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.

Actually, this article is a good catch.

There is also a story today on generating electricity through methane digesters at dairy farms. Cow Poo Power. The farmers usually have a way to quickly hose out barning into a holding pond or tank. The slurry is then taken by tanker truck to spread on the crop fields where they are producing hay for the cows. The one hitch is, believe it or not, methane tanks are dangerous. There have been deaths by being overcome by methane gas.

Thanks. One thing: you might want to fix the links.

I think this is a great step forward. It is renewable, creates no net--NET--CO2 increase, and gets rid of waste. What's not to like? However, because of politics, this guy may take his business to Europe instead of the US. In the US, farms are allowed to feed the remains of rendered animals back to the stock. In Europe, this is illegal. That means that in the US, Appel has to pay the turkey rendering plants for the turkey guts, because the companies can save money by feeding it back to stock. In Europe, rendering plants would be paying him to take it off their hands. In fact, last time I checked (discussed in the third article) he was planning to make a full-scale plant in France.

__________________
"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...."
- The Declaration of Independence

As usual, other countries will be at the forefront of alternative energy because the US under Republicans in monopolized by Bush billionaire buddies from the energy industry.

I'll try to get a good link for you.

How is this?

Anything Into Oil: Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year BRAD LEMLEY / Discover v.24, n.5, 1may03

I'm not going to say that I agree or disagree with allowing farmers to feed the remains of rendered animals back to the stock, but I will say that it does allow them to get their food for cheaper, which translates into cheaper food for us. I will also say that if it is uneconomical for him to afford turkey parts to make the oil (after all they can't cost much more than the animal food that they'd need to be replaced with) than I don't know how well it will work.

Plus, with Europe's fuel over $7 a gallon, I think they are in more need of it then us.

__________________
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"The wisest men follow their own direction." - Euripides