• Welcome to The Truck Stop! We see you haven't REGISTERED yet.

    Your truck knowledge is missing!
    • Registration is FREE , all we need is your birthday and email. (We don't share ANY data with ANYONE)
    • We have tons of knowledge here for your diesel truck!
    • Post your own topics and reply to existing threads to help others out!
    • NO ADS! The site is fully functional and ad free!
    CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

    Problems registering? Click here to contact us!

    Already registered, but need a PASSWORD RESET? CLICK HERE TO RESET YOUR PASSWORD!

What happened to gasification. Several years ago it was supposed to be the next big thing, Then all a sudden you hear nothing about it,

If you mean coal gasification, I think it was another victim of the obama war on anything related to coal. Part of the clean coal technology they want to eliminate in favor of wind, solar, geothermal, whateverthehellnext... Alternative energy is fine, but let the private sector develop it without siphoning taxpayer $ and buying off swamp politicians to their benefit.
 
btfarm said:
If you mean coal gasification, I think it was another victim of the obama war on anything related to coal. Part of the clean coal technology they want to eliminate in favor of wind, solar, geothermal, whateverthehellnext... Alternative energy is fine, but let the private sector develop it without siphoning taxpayer $ and buying off swamp politicians to their benefit.
Click to expand...
I was thinking plastic gasification. But I think that coal gasification is closely tied

https://www.google.com/search?q=Pla...on&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
 
Gasification is technically using it where you break the product down to the final fuel by means of pyrolysis.

Pyrolysis can be thought of as cooking the product, in the absence of oxygen so it doesn’t burn, to a gaseous state - hence the “gas” of gas-ification. So you “cook” the plastic in the absence of oxygen until it turns to vapor, then cool it under controlled pressure and temperature ranges until is condenses to different grades of fuel basically. Take out any bad stuff and vroom goes the engine.

Several issues around it. Mainly gubmint. Some for good reason and some not. Then issue with recycling vs consuming until “gone”.

The epa is concerned a out problems that come with plastics to fuel system. A HUGE one, and rightly so is not using proper plastic and the negative impacts from it.
A simple yet big example of the many is pvc.

PVC- polyvinal chloride. When it gets “cooked” the molecules bind in as a blended hydrocarbon. All oil based fuels afe hydrocarbons. But the C, chloride, basically mices with the hydogen becoming hydrochloric acid of sorts. Think you have fuel System problems now, haha-get some of that in there. Then when your engine burns it- wow.

High sulfur diesel fuel creates acid rain. I drive a hummer, don’t believe in man made temp change, pretty much “that guy” bill nye hates. But sulfur makes sulfuric acid when burned and there is no way around it- that crap is bad for the world. Same with hydrochloric- not always our friend. While plastics to fuel makes fully synthetic fuel and the reorganization of molecules makes the lubricity fail of no sulfur go away, we don’t need to replace one acid rain for another.

So you dont mind removing you def system or burning raw oil for power. Maybe you don’t mind casting your own lead bullets and breathing in the fumes because cancer is your friend. The net gain of the pvc fuel does enough damage to more than offset all gains, even of the fuel plant and plastics are free to be worth it. So knowing you are only putting in the proper plastics is simply a must. There is a percentage that could be mixed in by error and have no negative effects, but that needs to be reserved for just that- error factor.

Recycle vs end of life. When you buy you case of bottled water, it could theoretically be reused hundreds of times. Being melted down, reformed, used, melted down, etc. There is a point of diminishing returns but if you were in a spaceship going through the galaxy, it would be a lot of times before you put it in the gas tank and bring it to end of life. When we take plastic and turn it to fuel- it’s gone.
Enter physics rules and nothing goes away, but as far a reusable as anything good- it’s gone.

So the recycle police dont like this concept because now we will mine more oil to make more plastic instead of recycling what we have now. Long term, if we were to completely recycle all our good plastics that would make sense. But we don’t. Even most of the plastics that we send to the #1 recycling company in thw US, which has the most of any country btw, still sends a majority of the already seperated plastics back into the landfills. This is from the head of the recycling dept people of that company, not my opinion.

