DISCOVER Vol. 24 No. 5 (May 2003)
Table of Contents
Anything into Oil
Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year
By Brad Lemley
Photography by Tony Law
Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no
longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the
first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in
an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including
600 barrels of light oil.
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.
You can read the rest here-
http://www.discover.com/may_03/featoil.html