What Is Thermal Depolymerization?

By heating and pressurizing the organic waste for a period of time, they can achieve super-hydration under the combined action of temperature, pressure and water, and become a slurry-like mixture. Thereafter, by-product dehydration is performed by depressurization, and the remaining liquid is injected into the second-stage reactor. In the reactor, animal fat is reheated, breaking long molecular chains. Finally, the final product is split in the vertical still: the gas diffuses from the top, the light oil flows from the middle and upper parts, the heavy oil flows from the middle, and the water flows from the middle and bottom. It is separated from the bottom. In theory, any organic waste can be converted into fuel oil.

This is a light crude oil (paraffin-based crude oil) that uses hydropyrolysis to reduce composite organic matter (usually various waste products, often referred to as biomass and plastics). It mimics natural geological changes and is believed to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon of long-chain polymers decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons with a maximum length of about 18 carbons. (18-C)

"Thermal depolymerization technology" is a patented technology invented by Illinois microbiologist Paul Baskis, which can be applied to almost all carbon-containing raw materials.

Thermal depolymerization mimics the process by which the shortened earth's organic matter is transformed into petroleum.

A $ 25 million waste processing plant in Missouri, USA, started in late 2003 and was co-founded by the American agricultural giant Kangjia Company and a technology development company. The Kang family company slaughters a large number of chickens and other animals every day. The company plans to dump 200 tons of horrible animal entrails into a large pot every day, and then transport these organic waste to a processing plant, which is processed by a thermal depolymerization process and appears in the factory. At the other end are 500 barrels of domestic fuel, enough natural gas to run the entire plant, and 11 tons of concentrated minerals that can make fertilizer.

Theoretically, the thermal depolymerization plant can process from used car tires to animal waste, from waste paper to medical waste. This kind of factory can be spread all over the world, because its raw materials are abundant everywhere.

In the application scheme of CWT (Changing World Technologies), water is used to improve the heating process while providing hydrogen in the reaction.

In the process of CWT, the feed is first crushed into small pieces, and if it is very dry, it is mixed with some water. Then it was put into the pressure vessel reaction chamber, where it was heated to 250 ° C at a constant rate. Similar to a pressure cooker (only higher pressure), the steam naturally rises to 4

In the spring of 2003, a striking article in Discovery magazine made a big splash. The article is entitled "Everything Can Be Turned into Oil." According to the article, a company called "Technology Changes the World" has a plant in Missouri that claims it receives a variety of carbon-containing raw materials, "including turkey scrap, tires, plastic bottles, old computers, municipal waste, corn Straw, papermaking wastewater, toxic medical waste, refining residues, and even biological weapons like anthrax spores "and transform these things into three valuable products: high-quality hydrocarbon oil, clean hydrocarbon natural gas, and useful Of minerals. They call this technique thermal depolymerization (TDP). This really sounds like a high technology, as if the process of forming petroleum from organic fossils in nature has been greatly accelerated. The article claims, "Suppose a 175-pound man comes in from one end of the machine, and from the other end comes 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of natural gas, and 123 pounds of sterilized water." From a chemical point of view, the petroleum obtained from turkey scraps is like the No. 2 gasoline commonly used in domestic heating stoves. Engineers and investment bankers have joined in to cheer for this new technology; the federal government has also invested $ 12 million in research into this project.

This machine is like the one used in a traditional oil refinery-but it is much smaller. The company said that for materials such as turkey scrap, the energy efficiency of the entire process can reach 85%. That is to say, it takes only 15 thermal units to produce 100 thermal units from raw materials. Moisture in moist materials like turkey scrap can help a lot in the first stage of the process, turning fats, proteins, carbohydrates into carboxylic acids. When the pressure drops sharply, approximately 90% of the free water is removed. This eliminates the need to remove water by heating and evaporation. The second stage of the process is to further break down the hydrocarbon chains, eventually turning them into light petroleum. The third stage is actually similar to traditional petroleum distillation. Hydrocarbons are divided into kerosene, gasoline, naphtha, etc. according to molecular weight, and the obtained flammable gas can be used to keep the entire process running. And dry raw materials (such as PVC plastics obtained from crushed electrical appliances, building materials) mixed with water will produce useful chemical materials, such as hydrochloric acid and hydrocarbon fuels. Different raw materials have different processing "process formulas" and processing times. Technology Change World says it can safely reprocess any material as long as it is not nuclear waste. The company's first commercial-scale processing plant was located in Carthage, Missouri, Missouri, with an investment of $ 20 million, next to ConAgra's agro-food processing plant. A company spokesman said that with this method, they were able to produce only $ 10 per barrel of oil (in 2003 dollars).

Anything that sounds like Tian Fang Ye Tan is often Tian Fang Ye Tan, and the thermal disaggregation mentioned here is no exception. The implication is no different from the concept of perpetual motion in the 19th century. Garbage goes in, oil comes out. (There must be a lot of garbage, right?) In fact, this process is equivalent to a recycling project. According to the second law of thermodynamics, thermal depolymerization accepts 15% of the energy lost in the process of accepting the waste generated by our high-information, oil-dependent economy, and then turning them back into oil.

The problem is that the premise of the entire process is that there must be an oil economic platform. For example, the large turkey farms operated by Conagra can only exist in agricultural systems based on cheap oil and gas. Only such an agricultural system can produce enough fertilizer to grow grain to feed those turkeys. In addition, the site, processing, freezing, transportation, and sales processes were the same until the turkeys finally arrived in the cold storage of a large 150,000 square foot supermarket. Without fossil fuels, the scale of turkey farming will be greatly reduced, and it will be more localized. The waste generated (such as feathers, viscera, feces, etc.) will not be sufficient to supply even the TDP distillation plant for display purposes (If you plan to go to scattered turkey farmers to collect hypothetical turkey scraps and bring them back to the hypothetical TDP plant, the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel consumed in this process may be Will produce more oil than these turkey scraps).

The same problem applies to all other "raw materials" required for the imaginary TDP process (such as tires, old computers, municipal waste, etc.). All these things exist because they are the products of rich oil resources. Without cheap oil, these raw materials will sooner or later cease to exist. TDP technology is at best an efficient method for processing existing waste under existing conditions. But existing conditions will not exist for long. It won't be long before our fossil fuel-based economy will be turbulent. When this situation really comes, we will not be able to get enough oil from the scattered waste and garbage to continue the current lifestyle. Even if the waste produced every day across the United States in the early twentieth century passed TDP to produce oil, it would eventually produce only 5% of the oil we consume every day. Therefore, you may come to the conclusion that if we reduce energy consumption by 95%, TDP technology may still be useful-but if we really reduce energy consumption to that much, we cannot produce enough garbage , It will not be able to produce the 5% oil mentioned earlier. ^[1]