A new Fuel ? I assume its similar to Propel

[schiker]

Anyone heard about this stuff? I assume its similar to Propel. Nothing on how much it costs in comparison to Crude based and a Fluffy article but something to talk about.

Article clipped......

PANAMA CITY, Fla. -- Some of America’s best fighter jets can soar without using a drop of oil for fuel.

The Navy’s EA-18 Growler fighter jet can fly more than 1,100 miles per hour. It costs $68 million to build, and it’s flying on 100 percent bio-fuel, made from things like kitchen grease and plant seeds.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the engine does not function any differently.

“It may burn a little cleaner, but no, otherwise the engine doesn’t notice a difference,” he said.

In 2009, Mabus committed the Navy to 50 percent usage of alternative fuels by the year 2020.

“It’s to make us better war fighters,” he said. “Energy is vulnerability. Energy can be used as a weapon.”

“When I came in, the Marines were losing a Marine killed or wounded for every 50 convoys of fuel brought into Afghanistan. That’s too high a price to pay,” he said.

Until recently, petroleum had to be added to bio-fuel for it to pack enough punch to be feasible. But ARA, a Panama City, Florida, company that was working on a process to make sterile water in remote areas, when they stumbled on a way to make bio-fuel identical to petroleum.

“It’s a material that has all the same molecules as petroleum crude, but from a renewable feed stock,” said Chuck Redd, the company’s vice president of field development.

One of those feed stocks is Ethiopian mustard seeds that can grow in arid ground and can be used by farmers as a rotation crop. Ara’s process can also use waste grease from water treatment plants and kitchens.

Ara senior vice-president Glen McDonald saw an opportunity for his company, and the world.

“I hope that one day all diesel vehicles are operated with our fuel, I hope that all commercial jets are operated with our fuel,” McDonald said.

As for the U.S. Navy, that goal is well underway. Alternative fuels now power 30 percent of naval ships and 50 percent of its bases.

Not sure how long link will last...
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/some-of-america’s-best-fighter-jets-soar-without-oil/ar-AAkllAP?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp

 

[deejaaa]

very fluffy.....

 

[Will L.]

I spent the last few years working at a company building and working out the process to convert waste plastics to fuel. The D.O.D. is inline to be one of the main customers.

I dont know the details on the fuel in this article off hand, but have my suspicion to it's process. Simply getting ahold of that exact plant and a week in a lab will tell you if it is for real or more b.s. Like many companies before them just making a buck of the promise for a decade until the farse collapses, leaving them millionaires of course. Unky Sam does not pay scientists and engineers to disprove claims, they just take you at your word on a better mouse trap, and if the product does what you say, they buy.

The Canadian gubmint/ tax payers got ripped off bigtime by a plastics to fuel company there. More on that if you want.

As for the fuel they spec for the jets is pretty close to kerosene/ low grade diesel. Straight bio to fly a plane is no surprise, is near a perfect fit.

Biofuel varies greatly based on material being used for it and the processes used to make it. The article mentions kitchen grease- nothing new to that, thats been being used since the 70's that I know of, maybe before then. Rudolf made his engine to run off plant life, not like it's a new thing. The specific plant they are talking about I dont know, but a general rule of thumb is the faster the plant grows the lower the btu it puts out. Think burning fast growing pine vs slow growing mesquite woods. Always exceptions to the rule though.

Adding diesel fuel to it in order to get the required btu's out of most bio diesel is an economic choice. How much $ do you want to put into the process is the question. If you are familiar with the normal wvo processes, the yeild is around 10% less power for most, so depending how much closer to spec diesel you want, most guys just cut in other fuels (usually gas) to get it. If you want to do it without adding, just run it through a pyrolysis chamber, then reconstitue it. You'll spend $ to do it, and have waste product that you normally would have just burned up. Net cost is way more than just cutting in some gasoline, but if a company figured out to do it in order to get the government contract, that doesn't surprise me one bit.
They will pay more for "alternative fuel" than regular fuel.

