Credit: Nigel Buchanan
It is the worst stuff in the world. Eighteen tonnes of turkey offal – rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines and lungs swollen with putrid gasses – slides down a dump truck bed and sloshes into an 24-metre-long hopper with a sickening glorp. The smell is worse than the sight: an assertive mélange of midsummer corpse with fried liver overtones and a distinct faecal note.
But two hours later, sterile as you please, an oil truck pulls up behind this Thermal Conversion Process plant in the small American Midwest town of Carthage, Missouri, and the driver attaches a hose from a nearby stationary tank to the truck's intake valve. One hundred and fifty barrels of fuel oil (23,800 L), worth US$12,300, gush into the truck's tank, and off it goes to an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oil to upgrade the stock.
Three such trucks arrive here daily, loading up with the day's production of 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tonnes of turkey guts and 20 tonnes of pork fat. Most of what can't be made into oil becomes high-grade fertiliser; and the rest is water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system.
"This is a real plant," says Brian Appel, chief executive of Changing World Technologies, the company behind the offal-to-oil alchemy. "This is the first commercial biorefinery in the world that can make oil from a variety of waste streams."
He nods towards the US$42 million facility, which resembles a generic industrial plant from a James Bond movie's climactic shootout: A collection of tanks, pipes, pumps, grinders, boilers and catwalks inside a corrugated steel building. It is perched some 90 metres from ConAgra Foods Corporation's Butterball plant, where 35,000 turkeys die daily and surrender their viscera to Appel's operation; the pork fat comes from four other Midwestern ConAgra slaughterhouses.
"To anybody who thinks this can't work on an industrial scale, I say, 'Come here and look,'" says Appel with a grin.
Forget about straw into gold. The Thermal Conversion Process can take stuff that's far worse than straw – slaughterhouse waste, municipal sewage, old tyres, mixed plastics... virtually all the wretched, varied, voluminous detritus of modern life – and make from it something the world needs much more than gold: high-quality oil.
"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Appel. "This process can deal with the world's waste; it can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil; and it can slow global warming."
Pardon me, says a reporter, but that sounds too good to be true.
"Everybody says that," says Appel. No wonder. Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, company officials say this one will accept almost any carbon-based material.
If a 79 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals and 56 kg of sterilised water. And while no one plans to put people into a Thermal Conversion machine, an intimate human creation could certainly become a prime feedstock.
"There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says Terry Adams, Changing World Technologies' chief technology officer. So the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is in discussion with Appel's company to begin doing exactly that.
Appel's is far from the only voice lauding the Thermal Conversion Process. "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," says Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist and a former Bell Laboratories director.
"I'm impressed," adds Gabriel Miller, a New York University chemistry professor and a consultant to Keyspan Energy Corporation, an electric supplier that serves New York City.
"The fuel that comes out is better than crude, and you don't need a refinery to use it. I think they can bring it deep into commercialisation." Miller recommended that Keyspan burn the oil in its generators. Keyspan is running tests now, with an eye to investing in its own Thermal Conversion Process plant in New York State. In the meantime, Appel sells the plant's oil to a "large oil blender" whose name he is contractually bound not to reveal.
"The technology is sound and the science really works," says Michael Walter, ConAgra Foods' senior vice-president responsible for commodity procurement.
Doesn't work and here are the lawsuits that prove it
Renewable Environmental Solutions is the commercial arm of Changing World Technologies. Only one plant has ever been built. It has been mired in three lawsuits.
http://www.joplinglobe.com/carthage_jasper_county/local_story_048222118.html
http://www.beasleyallen.com/focus/Renewable-Environmental-Solutions/
http://www.class-action-litigation.org/renewable-environment-solutions.asp
Here is a backgrounder on Changing World Tech's process - similar to many others, but theirs just doesn't work.
Re: Doesn't work ?
You listed 3 lawsuits related to odors from the Carthage plant. The odors have been mitigated and the state of Missouri is no longer levying fines. The process is similar to others but not identical. All other processes have not been scaled up for mass production. In my opinion even producing industrial quantities of usable oil at $80 a barrel is a success.
Here's my bottom line for Changing World Tech's process - similar to many others, but Changing World Tech's process is the only one that works.