So for now, it makes sense to consume the plastic as fuel since IF it is properly seperated, it is way better for the environment, the engine, and the people breathing the exhaust, as well as the domestic economy.

When I got into this and learned these basics I went “duh! Just the thing to do!”

But the recycle police are afraid the consumtion will show so profitable that we will decide to buy up all the recyclable plastics and it will wuit getting recycled. Which, I must admit is a possibility. Infact plastic diesel having no sulfur and amazing reduced friction -not really better lubricity, but when friction is removed it is easier to say better lubricity because that is what people understand. Reduced friction sounds like 5% better than crappy. Improved lubricity sounds like 5% better than it ever was. Reduced friction is actually far better than improving the lube. Anyways, plastic Diesel can be used like an additive or cut into low sulfur diesel to meet the specifications of ulsd and have better lubricity numbers in the end. So medium sized oil companies would be intersted in it’s consumption.

Another gubmint problem is the plastics refineries run differently than crude oil refineries. And the epa has effectively stopped the building of new refineries. That is policy that could be changed. But big bucks are needed for that. And with the world going to ulsd, the demand and price will go up making investing in plastic to oil(fuel) more appealing.

So the plants to convert plastic to oil aren’t huge. The dont polute at rediculous levels under epa laws. But in places like china where most of them are, theyre doing interering things like tire plants. They have a big rotating pipe as the oven. They put tires in it and under it. Pour fuel on the tires under it and light them a fire. The tire fire cooks the tires inside making the oil. Then later when they are burning that tire oil, it burns the elements in it hydro carbons and oh yeah- SULFUR. Not ulsd, not lowsulfur, or even normal sulfur- but MEGA GYNORMUS ULTRA SULFUR. sulfur is what makes your tires flexable. So yeah... acid rain by the swimming pool in each tanker full- haha. SMH. China doesn’t comply to the epa. They lead the world in cleanest and dirtiest air requirements both.
Right now a huge supplier of home heating oil in the US is doing the same thing except not using the tires as the starter fire. They sell the heating oil to states that don’t yet regulate uls-home heating oil.

Big oil doesn’t want plastic to oil. It is a chunk of their market share. When diesel hits the US market at $7.00 and gas is at $6.00, enough people will scream and they will be allowed to build refineries any where they want. And they can afford to build the ulsd plants, unlike the mom and pop refineries.

The best long term for the next 5,000 year people don’t want it, so the followers- well, follow.

Who wants it? Me. End user. All the garbage companies and people that realize the majority of it is still in the landfill.

California outlaws pvc. Not because the sprinkler systems melt into the ground ruining the water table and poisoning the nine legged spider that is so rare. But because the recycling company simple cant seperate it from the other plastics cheap enough. So the pvc is 25% he cost of seperation from plastics that can be recycled. And since they passed the law on how much has to be recycled, they dont wasnt to pay $400 an month to get the trashman to do his thing.
So the rest of the US will follow suit as time goes on, and pvc will go from mega common to rare.

There are companies that do plastic gasification to electrical energy. I met the guy who does the most of it in the world, including in the US. Nice guy. We were focusing on vehicle fuel usage. But the saudi king decided to squash the fuel rebellion a few years back. Remember when oil per bbl price went from 105 down to a ham sammich? That is why it went down. US news was all “BLAH BLAH BLAH OBAMA HAMA HE GREAT LOWERS GAS PRICES BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU.” BS. The saudi king saw all the fracking and realized his wealth for the next generation was at risk and said he would drop prices until is wasn’t so profitable for fracking. The US laughed and said no way. Hell, the rest of OPEC said no way. He did it and prices fell exactly to the levels he said they would month after month, to the exact amount he said he would make happen. Most of the world economists dont want to give the credit to him because they are afraid he really could cause an economic tail spin anytime he wants. Just look back at history and his statements, actions, and results.