Make some cheap homemade brew, have it cost $4 a gallon to make and store, then sell it to unky sam for $4.50 a gallon- very doable. Our target price of producing plastic-fuel was $1/gallon. Operating costs and shipping drove it up double. It takes big millions to be able to sell directly to fuel terminals and gas stations.

There are algea that grows psycho fast and has a ridiculously high btu. It would be bigger than corn is to ethanol for gasoline. Why it isnt being done large scale is all the same downfalls of corn fuels with larger impact. The land useage study per gallon of fuel would be interesting to read with this mystery plant, algae is amazingly compact, requires almost no head space, thrives off artificial light,etc.

Because the D.O.D. Doesnt follow epa regulations, I don't get why they aren't chasing tire pyrolysis as a supplement. It is really the best diesel fuel in the world. Synthetically combined hydrocarbon chains reduce wear to an amazing low level, then the high concentration of sulfur has a similar effect. Using that as a mix base to any diesel fuel will super charge the btu and lubricity levels through the roof. Maybe they are tired of acid rain eating there other toys? IDK jet engines, maybe the fuel doesn't cause wear like it does to our pumps and injectors.

Sorry to side track so bad, but it's all in the same arena. If anybody wants to build a bomb..er.. pyrolysis fuel plant at home LMK...

 

[deejaaa]

.....

The Canadian gubmint/ tax payers got ripped off bigtime by a plastics to fuel company there. More on that if you want.
...:::::::

Sorry to side track so bad, but it's all in the same arena. If anybody wants to build a bomb..er.. pyrolysis fuel plant at home LMK...

i want and yes.

 

[schiker]

I just googled ARA biofuel....

https://www.ara.com/capabilities/advanced-biofuels-and-renewable-chemicals

 

[schiker]

Yeah, I have seen stuff on Algae and understand a little but the blurb about same power and interchangeable with dino fuel was interesting. I did not remember if Propel had the same power but at least it was supposedly 100% interchangeable.

ARA website has tons of acronyms to the point of confusing and is fluffy but it does mention the process only takes a few minutes and is flexible on feedstock. I am not going to run out and invest nor think it will be at the pumps in the immanent future but gives hope that something will replace crude oil one day if we run out.

Its my understanding turbines are generally more versatile with fuel vs internal combustion engines. I have heard someone say the Abrams Tank can almost run off perfume and can digest different stuff. I can see an airplane being pickier and having need for a much more stable fuel with pressure and temperature changes from ground to hi altitude etc etc.

 

[Will L.]

I can't remember the name of the company right now, but basically there was another company using pyrolysis of plastics to fuel in the Niagara area of NY.
They pulled a patent on using a multi barrel pyrolysis plant similar to the idea of a revolver pistol. Use one chamber while cleaning and loading the others for continuous operation. Most pyrolysis chambers have as much down time for cleaning and reloading as run time.

They got an alternative fuel grant of some sorts from the Canadian government. They built a production plant in Canada with that money and were supposed of been producing "X" amount of alternative fuel. They used more of the money to make "improvements" trying to increase yeild. They went back to the Canadian gubmint a couple times for more $, and not too long after the influx of $ stopped, they encountered unforeseen issues from scaling up and had no choice but to close the Canadian division of the company.

All very legitimate sounding issues.

A person from company I was going to consider exchanging technological information in an attempt to beat the big companies like the ones mention in the article to production. He gave them the next piece in the puzzle which saved them possibly 100k. After just conversations, it was becoming apparent they were way behind us. They were not even aware of the issues in producing parrafin wax and petroleum coke. A coworker and I dubbed it a "cancer candle". No real danger compared to any of the other oils/fuels produced, but something any company making it should be ready to deal with.

While this is not a major concearn for a home brewer making his own go-go juice, trying to produce large quantities of it is.

Anyways, someone who shall remain nameless got in contact with that company on his own and examined their entire process. Yeah... there is no way they ever obtained the yeild they said they could. E=mc2 kicks in and says you cant get more mass out of something than you put in even if you got 100% conversion rates. Our conclusion was they were making some fuel, buying fuel, mixing together and using that as end product. Financially unstable, unless someone throws in $ that doesn't have to make a return on investment (gubmint $).

