I can’t confirm or deny the following information, but I saw them in the comments of the video posted above. Not sure how accurate it is, but it could certainly add an additional element to the discussion if it is indeed so.
@rocketplumber and the water is what they said in the video recycled so if the recycled water is already hot it doesnt take that much energy to get it back up to the desired heating temp for the next batch process.if you go to 1:01 you notice all the white pipe, that is insulated pipe for retention of heat and again at 1:52 the white bigger tanks are also insulated.most likely the uncovered pipe acts like condensers or water return lines in the closed loop system
@madjimms No, TDP has a modest energy cost, about 15% of the heat of combustion of the feedstock. The cost of the equipment is significant, but not crippling. At full scale, the process cost would be around $20 to $30/barrel, and the latest crude oil price is over $100/bbl, so this is an excellent way to recycle organic waste.
No, TDP has a modest energy cost, about 15% of the heat of combustion of the feedstock. The cost of the equipment is significant, but not crippling. At full scale, the process cost would be around $20 to $30/barrel, and the latest crude oil price is over $100/bbl, so this is an excellent way to recycle organic waste.
It would be interesting to find out what “full scale” meant, and if that price assumes that the waste will be near-free as it is now. If you’re talking about replacing a good portion of world consumption, say, 20 million bbls/day (about the daily US oil consumption rate), I’d have to imagine that the feedstocks wouldn’t be seen as “garbage” anymore and would rise in price. This could impact other industries that use some of that waste already, like fertilizer and animal feed.
As to the fesiblity of the whole TDP idea, I was looking around a bit and it turns out that the parent company went bankrupt back in 2009, after losing $20 million and having a failed IPO:
First you agree with me, that we can manufacture pretty much everything we want if we have enough energy. Then you state that oil is finite after all. What now? I thought you agreed that resources are not really finite. Sure, replacing the low hanging fruit requires effort and investment, but that has nothing to do with finiteness. Increasing corn production requires investment too. Is corn finite? Forget about finiteness, that’s all that I’m saying. Except for that sentence, I do agree with your post. Finding alternatives is difficult and might not work out. But that’s why we got scientists and engineers. And geologists! It’s always a problem of productivity, never finiteness. We’re never ‘running out’ of anything, we can only suffer from too low productivity. - Luckily, oil isn’t anywhere near being difficult to produce, oil reserves are growing despite unprecedented consumption. So there’s enough time for a slow transition to nuclear or solar or whatever. If the total oil on the planet ever gets scarce, it will be a slow process with gradually rising prices for centuries, the pumps won’t just suddenly run dry. The world is just too big for that.
Edit: As for depolymerization, I don’t really think it’s feasible. Not because of lack of a carbon source, as I understand it they can pretty much use any kind of plastics. But because to make any difference we’d have to plaster the country with depolymerization plants. That experimental plant in the video produces 500 barrels a day, say at full scale they are ten times that productive, we would need four thousand of them to produce the 20 million barrels a day you mention. Where are they going to get all the pipes and tanks to build those things? And at the end of the day it’s still just dirty oil that makes the air brown.
Regarding the price of the feedstock. It says on wikipedia that the cost of the turkey waste adds 15 to 20 Dollars a barrel of their oil. Meaning if they could get “free” waste they could produce at 60 to 65 Dollars a barrel. Which would be economical, it’s just not possible to do this on a large scale.
First you agree with me, that we can manufacture pretty much everything we want if we have enough energy. Then you state that oil is finite after all. What now? I thought you agreed that resources are not really finite.
Natural. Reserves.
“Resources”, reletive to humans, aren’t finite. However, pre-existing natural reserves are of a finite nature. This doesn’t mean that we can’t MAKE more oil, but we can’t just pick it up out of the ground forever. Think of it like buying a house and finding a large refrigerator full of beer in the basement. You can keep drinking that beer, all at the low-low cost of just walking down into your basement. But eventually that fridge will be empty, and if you want more beer, you’re going to have to work to buy some, or brew your own, or whatever.
I mean, are you somehow not understanding that idea and think that natural reserves ARE unlimited, or are we just talking past eachother? Or are you saying that we can keep inventing, for example, more and more efficient vehicle engines which use less and less gas, making the amount of oil we consume negligible? If it’s the latter, then there’s a finite limit to that also, there’s only so many joules in a given volume of gas.
Oh, and 4,000 TDP plants isn’t really that many if you’re going to be replacing the whole nation’s oil consumption. You’d have to assume that some facilities are going to be larger operations and may be capable of making 1,000, 2,000, or 10,000 barrels a day. I really hope it pans out, although I’m looking forward to widespread electric cars also. No more oil changes or blown gaskets!
I was talking about natural oil the whole time. I am saying that pre-existing natural reserves are not economically finite. So I’m not talking about adding oil through depolymerization or other synthetic processes. I’m not talking about more efficient vehicle engines that shrink consumption either. And for the sake of simplicity, let’s forget about new findings as well. I’m saying the stuff in the ground is not finite. That is because “oil” is not one material, it’s different stuff over time. Oil is really more of a statistical category than a particular material. And we keep adding stuff to that category, meaning it is not really finite. For example: Say there are two trillion barrels of oil on the planet, not just proven reserves but including all the oil that would be worthwhile to extract but that we haven’t found yet. Now some guy invents a filter that makes oil exploration from certain types of less porous sand possible. Now there’s two and a half trillion barrels of the stuff we can extract as oil. We created more oil! And that means it’s not limited. Because for something to be limited, it has to have a limit, and I just showed that there is no limit. As long as we have improving technology and capital investment, we can push the limit ahead of us. So it’s not like beer in a refrigerator at all. Even though we’re using up something that’s pre-existing, there doesn’t have to be a limit to production, because we can keep using up different stuff. Sure, the overall amount of stuff on the planet is finite, but the planet is pretty big.
Then we run out of resources and starve. But my point was that this requires a limit, a reason that we can’t continue to renew resources. That’s a positive statement, not an assumption we should take for granted. We can continue unless there is a limit, it’s not that we assume there is a limit and technological improvement happens to save us from the end of the world until now.
