RadioBanter - View Single Post

March 9th 04, 07:12 PM

In article ,
(Brian Kelly) writes:

(N2EY) wrote in message
...
In article , Mike Coslo
writes:

Martha and her bookie...I mean broker...got convicted, didn't they?

And her stock is now dropping thru the floor which is impacting all
the little folk who put savings into pieces of her empires, layoffs
will ensue, etc. OYeah, the feds "won" this one big. But who is
getting *really* spanked? Martha? Ha! As if. Ashcroft & Co. strike
again.

Exactly. So what's you're solution - let her go?

Here's a datapoint for ya: The USA imported 57% of the petroleum used here
last
year, up from 56% in the previous year. Domestic production is down
slightly.
Even if the Alaskan refuge is drilled, it will be 10 years before full
production is reached there. Gasoline prices are already about $1.75 and
it's only March.

Meanwhile, SUV sales are at record levels and a process called TDP (Thermal
Depolymerization) is almost unheard of.

TDP is another scam.

Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not something to bet the bank on.

"This is classic pseudoscience - bordering on fraudulent!

Sez who? You a ChemE too?

FROM Discovery article May 03 :

"Thermal depolymerization, Appel [the guy who built the TDP pilot
plant in Philly] says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient
for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every
100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process."

HOWEVER

"Their energy numbers are [highly] specious. They give efficiency as
the energy content of the input waste over the energy use. That's
flat-out misleading. They should tell us usable energy of the output
fuel. That's all the matters. We do not rate coal plants by the energy
of the coal they burn, after all, all we care about is the output.
This little evasion suggests that they are not being completely honest
in their entire analysis." (Bonehead at Metafilter.com)

"Bonehead"?

An actual [honest] measure of TDP efficiency would contrast usable
energy content of the OUTPUT (not of the inputs) to the energy
required to drive the reaction/process.

No, not really. See below.

"[This] is called marketing. Anybody selling anything has an interest
in convincing you that it will give you eternal life and the Buddha's
ten secrets of personal enlightenment. Their energy estimate is so
dishonest that it hardly seems useful to give it any more time. A
100-BTU chicken couldn't possibly yield more than a few BTU's of
useable fuel, a small percentage of which could actually be converted
into useable energy. It's probably better to just heat your home by
burning the chicken." {Atlantic Online post}

Has this person actually investigated the process?

WRT Economics:

"If the New, Improved Poo Fuel and OPEC oil both come to market at
$30/barrel or so, the only difference will be in the profit margin for
Poo Energy Co. " {metafilter.com post}

Well, sort of.

$ per barrel is the only measure that will really stand up in the real world.
It doesn't matter if the TDP process
is 9% or 90% efficient in terms of BTU, what matters is the final cost of the
finished product in dollars per barrel or BTU or ccf. And that will be proven
or disproven by the plants already in service (the turkey plant in the Midwest)
and others in development.

This is NOT new. Chemistry is chemisty, period. It sure looks like a
pyrolytic process to me, even though they've given it a snazzy new
name. Their comparison chart also sets up pyrolysis as a straw man --
pyrolysis can also handle slurries,liquids, etc. and yields highly
uniform products. So this appears to be 'fancy'[read: hyped,
creatively marketed] pyrolysis to me. Also appears to be a 'classic'
example of "research" finding the results they want to find. Virtually
all experimental design (methodology, instrumentation, analytical
tools) are carefully chosen (crafted) to identify the expected
outcome. Choices are directed by prejudice - in this case, economic.
Given sufficient data, statistics can be employed to 'prove' any
theorum. Unless someone can tell me what I'm missing, of course...

It's a combination of temperature and pressure, plus water, that allegedly do
the breakdown. Again, the devil is in the details.

"Most men think that they think, but what they are actually doing is
rearranging their prejudice"(Bertrand Russell)

Get a grip folks! TANSTAAFL

Posted by: dr mac at April 26, 2003 02:09 PM"

"dr mac" huh?

Maybe TDP works, maybe it doesn't, the obvious measure is given above. Of
course if a company has 200 tons of turkey offal per day to dispose of, they're
going to pay the TDP folks just to get rid of it. And if something useful can
be made from for a competitive price, so much the better. Same for sewage
sludge and old plastic, etc.

But even if TDP works as advertised, it's not the entire answer because it will
take decades to bring enough plants online *and* there may not be enough
suitable feedstock meet the demand. (imagine - not enough waste?)

25 or so years ago a ChemE friend of mine did her master's thesis on shale oil
recovery. Developed a process that would get good-quality feedstock from oil
shales of the type that are all over the Rockies. Worked quite well, and was
clean to boot. Only problem was that the resulting oil would cost about
$45/barrel to extract - and that was in 1980 dollars. Figure $60-80/barrel
today.

How do we get folks to take the long view again?

73 de Jim, N2EY