Thermal Depolymerization and Peak Oil stuff

[ewt]

Thermal depolymerization is kindof like a big compost heap, very hot. You take your complex waste and make it very hot and you get water, ad oil, and carbon, and gas, and minerals. You can't take carbon dioxide and methane and turn them into oil, but you can put carbon dioxide into trees and turn _those_ into oil. Pretty neat, eh? Past attempts to do this have proven too inefficient to be practical but Changing World Technologies are getting good yield using turkey offal; the yield from plastic bottles is even better.

The FAQs at CWT say that this process destroys prions. This is pretty cool considering that we don't currently have any real methods of getting rid of these, and they're a pretty huge problem. But the Wikipedia article says the sludge is heated to 250°C and then later to 500°C, and hairyears says prions are only destroyed at much higher temperatures than these. Prions don't have nuclei, so they aren't affected by all the lovelies that kill stuff by disrupting nucleic acid. I suppose different prions will denature at different temperratures. I wonder whether the high-pressure part of the thermal depolymerization process is part of this. Hmm.

I wonder whether any of the various parties campaigning for election have looked into this. I'd vote for a party that pledged to turn all waste processing facilities into thermal depolymerization plants, for sure. You know, if I'd managed to get the electoral register forms turned in on time and stuff, which I didn't, so I won't be able to vote in this election. Fuck a duck.

Does Thermal Depolymerization Solve the Problem of Peak Oil? An interesting article, but it only touches the surface. The good thing is that thermal depolymerization is much cheaper than many other suggested solutions (biodiesel, hydroelectric-driven hydrogen generation) to the Peak Oil problem, so it might get developed enough, and used widely enough, to stop everything going apeshit as some of the more doom and gloom sources seem to suggest.

But running out of oil is not the whole story.

Power that is not made locally still has to be transported, and this is still inefficient. Ideally you'd want your waste processing plant right next to your thermal depolymerization plant, and that right next to the power plant so you don't have to transport the oil too far (although some of it could go to cars and so on). If you have a large power plant using this stuff and then sending electricity out over the grid, you're still losing lots and lots of electricity to heat and resistance. If you're burning coal, it's more efficient to burn it all in one place so you can control the emissions - there are economies of scale, here - but you're still losing around seven per cent of the power just getting it from point A to point B.

I think there is still a very good argument for distributed generation - make what you need, send any surplus back to the grid, if you can't make all that you need you take some off of the grid. The smaller windmills are no more offensive to look at than TV aerials, and solar panelling is much more efficient and affordable than it used to be - and it's possible to go even more direct, with direct solar hot water heating (yes this even works in sunny Engrand). With some efficiency measures thrown in as well I tend to look at suburbia as a huge power plant waiting to be set up. All these arguments apply to food distribution too, and I do tend to think of suburbia as having massive potential to grow lots of vegetables and fruit, as in the Victory Gardens of WWII.

So if we've got a renewable supply through the waste we create and thermal depolymerization, what's the point of better efficiency? A renewable supply is not the same as an unlimited supply; we only have so much matter, we only have so much sunshine, and it's sunshine that's driving all this really (even if we are a long, long way away from using all the energy the sun provides). There will still be limitations, and there will still be some scarcity.

Better efficiency means more people can have a higher standard of living. Having a higher standard of living makes it easier to get on with things like art and education and stuff. Nobody is going to pay for their kid to take piano lessons if they can't put food on the table. I have a vested interest in the basics of life being delivered as efficiently as possible. It means I can do a job I like, instead of manual labour (not that manual labour is all bad, and I quite like growing some of my own food, but I'm quite glad not to have to struggle too much to survive, thankyouverymuch). What would your life be like if nobody bought your product, or your company's product, because everyone was poor and struggling? Think about that. Then go out and get some fluorescent bulbs. Your bills will be lower, too, so it is not all that bad.

There's another side to this, too. We have already increased the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and not growing enough things. Switching to fossil fuels that are basically from biomass (human waste, turkey sludge, et cetera) is noble and will, in theory, prevent further disruption to the carbon cycle. We got the disruption we have by using a fuel that has very high latency - in the natural world, it takes a LONG TIME for burned fossil fuels to become plants and then dead things and then fossil fuels waiting to be burned. Previously, lots of the carbon that has been floating around as carbon dioxide was locked up in, um, plants and rocks and stuff. If we were to switch over to thermal depolymerization as the method of oil production tomorrow, using waste products, we'd still have way more carbon floating around the atmosphere than we used to, and it would take a lot more than just a few trees and some vegetable gardens to soak it up.

I haven't done the arithmetic, but my suspicion is that the rate of oil consumption we currently have leaves more carbon in the atmosphere than is sustainable in terms of keeping the Earth's climate habitable for humans. In other words, it's great we wouldn't be finding even more carbon that is locked up undergroud somewhere, but we're still in for a nasty global warming surprise unless we stop using so much, or create some pretty massive rainforests to act as carbon sinks. We've already got loads too much up there, and it takes time for the effects to be seen and it also takes time for the effects of carbon sinks (ie forests) to be seen. If we were to stop drilling for oil tomorrow, and only use what we've already got hanging around, we'd still be in for a pretty rough ride. We need to redress the balance somehow.

Am I missing something here, or should we all be out planting loads of trees all the time?

Comments

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

You think? I'd have to clean it up some, though. And deadtree formats don't do hyperlinks so well, so maybe I'd have to explain a lot more about various things (thermal depolymerization, prions, global warming) that I've either linked to or assumed my readership already understand.