I wanted plastics to fuel not just because it is better all arounfd in the US. But the fuel reserves that we than have goes through the roof! Imagine the value being so high we dont put ANY plastic into the landfills. Imagine we actually dig some back up! Rough estimates are 20% of landfills in the last 50 years are recoverable plastics. Safer economics against another 1970’s gas shortage AND actually cleaning up
The earth in landfills? Come on- how does a hummer driver think that is good but not a prius owner? Smh

How much did Presidents of the United States of America deal with saudi arabia up until the 60’s? How bout from then till the gas shortage? And since then? The great recession gets most talk about the housing. Until you talk to an economist that looks at the oil/ fuel prices and their returning effects. Then you get scared by the power of the saudi and kinda get glad that the king who caused the last price drop died and how his predicessors very slowly and cautiously backed away from that plan.
 
Bad part is this is not a new concept. It’s been around 15-20 years- using plastics.

Search tire pyrolysis. Most similar stuff that is all over 3rd world nations. But like mentioned tires are massive sulfur, so not a good thing.

So whats good and bad?
16A15DDC-1665-4AD3-BA66-BDB771A304D9.png
1,2,4,6 are most desirable. 5 is ok, but not a high yeild. So takes about as much energy to process as youbget out in the end. Still profitable for the company, but might as well skip
It because as plstic prices rise and fall, has potential to loose money.
3. The PVC- Momma says your the devil. It HAS TO be removed. There is multiple ways to easily seperate it.
7. OTHER. Ok, anytime you get anything that says “other” as an ingredient- run dont walk. Might as well not even have a number on it. Total garbage no one anywhere can use it for anything I have ever heard of. Maybe use as toxic fumes for child molesters breathing treatments while rolling them in the melted plastic? I get side tracked- sorry.

So there is a market for recycled plastics. The most expensive stuff is pete, and polyethylene 1,2,4. 2&4 are basically the same just more/ less dense. Anyways back at $100 bbl oil, pete was running $0.30 per ton - last I looked was years ago though. 2&4 were around $.020/ ton.
But that is clean and seperated condition, melted into blocks.

There was a task a comworker and I was asigned in the begining. How to seperate, clean, and prep plastic- basically from the trash trucks.

I worked around shredders when I was younger for a couple months. I still love to watch them- scope YouTube and shreading cars- way cool! So I thought step one shred everything, then run it through a wash system.

Then one of the owners asks “What about seperating, are you going to do it by weight in the water? Great idea!” So I said “Um... weight seperating in water?” He goes, “yeah. Pvc floats the good stuff will sink, might need to add some salting for buoyancy control, but yeah.”

I drew up a modified semi trailer pool that has 3 channels back and forth and rotating paddles to force the plastic down through the river. Filtering system up front by the pump, and mesh extraction conveyor at the end of row 2 for pvc off the top, and the final row would do the same- meshed conveyance but from the bottom. Getting them to seperate by weight was another one figured out by using the specific gravity, but wasn’t consistent enough.

There are advanced computer detection systems- Canada uses one- but it is kinda slow. Something like that could work after the lazy river wash n float seperator.

For our testing, we bought pre sorted and pre shredded plaastics. Later moved to just recycled plastic fromthe trash company. We tried not washing it- but too much contamination. The big $ owner was a major narcissist and when he thought something wasn’t needed (washing trash) he just skipped it. That was one of his many errors causing downfall of the company. The mini washer I built worked perfectly. He was just trying to shave pennies.

Washing created the problem of needing to dry out. Water going into a pyrolysis chamber is no bueno. See, it gets heated to steam, creates heating issues, then if it gets broke down at molecular level creates hydrogen peroxide which is not exactly friendly to fuels, and the other part is oxygen-
Ya know- the stuff that starts fires inside plastic that is 800*f. So getting it clean then dry takes some work.
Now, coming out of the pyrolysis chamber- (think big rotating pipe being heated to 1,000* plus at times) you have a lot of heat applied to that chamber. So pumping the heat to dry the plastics is not to hard. Simple diffusion and away goes the water issue.

At home use- dangerous really. You have to heat the chamber to crazy hot temps. Then keep it at low pressures for safety. If there is a failure a major fire starts with tons of fuel.
Think about this- using #1,2,&4 you get gasses like propane, butane, etc from about 5-10% (cant remember ratio right now) and maybe 10% parrafin wax. The rest is fuel. Mostly diesel, then equal portions of gas and kerosene.

