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Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

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Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#61

Post by lazide »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #44
danuker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be carbon negative if you burn the resulting oil. The carbon in the atmosphere goes up. Ths technology is pointless. The carbon can be sequestered as plastic.

But they don't like doing that because it does break down over time and starts leeching into the soil underneath. Which can be caught and prevented, of course, but nobody wants to build a landfill like that. I too think it should be sequestered, ideally in fairly stable conditions; worst case, it stays there for the next thousand years and the plastic breaks down into whatever it does (entropy etc). But in a good cas…

Huh? Everyone already builds landfills like that. They have to be clay lined anyway and leachate collected for a number of reasons.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#62

Post by pubby »

eloff wrote: post #20
whoomp12342 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In china, its common to cook with "gutter oil" which is sewage, filtered and refined. Humans are amazing.

It doesn’t seem to be common, but there seem to have been some scandals around that, and an increase in regulations. Really gross!

It's more common to unsafely reuse oil than pull it from the sewer. This is done everywhere to some extent (bad grease at a fast food joints, etc), but China does it on a bigger scale.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#63

Post by odiroot »

rcshubhadeep wrote: post #55

It is written in one of the pages - "As you look into the data you can understand our machine can produce high grade oil mixture of gasoline, kerosene, diesel oil and little heavy oil. The oil can be used as recycled fuel for electric power generator without refining" I am no expert, and so I have the question actually. How do we use that oil in reality?

The obvious answer would be cracking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#64

Post by SigmundA »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #8
wheels wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the answer is, "Because you can already burn the plastic directly." Presumably burning this oil would have the same levels of pollution as burning the plastic in the first place, but also takes extra energy to produce.

Other than if you have a Mr Fusion you can’t run a car off of solid plastics. But, I assume some additional steps are required to make it usable. The site doesn’t detail the possible uses of the the oil, but generally liquids and solids can be used in different situations. The oil could also be used as lubricant rather than an energy source.

An electric car can, in my area they burn garbage for electricity:

https://pinellas.gov/waste-to-energy-facility/

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#65

Post by mrpopo »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #15
actionfromafar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, plastics can contain all sorts of nasty toxic surprises. Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity.

> Better to burn it at a centralized location with proper filtering and treatment than having little batches or mystery oil of varying quality and toxicity. If we can assure that the output meets a standard should we burn it, then certainly we should be able to assure the output meets a standard should we refine/convert it.

It is more efficient to burn it, generate electricity and charge a EV battery with it, than it is to convert it to fuel (consumes energy) and burn it in an internal combustion engine (very low efficiency due to small scale).

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#66

Post by mrpopo »

osigurdson wrote: post #60
wheels wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the answer is, "Because you can already burn the plastic directly." Presumably burning this oil would have the same levels of pollution as burning the plastic in the first place, but also takes extra energy to produce.

I don’t believe plastic burning is a widespread energy source.

Japan and I believe Singapore burn most of their plastic in incinerators to generate electricity. Coincidentally they are also among the highest plastic waste producers per capita.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#67

Post by osigurdson »

_ea1k wrote: post #43
pfdietz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> kW/h (tears hair out)

Still not as bad as kwh/hr. That one is showing up on some car UIs now.

Why can’t we just use the right unit for energy - Joule? A battery capacity should be stated in MJ / GJ.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#68

Post by LatteLazy »

actionfromafar wrote: post #7
LatteLazy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the oil it produced would be worth about £0.25 (GBP) (400ml assuming the price is the same as Brent crude and ignoring the cost of the input plastic or the machine itself etc). But the power to run it (3kWh) would cost about £1 (1GBP) at current rates at least here in the UK. I might be wrong, I'm not sure whether the oil produced is equivalent to Brent crude (I picked it at random) or more valuable or less..…

More worth than crude. Crude also needs processing. The output from this bench processor is probably somewhere around the red fraction here: https://petroleumservicecompany.com/blog/oil-barrel-42-gallo...

Thanks!

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#69

Post by elil17 »

osigurdson wrote: post #60
wheels wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing the answer is, "Because you can already burn the plastic directly." Presumably burning this oil would have the same levels of pollution as burning the plastic in the first place, but also takes extra energy to produce.

I don’t believe plastic burning is a widespread energy source.

It happens in waste-to-energy power plants (a.k.a garbage power plants). They can be a great way to get rid of waste but they require a lot of filtering of the exhaust to be safe. Adequate filtering is universal in some countries (like Sweden). In the USA, waste-to-energy plants frequently have inadequate filtering, which can make them dirtier than coal plants.

Re: Plastic to Oil – Produces 80% Oil

#70

Post by ZeroGravitas »

chpatrick wrote: post #28

Surely it's still not good to put that plastic in the atmosphere though, especially while spending extra energy. If it can't be recycled the next best thing is to bury it.

In the waste hierarchy, burning plastic with energy recovery and gopf fikters comes after recycling and before well-managed landfill.

This becomes less true as alternative non-fossil energy becomes more dominant though, since you're not displacing dirtier fossil fuels.

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