Tackling over-stuffed landfills and peak oil in the same afternoon

A new technology pioneered in the 1980’s by microbiologist Paul Baskis, and commercially carried out by Changing World Technologies claims to efficiently convert any organic waste into usable energy and minerals. The process is called Thermal Depolymerization and if the success of the first two commercial plants continues, this will be the means for solving two of man’s most pressing issues: The billions of tons of municipal waste that we have piling up in landfills, and the current ecopolitical energy crisis over depleting oils supplies.

thermal depolymerization or ( TDP): A process using heat, water, and pressure to break down most waste to produce new, simpler carbon chains. (mainly: clean burning gas, light oils, purified minerals, and water) It mimics the natural geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, long chain polymers of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons.

In one sense it sounds like a fantasy, something dreamt up by a crazy recluse inventor, but in another more biological frame of reference it makes perfect sense. Essentially this process does for materials what lengthy biogeochemical cycles do, but in a time span of hours, not hundreds of years. If you consider the rate at which humans consume, manufacture, and discard material products, a means for saving our waste from being so wasted would have to operate at similar speeds.

In 2001 the Environmental Protection Agency estimated there were about 229 million tons of municipal solid waste, or 4.4 pounds generated per day per person in the USA. Industrial facilities in the USA create roughly 7.6 billion tons of industrial wastes each year and, as a whole, the USA creates over 12 billion tons of total waste. And what have we done with our dirty little secret? We swept it under the carpet and hoped no one would notice. Instead of packing our garbage into the land where it’s doomed to a fate of inadequate decomposition, slowly decaying into toxic mush, we should be collecting waste to dump into Thermal Depolymerizing plants (TDP plants). Here they can undergo a natural refinement process at unnatural speeds, effectively putting our bad byproducts to a good use.

How to make your own gas and oil from things “around the house” ((please note***actual thermal depolymerization cannot be done without some serious machinery that you absolutely DON’T have around your house. But in theory…))

1.) Ingredients you will need:
Any carbon-based substance, organic waste, plastics, hazardous biowaste, or your angsty child’s Xbox (get creative, your home is full of tacky trinkets that could easily be turned into food for your gas-guzzler). - The plant can process basically anything (even poisons, and pathogenic substances) except material that decays to be radioactive. *Note: You may still want to recycle the readily usable materials such as glass, steel, and aluminum, but the junky remains of your trash can go right to the TDP plant - bones and all.

History - The first TDP plant, completed 1998 in Philadelphia, was built directly across from a Butterball industrial plant. Butterball graciously offered several hundred tons of turkey offal (trust me, you don’t want to know what ‘offal’ is) to be recycled in the plant.

2.) Chop and Add Water;
Materials are first ground into chunks and put into the first reaction chamber. The chunks are then super-saturated with water making for a lovely, trash soup. Fully hydrating your chunks is important. In the first attempts at mechanically breaking down waste to produce simple hydrocarbon chains, this step was omitted. Instead of adding water, large amounts of energy were spent trying to extract the water of materials. This method of dehydration is what made the initial trial plants grossly inefficient. As it turns out this simple addition means the difference between a 15% efficiency rate and an 85% efficiency. Water makes the difference!

3.) Set oven to 250*C and cook for 15 minutes;
Once all the ingredients are in the reaction chamber it’s cookin’ time! The heat acting in combination with water causes the waste materials to break down partially giving you a runny soup.

4.) Switch oven setting to “pressure cook” at about 600 lbf/in2;
The hot, saturated stew will break down more thoroughly when pressurized. You should have a thick hearty stew now of carbon and hydrocarbon chains, water, and minerals.

5.) Rapidly Depressurize and drain;
Now you’ll have to be quick with your hands. Rapidly decreasing the pressure in the chamber will boil off most of the water in the solution. You should be left with hydrocarbon chains left in liquid, and some solid minerals. The minerals will coagulate and separate. (We’ll call this formation the “skin” on the stew). Variations in pressure can be fine tuned to produce specific “skins” of separated minerals. The mineral skins are removed from the mixture and go on for further refinement to be sold later as purified minerals for pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, industrial chemicals, and various other things. The extracted water can go through a simple purification treatment, and be released back into municipal water ways as clean water (that’s a little better than it started off).

6.) Heat the secondary oven chamber to 500*C and cook:
All you have left in chamber one is a sludge of hydrocarbon chains. Move this sludge into the second oven and cook at 500*C until all hydrocarbon chains have been broken down to usable pieces. Once you’ve cooked your mix a second time, the hydrocarbon molecules will have organized themselves into easily separable gas and oil. You are now ready to refine you gas and oil products (almost the same way you would refine ordinary oil). Your beautiful products will be a combination of pure water, purified minerals, gas and oil. The oil is light, golden and lovely. About 20% of the oil produce can be used to run the plant, and the remainder sold to industries willing to pay for high quality fuel. The gas you produce will burn cleanly, and will be of sufficient use for public gas companies.

All things considered there’s potential here to be making a profit of estimated 500%. Taking in turkey guts and spitting out gas and oil is as close to the alchemists’ goal of turning lead into gold as anyone will get. As political battles rage on over regions rich in fossil fuels (i.e. Iraq), a new method of fuel production should be considered for large scale commercial use. The process itself is constantly being improved upon, and there are estimates of increased efficiency as much as 600-700%. That’s incredible! Not only would be reducing the nasty amount of waste we live with, we would be returning elements to their natural cycles of reuse, and to top it all off we would be bringing in the bank with billions of dollars saved and earned. At least at a time when our resources are slowly depleting, and the peak oil crisis is expected to climax within the next decade or so…what on earth is keeping us from making our own gas and oil from our own garbage? Perhaps it’s the idea of turning fecal matter in “pure” minerals that turns people off. Perhaps it’s the disconcerting thought that “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 mindfully.org Some people have complained that the smell produced by such plants is god awful (I’ll buy that), but it’s otherwise so successful and efficient I would predict widespread commercial use within the decade.

Final Words
It should be remembered that switching economies is never easy, and it could take a while to get used to recycling out waste in this fashion. It should also be remembered that burning oil and gas made from these plants would be the same as burning any other kind of gas or oil. It still produces greenhouse gases, and this contributes significantly to global warming. However, one good note in this regard is that a large percentage of the carbons we are releasing into the atmosphere are harvested from the land-locked carbon supplies (i.e. fossil fuels). Recycling the carbons we’ve already extracted from the earth means we leave the land-locked carbon where it should be - locked in the land working its slow way through the global carbon cycle.
And if we can’t take the speed of natural cycles the way they are, the least we can do is find a method for recycling that mimics what nature does and still satisfies our human need for these resources.