Green Light at the End of the Tunnel (Part 2) Thermal De-polymerization
Stafford Williamson
August 20, 2006
It is a fundamental concept of engineering that all processes are inherently inefficient. It is a philosophical truism that all things are connected, that even a butterfly flapping its wings in the plains of Manchuria has an effect of the global climate. So let us remember that what we are trying to achieve in freeing ourselves from our “oil addiction” is to find a replacement source of PORTABLE energy storage and delivery. That is, we need something we can put in a vehicle, take to the middle of the desert, or lake, or ocean, or ice flow, and then still have the power available to bring us home. Ideally, at least, we shouldn’t have to be able to refill the tank at the destination, since it might be the middle of a desert or ocean, not that any one fuel has to be universally useful for every situation. We don’t take gasoline to the moon to start the rockets for the homeward journey, for instance. Nor do we build billion dollar rockets with 40 story hydrogen fuel tanks to take us from Florida to California (which, if you think about it, is often what the shuttle does).
We need a process that weans us from our dependence on foreign sources of energy, again, at least partially, and doesn’t add carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and tons of sulfur dioxide and other pollutants to the air.
Methane (the main component in “natural” gas) and ethane are two pretty friendly energy portability solutions. I’ve been seeing buses and fleets of trucks running around town with CNG on the bumpers. CNG stands for “Compressed Natural Gas”. They are clean burning (compared to almost any other energy source in use today) and the only major drawback is that they are still “petroleum” based products. Well, that’s not entirely true. We don’t have to get methane and ethane from ancient, underground deposits. These deposits are usually associated with oil deposits but not always, but in any case derived from “rock” deposited hydrocarbons, from which we get the term “petro” (rock) and “oleum” (oil). One of the principal disadvantages of these sources is that they upset the “natural” balance of the rate that carbon is absorbed by the planet. Dead bits of dinosaurs that have been transformed by heat and pressure into petroleum are not floating around in the atmosphere contributing to global warming. They are locked underground. Pulling that stuff out of the ground and making it into plastics and other tangible products (acknowledging that all processes are somewhat inefficient as stated earlier) is not putting them into the atmosphere either. Burning such hydrocarbons in either portable or fixed (as in power stations) engines and allowing the exhaust to flow freely into the air we breath is not such a good idea. The greenhouse effect of higher concentrations of carbonaceous gases traps the heat of sunlight in the air, gradually warming the earth.
I am of the opinion that some of this, like economic structural inflation in a capitalist economy is systemic and unavoidable. As such an inevitability, it is as useless to rail against it as it is to curse the sunshine. But it would be nice to have a thousand years of breathing space to come up with solutions to the fact that eventually Florida is likely to be entirely below sea level. So in the meantime we search for a solution to our portable energy problem.
Okay. Here’s one great step for mankind. It is called “Thermal De-polymerization”, and although I don’t like three letter acronyms, I will mention that it is sometimes called TDP. Thermal De-polymerization is a process whereby long chains of combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms are broken into shorter chains that are more easily used for other purposes. That is to say, heavy molecules, long chain structures, can be broken into relatively short chain molecules hexanes, octanes and other components that we have already learned to handle, store and transport as portable forms of energy. In short, gasoline, and diesel fuel. Not only that, but the use of catalysts can promote transformations into specific forms of these shorter chains so that even though, theoretically, you could break the long chains down into their most elemental components of pure carbon (probably in the form of graphite) and hydrogen gas (with, of course, some byproducts consisting of the impurities in the source substances), you can bias the output to be specific compounds by using catalysts that promote the formation of those particular molecular structures you want coming out the other end.
There is a low temperature version of this (although it, too, produces some heat) that happens “naturally” called “fermentation”. This is the heart of most of the ethanol production processes, and is one of the reasons that Brazil has been so successful with their conversion to ethanol based fuels for their cars and trucks. They make it from sugar cane which they grow locally, in climates ideally suited for this cultivation. In America, corn grows with almost equal lushness, and with the help of Archer Daniels Midland and others, we are now converting a lot of the sugars in corn into ethanol too. (By the way, ethanol is essentially the same stuff, okay slightly different, it is a liquid sister to the gas “ethane”, the shorter chained cousin of “octane” mentioned earlier.) For a quick lesson in the forms of organic chemistry, (prepared for high school students) take a look here, where you will see that what we call “octane” in gasoline is actually an isomer of pentane, the 2,2,4-trimethyl pentane. But there is a lot more sugar in sugar cane than in corn, and easier to get it out, so we slapped a 100% import duty on the stuff to protect American farmers (and ADM) profits.