You get pound per pound results. Propane, butane, etc are lightweight. How much diesel and gasoline is say 50 pounds if you gather it in plastic? If a fire breaks out it is gonna be a raging nightmare without prpoer fire suppression.

There was desk top models made in Japan that were about the size of a big blender. They worked but were inefficient and put out deadly gas. You have to capture or burn off the gaseous product- breathing it can kill or cause long term health issues.
So this system isn’t correct, but close.
 
All of us working on the improvements, my friend and coworker, Jason, came up with a concept of an advanced pyrolysis chamber for stirring the material inside rather than a tumbling pipe. I am a fan of Archimedies and induction heating as well as deteoit blowers... (Big hints there). So between the 2 of us we hit a winner. Our boss had a couple ideas on making it ourselves cheaply, but the big money owner shot it down- one of those ideas that we didn’t convince him was his idea first, so doen the tubes it went, and foreward with Chinese tire burning pyrolysis machines. SMH.

Open flame around fuel production just seems silly to me, so dont use it. Convert the gasses and smaller chain molecule wet fuels to power generation remotely. Heat via conduction. Yes there is a slight loss in energy transforming power modes, but the loss is negated by amazing thermal control of the pyrolysis machjne, plus there are major gains to be had by induction heating the inside of the pyrolysis chamber instead of heating the plastic through the pipe pyrolysis chamber, so losses are offset by exacting a faster and more accurate thermal reaction.

Going from solid plastic to liquid should happen as fast as possible. Liquid to gas shoud be at a more controlled rate. Too much heat rockets the liquid into gaseous product. Slightly slowing that change allows getting much higher ratios of liquid, long chain product (more diesel, less butane).

Now, to save the earth- FAR less Co2 is produced by burning the “plastic fuel” than crude fuel. It is synthetic after all.
Did I give the “bank pen chain explication”?

But in saving th world- propane. I like diesels. But really most everyone could power their rigs with propane. There are only 3 carbon molecules to propane. 16 in diesel- up to 24 if they really push if full of alcohols. So you realize that from polution stand point you could burn 5 pounds of propane and get less issues than 1 pound of diesel? Diesel is 7 pounds per gallon, so 1/7 gallon. Propane is 0.236 gallons per pound, so roughly 1/4 gallon.
So profit vs environment as always. But even so, the jump is not that far it couldn’t be overcome.
Btu is 137k ulsd : 92k propane. So you can to do the math to see how much propane you need to replace diesel (or gas if you choose) but the cleaner burning fuel also other advantages. There are drawbacks of course. But in relation to pyrolysis- if you crank the heat on and cook the plastic at full boar, you get more propane. And propane sells for less- so give and take for others smarter than me to figure out.

Another thing is what happens at the dump. Many dumps use the decomposition producing methane as a fuel supply within a year of burying. But plastics decomposition takes a minute or two longer, give or take 20,000 years. Haha. Idk the real time, but it’s ridiculous. And the plastic horribly slows the process. Shreading, Washing the plastics at the site and dumping the wash water at the site makes sense. What- contamination of ground water? That crap gets there anyways. If the trash company has the land mass, piles of the shreaded plastic could be stored to dry. It doesn’t need to be perfectly dry at that stage. Final drying could occur later. Then the dump can get the trash broken down in a couple hundred years instead of bazillions.

Who wants a small refinery next to their house or school? Same people that live next to a dump. No one. Pair them up. Plant sizes are rediculously small. 1 acre could Service the entire las vegas area of 2 million residents and all the tourists.
1 more plant up in reno and nevada is taken care of.

They could build and run them until the recycling customers can figure how to consume it all. Then chuck the idea. Just quit filling the landfill with petroleum. Doesn’t seem to hard to me.
 
Will L. said:
I could go much more into it, National, local, or at home wise.
Lmk if you need to be put to sleep more- haha.
Click to expand...

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . . ;)

Actually though, good information :)


FWIW, wood gassification seems relatively healthy but is a very niche application which is probably a good thing. Personally, I do not want it to get popular as it keeps the price of wood down and availability high :D
 
I have heard from a reliable source, that the US is sending massive amounts of plastics waste for supposed recycling to China aboard ships that are simply dumping most in the open ocean.
 
