Future Hi: TDP - Too Good To Be True?

June 30, 2005

TDP - Too Good To Be True?

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really.

"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming."

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Read the rest of the article (with pics and diagrams of the TDP process) here.

Posted by LVX23 at June 30, 2005 02:27 PM

Comments

Whoa!

Posted by: nmatrix9 at June 30, 2005 11:20 PM

I heard of this device about two years ago, when they bragged that it could *easily* turn a human being into 12 gallons of oil, and that all you had had to do was dump the human body in one end, and in a little while your crude oil would come out the other end. How long then before some parts of the world start throwing people into the machine to make oil? Solyent Green anyone? Of course it could solve many problems too, but it was my first thought when the companies spokesperson made the comment.

Posted by: Paul at June 30, 2005 11:34 PM

Even at $5 per gallon, that's only $60 per person, probably not even breaking even when you add the costs of kidnapping, transporting and processing them. I suspect that the world will stick with good old fashioned slavery.

Of course, if you already have an inconvenient prisoner that needed disposal anyway..

Posted by: Marc Forrester at July 1, 2005 12:14 AM

well, who will be the one's the entrepreneurs to get this thing going? The problem in america is that our society is very very litigious. Just to do anything you have to go through a thousand lawyers and so much red tape. It stalls the process of implementation and action taking.

Posted by: joe at July 1, 2005 09:23 AM

Several points:

1. Yeah, this tech *could*, in principle, be Soylent-Greenized, not so much here in Amerika (there is still a modicum of Constitutional protections...), but in 3rd-world banna dictatorships. That's why, once this tech goes fully online (and sounds like it's makin' headway apace...) We the People need to make sure it's not used for executions (too cruel & unusual, surely--fnord!!)

2. The tech itself, though, sounds GREAT--doesn't it: trash, refuse, polluting sludge, ***waste from other companies' processes*** (Hello!!)--all go in and pure, hi-grade petroleum, natural gas, and industrially-useful chemicals/minerals come out. Until photo-voltaics get even more efficient (and they're also trending that way [yay!], of course...) and/or until we get zero-point, vacum-fluctuation energy commercialized (and, of course, this is being worked-on, too, by Tom Bearden among others...), this amounts to the most environmentally-friendly, potentially very thermodynamically-efficient (i.e., in terms of the entire Gaian eco-system) tech we've got to turn-to. Plus, and I love this one (of course), it'll drive the regular drill-&-pipe-&-refine boys (i.e., W, Cheney, et al) fucking NUTS. Amerika being Amerika with a "k" to a rather sickening extent notwithstanding, we're not (at least not quite) fucking fascist enough to be able just to put the power-elite quash on this---or it would've already been quashed-the-hell-out-of...dig? So, no, Big-Oil, and all its Crony-"Capitalists" will just have to eat shit--or at least run their cars on it!!

3. Thanks for posting this, Paul. I'd read about in Discover Mag about 2-3 years ago, but it's good to see it coming to (full-commercialization/consumer) fruition. And won't the competition with photo-voltaics **AND** hydrogen in the coming 5-10 years be grand??!!! YEAH, BABY!!! These fuckers will compete their fucking asses off, and market-processes will also determine which energy-providing tech(s) is most consumer-efficient and thermodynamically-efficient in which particular socio-techno-economic niche. YEAH, BABY!! IF, that is, the Robber Baron Pigs and their statist/bureaucrat minions don't (partially, temporarily) fuck things up with regs & shit! Cheap, afuckingbundant energy is on its way. And fuck the bureacrat/assholes who try to hamper it!

4. Returning to the Soylent Green thing for a moment: Definitely need staunch Bill of Rights protection. See Randy Barnett's stuff. Don't worry, though, this fits right in with Paul's projection/forecast that in 10 years or so, things'll be lookin' pretty good. Keep your eyes on the money, and don't let bullshit hamper the development of stuff like this: just be sure to guard against Soylent Green-type abuses. Yeah, Baby!

I'm outta here for now...

Y'all have a wonderful 4th of July--You, too, Marc: from your e-mail address it looks like you're on the other side of The Pond...

Posted by: MCP2012 at July 1, 2005 02:49 PM

Paul has a point that this tech could be seriously abused. Still, I hope that it's not and that it does go into production at some point.

I have a feeling the oil-baron boys will try to block it--like the newspaper barons blocked the hemp paper presses.

Happy 4th all...I'm 'Murican, but I do live across the pond now.

Posted by: Sly Stoner at July 2, 2005 11:57 AM

Soylent Green? One might as well blame the existence of matches for arson.

Posted by: razorsmile at July 3, 2005 02:21 PM

bunk, bunk, bunk. This guy is a con artist, and he managed to get himself published in National Geographic and other reputable magazines; and gotten tons of funding from well meaning people, yet no one has reviewed his 'method' or verified his claims - which are preposterous! We don't even know for sure how petroleum from ancient biomass was actually created, this guy claims to manufacture it from turkey entrails "through steam and pressure". The most amazing thing to me is how little skepticism this story generates... as if we all want to desperately believe it's possible. But... it ain't! Sorry to burst anyone's bubble. On the positive side - ITER is coming online, and I think most importantly Peak Oil keeps getting in the mainstream press. I personally don't believe the peak is here yet (tons of 'expensive' oil left in the ground, which will be 'cheap' once the price goes over a threshold), but if we talk about the peak ahead of time, and the market sees the investment opportunities in renewals... then we might be in for a not-so-brutal withdrawal from our Oil addiction. fingers crossed...

