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| Thermal Depolymerization Update |
| 2005-02-22 |
| Found via slashdot. Not as much solid cost information as I was hoping for; I think it might work better if it could easily switch feedstocks, to ride out price fluctuations. ...The key question is whether the end products are pure enough and cheap enough to compete with other biofuels and petroleum. Until recently it seemed that turkey fuel would score big on both counts. CWT saw opportunity in the mad cow scare of December 2003. Expecting U.S. authorities to ban the feeding of animal offal to livestock—a practice linked to mad cow disease—CWT and ConAgra formed a joint venture that built a $30 million plant in Carthage, Mo. The venture assumed that nearby turkey processors would provide lots of free turkey waste. Last year the Carthage plant began selling its output to a Midwestern manufacturer, which buys it for roughly $40 a barrel (25% less than conventional fuel) and uses it to run its plant. The Carthage factory now produces 400 barrels a day. That's a drop in the ocean of U.S. oil consumption, currently running around 20 million barrels a day. But making more turkey fuel isn't as hard as nailing down its costs. It turns out that feeding animals to animals remains standard practice in the U.S., despite a modest tightening in the regulations last year. So instead of being free, turkey leftovers cost $30 to $40 a ton, a hefty expense considering that one ton of turkey yields just two barrels of oil... |
| Posted by:Phil Fraering |
| #2 Nothing goes to waste in the meat processing industry. Nothing. The scraps that don't go into hot dogs or sausage or such get rendered down to recover the oils and the resulting solids go into animal feed. I know of one meat processing plant that even has a cover on its wastewater treatment pond that captures any methane and feeds it back to a boiler. It's not unusual for a pork processing plant to process 7,000 pigs per day. Can you imagine the massive pile and foul stench if any of those wastes were just piled up somewhere in a dump?!? |
| Posted by: Tom 2005-02-22 9:01:24 PM |
| #1 Sounds like another good reason to make the feeding of animals to like animals illegal. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-02-22 7:22:04 PM |