Battling Gremlins on the Way to Gigatons: The Bighorn Journey

I've been really interested in alternative energy and chemistry technologies for a long time. My take is that pyrolysis is one of those 'El Dorado' technologies like the fast breeder reactor or ethanol from cellulosic biomass that is heavily researched, talked about by some as if it were a bird in the hand, but makes little real progress.

People will say 'pyrolysis is an old technology', I mean, go to the black neighborhood in your town and you might find there was a coal tar street plant across from where the elementary school is now. I grew up in Manchester, NH and was baffled a bit as a kid by large areas near the downtown that were barricaded and overgrown and only found out later that we had the largest coal tar factory in the world at the age of WWI. It's toxic!

Pyrolysis takes many forms such as: turn switchgrass to dimethyl ether, turn plastics into BTEX [1] chemicals, burn coal "cleanly" and capture the CO2, eat municipal waste with a plasma torch but so often these projects end in failure. I mean, this machine has been up and running for 40 years,

https://www.dakotagas.com/

but only because it went bankrupt and didn't have to pay its capital cost.

[1] https://www.aeroqual.com/blog/what-is-btex