I am transferring this post to its own thread as per AHFN's request. Please address all praise, questions, inquiries, issues, personal putdowns, attacks and sarcasms at AHFN. (^:

Here it is.


Quote:
Anything Into Oil
Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end.

by Brad Lemley, Photography by Dean Kaufman
published online April 2, 2006



The smell is a mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct fecal note. It comes from the worst stuff in the world—turkey slaughterhouse waste. Rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs swollen with putrid gases have been trucked here from a local Butterball packager and dumped into an 80-foot-long hopper with a sickening glorp. In about 20 minutes, the awful mess disappears into the workings of the thermal conversion process plant in Carthage, Missouri.

Two hours later a much cleaner truck—an oil carrier—pulls up to the other end of the plant, and the driver attaches a hose to the truck's intake valve. One hundred fifty barrels of fuel oil, worth $12,600 wholesale, gush into the truck, headed for an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oils to upgrade the stock. Three tanker trucks arrive here on peak production days, loading up with 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tons of turkey guts and 20 tons of pig fat. Most of what cannot be converted into fuel oil becomes high-grade fertilizer; the rest is water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system.

For Brian Appel—and, maybe, for an energy-hungry world—it's a dream come true, better than turning straw into gold. The thermal conversion process can take material more plentiful and troublesome than straw—slaughterhouse waste, municipal sewage, old tires, mixed plastics, virtually all the wretched detritus of modern life—and make it something the world needs much more than gold: high-quality oil.

Anything Into Oil | Alternative Energy | DISCOVER Magazine

Also, these two very important follow-up articles:

Anything Into Oil | Alternative Energy | DISCOVER Magazine
Anything Into Oil | Alternative Energy | DISCOVER Magazine


Quote:
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year

This first article was published on-line over two years before your article, and I saw it in the actual magazine the month before it was put on-line.


EDIT: Oh, this is about waste into electricity. Could you split this off into a new thread, "Anything Into Oil"?
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Last edited by AHFN : Today at 10:36 AM.

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