When the info on where they were at after the info exchange, I thought something is up w/ them. After learning about the plant and how they were operating, I knew it was a scam of sorts, I just didn't know at the time about the funding.

Imagine if you told your county you can clean rain water to drinking water levels. You catch and boil the rainwater, then mix it with county tap water from your garden hose after extracting the floride. Youll be into $1 worth of water about $2. But a grant to pay for your plant development ends up costing 1/2 of what you showed them. Take 3/4 of that skimmed $ and buy the tap water and a floride removal device. Now you can have the water tested and all looks good. You explain after scaling up to the final size plant your cost per gallon will fall to 1/4, and show some b.s. (perpetual motion pie in the sky) devise that does all this amazing stuff, and it is the heart of your creation. You don't have to show what exactly it is or how it works, that is after all your intellectual property. They just see the results and wow.

Run the scam till $ runs out, then during (or just before) the big "We are here to watch it all work under scrutiny" moment, the device you created goes Chernobyl. Your heart broken and they say "hang in there and come back when you get it fixed, and with a careful examination, maybe we can partner up again.

In the end they were either ingenious scammers, OR horrible in business and plant operations and science and petrochemistry with an amazing flair and skill for schmoozing money for an operation way before its ready. (The last skill of which possessed by somebody other than me at the last place I worked at).

The funny/sad part is there is already the biggest most important part of a pyrolysis plant in use by the oil companies now, they are just invented it and are using it in a different application. We worked through all the trials before creating the device, then in searching for affordable ready made parts, found it. Anybody have $20M extra to start producing fully synthetic fuels from recycled material?

The company i worked for finally realized something I explained to them about production 3 months into working for them and have shelved plastic to fuel for profit. They are still legally running that, but really trying to make $ another way until they recover from the decision I tried to have them avoid. I heard Kenny Rogers singin- "...know when to walk away, know when to run...".
I do hope they (either company) get on track, it will mean better fuel for everyone, more jobs on this half of the world, less landfill material, etc.

 

[WarWagon]

With what Bio-Diesel cost me when it went bad and no one knew F U C # A L L about it especially and most notably the local refiner new Gee-Wiz fuels taking out a jet engine is a enormous waste of taxpayer money esp. when the rotten fuel is not ready to go when needed. As mentioned testing to Military Specs on the taxpayer's dime is also expensive.

The local refiner was supposed to meet ASTM specs for Biodiesel. After the State of AZ was turned loose on them, Um, How do you fail and get high sulfur in B99 violating ULSD specs? Seriously? Not the only test they failed.

Literally Yesterday's News just has the largest oil find in history in the state of Texas.

I am all for alternate fuels, but, the downsides have to be known and it has to meet whatever bottom of the barrel lowest excuse of a number they can get away with setting for a specification. Not only that but completely destroying an injection system from the fuel tank to the injector tips is a big NO-NO!

Commiefornia leads the way for my disrespect for the standards process as they wish to add water to diesel fuel to lower emissions. IMO it works as the emulsified water is pretty good at taking out expensive injection systems and in some cases the complete diesel engine. If it's not running it's not polluting the air: mission accomplished.

 

[Will L.]

Thats the big reasons I love the plastics to fuel synthetic stuff. Way better wear than original full sulfur diesel, cleaner burning. No cutting it to get to spec, it just comes out ready to seperate gasoline / kerosene / diesel / paraffin

Way easier to seperate than seperating regular fuels. Way different from biofuels. Bio=life. Means it came from something alive.

Regular crude oil gets seperated and they make plastic from the stuff that already doesnt have sulfur in it. So when you turn plastic back to a gaseous state then heat it till the molecular chain cracks. Cool it back down and it is a mix of fuels. Amazingly simple, just cant compete price wise with someone doing zillions a day.

With oblamer getting out, hopefully Trump puts in someone that gets the EPA to allow more distilleries to be built in the US.