Ah, but the sewer I spoke of is not one of dirty politics, rather I mean real sewers. The Thermal De-polymerization process has a number of practical methods by which it can be applied to long chain carbon and hydrogen combinations. One of the most promising is patented by Changing World Technologies who have, under financing provided by ConAgra, built a pilot plant to demonstrate the process. According to the founder of the company, you can take almost any kind of feedstock (what you put “into” the process) that is made up of organic chemicals or petrochemical products, and output a whole variety of fuel products and, as a by-product, refined chemicals. Now, Changing World Technologies, Inc. was founded in 1997. They formed Renewable Environmental Solutions, LLC in partnership with ConAgra and have had the pilot plant in production in Carthage, Missouri since 2004. The good news is that the EPA gave them a rating (“a finding”) (very cute, by the way) of F.O.N.S.I.E. (like, “the Fonze,” in the old television show “Happy Days”) which means “Finding of No Significant Impact on the Environment”, or, in other words, non-polluting. The other good news is that they are producing what the 2005 Energy Bill from Congress called “renewable diesel” (a new class of fuel, added by the bill) and selling all they can produce. The bad news is: EVERY TOWN and CITY in the WORLD should have one, or more than one.
We have this strange Victorian attitude toward human wastes that makes politicians as leery of it as if it were toxic nuclear waste. The Chinese have been using it to fertilize their crops for thousands of years. Imagine for a moment if we get the Chinese started on producing these kinds of plants. Since it really only takes about 6 to 8 months (2 years if it is a government project, of course) to build one of these plants on a modest scale, we could see the end of the so-called “oil crisis” within a couple of years. No doubt Changing World Technologies and ConAgra’s legal departments are busily working on protecting their original patents with subsequent filings as well, but the original patents run out in just a few years. Can we really afford to wait?
Additionally, Changing World Technologies, Inc and their subsidiary R.E.S. LLC are just a couple of the hundreds of small companies exploring the high tech possibilities of “bio-mass” energy according to the original Newsday magazine article from April of 2004 (see the link).
Sounds like magic, doesn’t it. (Don't expect music in this video. ;o) )
I am hoping that the upcoming elections will bring you the same kind of opportunities that I will try to take to “put a bug in the ear” of your political representatives, to open their minds to this kind of “green” source of energy. The process isn’t rocket science. Changing World Technologies isn’t “the only game in town” either, although their process of using high pressure water/steam in the earlier stages is very attractive, but most of the rest is just, more or less, standard oil refinery technology. On the whole the technique is very similar to the Athabasca Tar Sands project (notice I used the other spelling for Athabasca this week) in which the government of Alberta has joined with private (oil) industry to extract petroleum from the vast surface deposits in that Canadian province. Remember, I told you Alberta and Colorado have enough “oil” to supply the world for a hundred years if we just build the plants to extract it, but that doesn’t address the “green” issue the way that Thermal De-polymerization does.
Guess what? Thermal De-polymerization can actually use the left over corn stalks from the methanol producing process as its feedstock too. (The GM "Live Green, Go Yellow" theme is going to be producing a lot of available corn stalks, during the production of all that E85 gas.) Thermal De-polymerization can swallow up municipal landscaping trimmings, as well as city zoo manure, or that from horse racing tracks or dairy farms, even rubber auto tires; all are potential sources of these long chain carbon molecules. I'll be working on the politicians in my town at this month's "meet the candidates" meeting, but I certainly would love to see one built to use the 250 tons of tires that come into the Los Angeles County dump every day instead of letting them just get buried in the landfill. Whether your political candidates are on a do-nothing course, or even if they are promoting ethanol production, put them on the hot seat, and watch them squirm when you ask them why your tax dollars are going to pay for hauling away sewage sludge from the sewage processing in your area, when the city could be using that to produce green bio-diesel (or methanol, or butane or any o f the other short chain carbon fuels) at the same time that they produce the fuel to run the plant, and probably have enough residual electricity to run a couple of neighborhoods worth of homes. What are we waiting for?
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