The large-scale plant in Carthage, Missouri is behind schedule, but for construction delays, not because of a problem with the process. They've tested it in 12-hour cycles and confirmed the output is diesel compatible.
If this were a publicly held company, I'd be suspicious. But it's a tightly-held group of pretty saavy investors, so I buy the explanation.
Eventually, they hope to build a plant that can take entire cattle (diseased, for instance) to remove the contaminants from the bio-chain.
The plant produces diesel-comparable oil, solid carbon (which can be used in coal plants), and minerals, which can be resold. It claims that of the 100 BTUs produced by a given unit of input, 85 are available in the oil, carbon, and minerals. I don't know how much of that is in the minerals, but this means it may approach a 5-1 energy production ratio, ignoring construction costs of the plant.
Even better, most of the input material contains carbon that was recently fixed from the air, meaning burning this contributes much less to net carbon dioxide increase. That is, burning a gallon of this oil produces the same amount of CO2 as burning a gallon of diesel, but the CO2 produced by burning fossil-fuels has been out of the atmosphere for a very long time. The CO2 produced by this new fuel was in the air a short while ago.
This is very exciting, and if it pans out will be an incredibly important discovery. Just thought I'd share, since we've been discussing oil peak lately.
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Yeah, I almost never even look at Discover, but I bought this month's issue just for that article. Of course, I could have just read it in the bookstore, since it's incredibly brief, but oh well.
I continue to be pretty excited about the possibilities of this technology. It really sounds like it has the potential to improve life as we know it pretty dramatically.
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