The "seperation and cleaning devise" we built for our plant was not a distillery only because of lower temps and pressures. Part of the U.S. Inability to produce as cheap as middle east is sulfur removal and too few distilleries.

As for the recent find DRILL TEXAS, drill and distill.

 

[deejaaa]

really interesting. years ago there was a fluff story of someone who turned used tires into fuel. never heard anymore about it.
there was a video of a man from China who put plastic into what looked like a crock pot and out came fuel. nothing more on that one either.
here it is from 2010:

 

[Will L.]

There is a Lady in Lorado or San Antonio (somewhere near there- cant remember) that currently runs a tire pyrolysis plant. Tires have an amazingly high percentage of sulfur in them, so that why it can not be used legally for diesel- ulsd is max 15ppm and the tire-fuel is into the 4 digit range. Iirc she is selling it to mexico. It can be used for home heating systems in some places, but more and more states are mandating ulsd heating oil.

They dont test the end user and cant know if you are using home brew afaik. There is no emmisions test to see if a person is running it like they can for red dye diesel that has no road tax. They have to send a sample of the fuel/oil off to a lab to be analized. It can be done, it's just not being done.

In china, they use rotating pyrolysis drums that are 10' diameter, 50' long. They load it full of tires, close the door and vacuum out oxygen. load tires underneath it and light those on fire for the heat. Add tires to the fire as needed. Once the plant starts production, the "non compressable" gasses come off, propane, butane,etc. and that can be used as fuel to heat the pyrolysis, so no extea tires get thrown in. The rubber melts to liquid, the gaseous, and the gas goes through heat exchangers and a water bath to be cooled off. Seperate the oil by weight with controlled cooling, settling, centrifuge, what ever means- and there you go. So yeah, did you catch the part where they use an open to the air TIRE FIRE for the heat source? There is no translation of EPA in china.

Plastics work exact same as tires in theory, just different temperatures and pressures for optimum run.

Never want to use pvc the c is chloride. When it combines with the loose hydrogen molecules you get hydrochloric acid. Besides toxicity, it eats your plant And anything you run it in. Really if you look on the bottom at the recycle triangle 1,2,4,6 are what you want for oils/fuels. 3 is pvc, 5 uses as much energy to convert as it makes at best so worthless. 7 is junk- if they have a mess up making plastic, or dont know what falls into it it becomes 7, it is the pot metal of plastics. Even the number 1 is not a good producer, it is more valuable to be sold to recylers, but at home I would throw it in rather than throw away. You farmers with those big rolls of plastic black one side white on the other- we ran a bunch of that. If you could clean off the dirt, poop, and dry off the water that stuff is awesome. Cleaning and drying makes it not viable at the moment.

Oh yeah- water in the pyrolysis chamber ruins it- everything has to be dry- one of the big problems with the system.

That little desktop machine is not around anywhere, and here is my guess why. It you look at the line that comes out of the top of the pyrolysis chamber there is a "T" with a valve that goes open to air. Open that sucker while running and you bleed of the "noncompressable" hydrocarbons- propane, butane,etc. at best:
"honey, I caught the kitchen on fore again" at worst oxygen gets into the pyrolysis chamber: then flash fire to KABOOM.

Maybe not, that plant is so tiny it might barely produce what a bic lighter can. I wouldnt have it there without a lock on it. Probably uses it to hook up his vacuum source to get rid of oxygen.

Also, it is not a super fast process. His little machine would probably take an hour to make 1 qt.

In 1st world countries we would use natural gas or propane to start the process, then use the noncompressables as its fuel through most of the run. However- a flare tip to burn off excess is REQUIRED. we had mini plants and full scale plants run away. Remeber the bomb statement I made... no joke when its hundreds of gallons (let alone thousands) worth of fuel that can go up.

Having a compressor / seperator system for the propane and such is really the best answer.

Oh yeah, the desk top, just like the real plants, not just the oil comes up out of the water, the noncompressables do to. And you have to do something with it. I think that Japanese guy was just letting it vent- like into the house. Idk how to say stupid-dangerous in Japanese. The water works as a backflash valve as well as cooling so if there is a fire in the outlet side it can not burn back through the water into the pyrolysis chamber- KABOOM avoided. Still Dumb to vent.

