Converting Turkey Offal into Bio-Derived Hydrocarbon Oil (2004) [pdf]

Converting Turkey Offal into Bio-Derived Hydrocarbon Oil (2004) [pdf](large.stanford.edu)

12 points by ashergill 4 years ago | 7 comments

stephen_g 4 years ago |

Very cool. I've been thinking about this space for a few years (waste to fuel) particularly for aviation and maybe ocean shipping, since most land transport, home and commercial heating, cooking, etc. can all be electrified, but long-haul aviation can't and hydrogen is problematic (the weight of the storage vessels and the low volumetric density are big blockers).

With catalytic hydro-processing the fuel can be made into something that is chemically identical to fossil-derived diesel or jet fuel, and if everything is run from 100% renewable power and the feedstock is waste biomass, then the fuel is basically already carbon neutral without needing to buy offsets. Need to start looking at funding to start doing some research to see whether the energy return on energy invested could be good enough and the price of the finished product could be low enough at scale including the logistics (collection, production, etc.). Maybe more likely now given the increase in oil price, but a high carbon price on fossil fuels that it would be exempt from due to carbon neutrality would likely be necessary too...

pkphilip 4 years ago |

Wouldn't it make better sense to use something as abundant as raw sewage for conversion into fuel?

https://www.waterworld.com/wastewater/reuse-recycling/articl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owwhInRsgEk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_P9aneX7bo

pstuart 4 years ago |

I was convinced these guys were really going to change the world. Still bummed they couldn't pull it off. Seems like they forgot that people don't like to smell bad smells.

trylfthsk 4 years ago |

I'm tempted to mentally file this under "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", if only for the visual of a future where an insatiable appetite for meat-derived hydrocarbons is satisfied by minmaxing factory farming sans any constraint that the outputs need to be suitable for human consumption.

Hopefully algae is the most efficient way to this.

ashergill 4 years ago | |

It's definitely one of the more unsettling titles I've read recently, but this quote makes it a little less dystopian:

"The CWT-TP process is designed to handle almost any imaginable waste, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged sediment, old computers, municipal sewage sludge, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, and oil-refinery residues".

As a complete layman, it seems to me like a really neat way to handle waste and oil dependence in one go. I'm sure there's lots of reasons why it wouldn't be practical though.

trylfthsk 4 years ago | | |

I do love the idea of technologies that make resources (and waste streams) more fungible. Though the level of dystopos then is where we draw the line on "resources" and "waste streams".

"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people."

Still, technology that excites the imagination is always itself exciting.

baud147258 4 years ago |

I was confused at the start by the capitalization of the title, as I was thinking Turkey as in the country instead of the bird...