Posted by: alex at July 5, 2005 03:01 PM

Alex, I tend to agree about Peak Oil, especially since a lot of the "experts" in the field seem to work for the petrochem industry (great way to drive up prices).

RE: bunk, bunk, bunk... Would you post some sources for your refutation? Or are you basing this on personal opinion/experience? I agree that the claim seems preposterous but alternatives to petrochem are usually quickly discredited & buried by the powers that be, so I retain some degree of hope for this one.

Posted by: lvx23 at July 5, 2005 04:01 PM

RE: Bunk, bunk, bunk...The full article, excerpted here, as well as the Changing World Technologies own website, seem to provide ample argument/evidence that this isn't bunk at all, at all. I'm wide-open to this thing being refuted-the-hell-out-of--please do provide references, etc., Alex--but with Warren Buffet's son, among other people who can surely do enough Due Diligence and independent-scientific-checking/investigation--what with these folks **signing on to this thing**, this is by itself **prima facie** (but, mind you, *rebuttable*) evidence that this stuff is the real-deal. Billionaires, who pride themselves on investment savy (Buffett epitomizes this), seldom (but sometimes) financially-back bullshit. Sure, it happens. But more often than not, they themselves pull the plug because it would fuck-up their capitalist-pig game (see, e.g., J.P. Morgan & his crowd pulling the financial slats out from under Tesla around the turn of the last century...). This thing may indeed be BUNK, Alex, but we need you to provide corroboration of its being so.

Vive le Biocosm (great book, btw)! Toward Meta-Cosmic Horizons!

Y'all have a good rest-of-the-week...(wink)

Posted by: MCP2012 at July 6, 2005 01:09 PM

It rather interesting to realize that humans are made of very sophisticated plastics! Plastics are polymers, meaning many-mers. They are repeated chains of simple building blocks. Hence repeated chains of ethylene are called polyethylene. Proteins are simply repeated chains of about 20 different amino acids, printed out from the DNA by the ribosome. Hence we are polymers, or plastic. Therefore thermal depolymerization should work fine to breakdown most products of animal or vegetable life.

Bake anything organic at 900F in an oven and sooner or later it will all turn into CO2 and carbon ash. So why is it so surprising that high temperature and pressure could breakdown most organic materials?

Water actually becomes a very good solvent for oils at higher temperature and pressure and will become a catalyst for various reactions, and will hydrolyze materials to assist in their decompostion.

While of course this any article should be doublechecked, if they're really building an industrial scale factory near a turkey processor, it seems hard to imagine that this is some kind of scam.

Posted by: dlight at July 7, 2005 01:46 AM

Well said, DLight! We're not ganging-up on you, Alex, but from all the evidence, and from the underlying associated known prinicples of physics & chemistry, this process would seem to be (at least *in-principle*) quite plausible. Now I'm no physical chemist (hell, I just barely know the difference between a co-valent bond and James Bond!), but I know enough basic chemistry and physics to know that this process is not only plausible, but, thermodynamically, very interesting--because it closes (or, more appropriately-put, *tightens*---but by easily an order-of-magnitude or more---so it comes close to closing...) the thermodynamic loop--or thread, if you will--that is currently dissipated more-or-less randomly (or, more-to-the-point, **haphazardly**) into the general-environment. Now, this dumping of waste-products (even if superficially "cost-effectively" and/or "efficiently") DOES, nonetheless, oftentimes have a detrimental effect on delicate ecosystems within various radii of the dumping (or "storing" or "processing" or whatever). But not only is it oftentimes disruptive and/or toxic as regards the ecosystems impacted, but it's also just (at least ***relative to*** this new TDP process) egregiously thermodynamically **sloppy**!! And it's this sloppiness that exacerbates atmospheric problems, and a host of other environmental ailments. But the TDP process, if systematically brought into full industrial integration--not only with 1st-world captital-structure, but also by helping to "leap-frog" 3rd-world countries into a more environmentally-benign path toward developing vibrant, productive, energy-plentiful economies/ecologies. Because, as we've heard the propaganda over the last 10-15 years, if China & India industrialize along the same "path" that "the West" did, we might have techno-ecological catastrophe. But the point is that, as Kurzwiel & John Smart have been pointing-out, there'll always be more innovation, alternate growth and developmental pathes that are both more benighn and more efficient. But a prerequisite for this is entrepreneurial market-processes. So we do need some version of Market Liberalism to intersubjectively catalyze all this...

Anyway, gotta go for now! Best regards to all! Y'all rock; I love this site and all it contributions!

Posted by: MCP2012 at July 8, 2005 11:16 AM

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