You operate the plant by keeping the pressure in your system always above 1psi, never above 20. For plastics 1,2,4,& 6 the best point we found in all of our stuff was 7 psi. Countless tests for comparisons measuring quality, yeild, etc. Then, in researching other items we found that info existed already by multiple college studies that were done on how to breakdown plastics.

The heat your dealing with is just north of 1000f. Sometimes when it start hogh production rate it can accidentally climb to 1300f. So stainless is a must, and everything has to be rated 150 psi so it withstands proper pressures with headroom at those high temps.

I believe a stainless cased steel lined pyrolysis using inductive electrical heaters is the way to go, then bottle up 100% of the noncompressables. Several methods that would work amazingly well.
If it was zombie land (or mad max if you prefer) then the chinese have it right- burn tires (or what ever you have) and the paraffin wax (by product) to get it started, then use non compressables to keep it rolling.

Oh, why it is in use in other countries but not here:
1. When our fuel gets to $5 a gallon it will be used here. Crude is cheaper than reusing plastic currently.
2. Obamas EPA manager is wrecking our industries. Coal, lead, fuel, etc. They wont let us be classified as biofuel because we are not bio- it is a crude based material. Also wont let us be crude based listed because it has been molecularly altered twice- oil to plastic, then plastic to oil. I dont get it. Also no new refineries are allowed, and that is what would make this really produce high volume and cheaper. I dont want chinese tire fires, but literally making it impossible for us in the USA, while 98% of the countries it's ok just so they can brag or something?

Ok 12:45 am, I'm done. Lmk if you want more ramblings. I probably have some videos of micro plant (10 times size of his desk top) goofing around and pics i could post.

Kinda completely stole Schiker's thread- should we chop off this other junk and move to different one? I should learn to start separate threads, huh?

 

[deejaaa]

i think it's interesting. sounds like more than the home tinkerer can handle. i would like to hear/see more but that's just me.

 

[schiker]

I don't mind its related and helpful to understand why it's not being done. The volume of just plastic bottles is staggering.

I worked in a plant that blended PVC, extruded and injection molded it. I saw the resin and oils added and once they had a process get too hot and poisoned the plant with chlorine gas or other toxic stuff. There was a small plastic grinder and recycle stream to a mfg of fatigue mats iirc. We blended some regrind but there were issues with how many times it was already regroups or if plasticizers were gone or if it had been heated too much before so that later process weren't hot enough to remelt

It's the little - big things like cleaning and removing labels and contaminates I don't know much about. Have heard some landfills just segregate the plastics we put in recycling. My county won't take plastic at the trash collection centers unless it has a screw cap and they collect cardboard with the bottles. I guess those are the easiest to separate and save on transport costs???

 

[WarWagon]

@Will L. you do understand the videos would be neat, but, I question if they help a 3rd world country too much? Oh never mind, they likely already have the info...

Let me get this straight: I have to compete with an expensive and MPG hit of a diesel truck that meets gas engine NOx numbers with a country that has open air tire fires? It's no wonder that Free Trade agreements are bankrupting this country. There needs to be an EPA leveling tariff along with the other tariff in this global market BS...

This thread has 1000% gone off the rails.

 

[Will L.]

The couple of videos i still have is on my old iPhone 4 with no service. Ill get the help of my son to get them loaded somewhere useable. Idk that the videos would help anyone, they are 1 minute snips of us goofing off, and 1 time I was documenting a near runaway - we got lucky that day.

I know there are guys here that are certified welders. Boiler Maker level work is MANDATORY for anyone that would do this at home- it is not to be played with lightly.

The plastic bottles like drinking water are P.E.T. = the most expensive recycled plastic. Thats why they want the screw cap ones. The caps themselves end up in a different pile. Labels become near inconsequential for most recycling uses including back to oil/fuel.

Probably take me a couple days for videos. If i dont have them up on weekend somebody yell at me.

 

[deejaaa]

get WIFI service and transfer vids to new phone.