Do not know about the dumping part, but the US did send a lot of recycling material to China. Reason for the statement of past tense is that China started to unilaterally cancel contracts to receive the material as they started to see themselves as the world's dumping ground. And, had seen where not all the contracted material was actually converted, but instead dumped.

In can understand the reasoning behind no longer wanting to accept the recycling material, but to me a contract is a contract and this raises the question of whether this is 'saving face' on China's part by not honoring its negotiated agreements. Although, from what I had read, China had unilaterally modified or canceled other contracts (ex: rare earth) without any significant economic impact on their part.

Bringing the topic full circle, not sure what is happening to recycling material that *was* supposed to go to China and am seeing where it is causing a global stockpile issue. If anything, this is pushing some start-up opportunities for converting the material using new methods. But in the short term, municipalities all over the world are not sure how to proceed.
 
China was going through huge consumption, and the projected demand for end customers wanting 100% or close to it recycled product was driving most if it. Then when the tables turned and people learned there are drawbacks to it in some uses demand lessened. Then when the end price was higher to buy 100% recycled product continued to go up and customers that are tree hugging decides to buy brand X instead because of price realization that they won’t pay that much for saving the earth, demand simply fell.

Another factor was oil prices. See the recycled plastic value goes from almost nothing to expensive as hell almost overnight. Oil at $85bbl means recycled plastic is almost free. At $100 bbl it is crazy expensive. So the companies that use the recycled plastic as a requirement in their product because they get checked for recycled content to meet advertising- they go through stock piling times.

And yes there have been times when the market bottom simply fell out and the buyers drop payment to the shippers. So they literally drop product in the ocean. In the mid 90’s shipping containers were full both ways US/China. Around 2005 about 60% contaniers were empty going back to china. So they would take anything at near free prices just to ofset fuel. They offered a reduced rate to some companies like plastics mfrs that paid for loading and unloading and break even cost of fuel burned. So on day 4 of the 14-15 day voyage, the plastic company would decide it is better to fold the hand- call the shipper and say we dont want that cargo. Knowing this was the possibility, these containers were loaded in a top, side of ship position. The onboard crane hucks it over the edge because they aren’t getting any more money, and the weight is costing fuel. The crew is paid for and doing nothing so not like wages cost go up. There was big write ups about this back in 2007ish. It was quickly squashed as bad publicity for all involved and the story changed to “No, the guys telling you that don’t understand what was happening. We had to unload because rough seas could have sunk the ship. We dropped so many because they were light weight. If they had been steel we wouldn’t have had to drop so many.” Never mind that there was no storms going on was pointed out. But the bigwigs behind save the earth folks squashed it too so the couple reporters were made to look bafoons, when it was a normal practice known to the inside plastic industry. But plastic industry people are really big oil most of the time. Think they care about tree hugger reporters? Please.

The bigger shift has been occurring in the last few years. China went from no recycled materials there to creating a recycling program funded by the plastics mfrs there. Inread that The jump was something like all china recycled as much as Florida. Then 5 years later they recycled as much as the eastern seaboard. All USA recycled materials should be surpassed by 2022 iirc. They have how many people consuing there? And as their economy grows and they continue to falsify money value, their consumption rate climbs.

They also realized building the empty cities and promoting moving to them wasn’t generating the income they thought it would, so that has been pulled way back. That was a huge driver in there recycled materials purchased.

We learned about all this during the work at the plastics to fuel company, and I loosely follow it still. I expect recycled plastics cost to fall as demand falls. And with tree hugging being more normal people aren’t spending extra cash to save the earth. unless someone is watching them they no longer pay 50% more for products that are more environmentally friendly. They are looking at price tags. So demand will continue falling as supply raises. This is obviously going to put even more in the landfill. Things like PETE will continue to get recycled. Its cheap and easy to do so. But harder to seperate stuff..dump
 
I am certainly more in favor of land filling instead of ocean dumping which we know to have become a serious problem now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top