustainable as we would be able to go.

BTW, TD is Thermal Depolymerization (as in using heat to break polymers down into monomers), not Thermo Depolarisation!

[Cash]

TDP, as thermodepolymerization is often called, is basically just a recycling program, not unlike recycling newspaper and tin cans. Assuming it works as advertised, it sounds like a great way to squeeze another cycle of productive use out of waste materials, from municipal garbage to old computers. I've read that it can even process municipal sewage into oil and fertilizer, as well as producing natgas and pure water.

But it is just recycling. It needs an initial supply stream, and I haven't seen the numbers that support the idea that it can be anything more than a nice supplement to oil requirements, not a huge savior.

I believe that post-Peak we will see major decentralization in energy sources to a much more locally produced model -- wind, solar, PV, biodiesel, ethanol, wood-fired generating station, horses, mini-hydro, and things like TDP. Nothing is going to provide the silver bullet, but there's no reason TDP can't be part of the larger mix.

Cash

[Optimist]

I haven't seen the numbers that support the idea that it can be anything more than a nice supplement to oil requirements, not a huge savior.

Let's talk about numbers then. According to Changing World Technologies (CWT http://changingworldtech.com/what/problems.asp#energy ), the inventor of TDP, there is enough agricultural waste (6 billion tons/year) in the US to replace all oil imports. Using all solid waste produced in the US (12 billion tons/year) could yield 24 billion bbl/year, compared to a demand of ~ 19 billion bbl/year in 1998.

Even if CWT are lying through their teeth and the process is only 20 - 25% as effective as they claim, it still has the potential to be very significant.