Mixed Plastic Waste Converted Back to Oil

I certainly hope this is not pie in the sky and is successful.We certainly need something like this.

I recall many years ago (before the internet) an article in which researchers injected various materials down a deep bore hole that had very high temperatures.

(I did mention this effect in a previous post,but received a lot of push back.)

Injecting cellulose,paper,sawdust,plastic,resulted in a return of hydrocarbon gases.

Sounds like they are recreating the same conditions here;A sudden large increase of temperature to crack the bonds of the materials.

This process may also work with cellulose and other materials as well as plastic.

The fuels produced could power the process itself

Imagine tire rubber being recycled like this.

It might even be lucrative to harvest and process waste plastic at sea.

I would certainly like to see our numerous "Mount Trashmore's" disappear.

I sure hope this pans out and is implemented worldwide.

Surely the governments would encourage and attract this technology.

Thanks for the link!

There are a few nice mount trashmores out there.

One near home is a terrifying sledding hill.

I golfed a couple games on another one.

In ILLINOIS.. any hill has the capacity to be majestic..

Rather than use more energy to convert plastic waste back into oil, just burn the plastic to generate electricity and eliminate the "middleman".

Your solution only addresses a small part of the problem. Yes it gets rid of the plastic waste but at the expense of creating a lot of co². Moving away from a fossil fuel economy is not just a matter of changing to electric cars, less air miles or more efficient aircraft it requires a set of measures that eliminate or find alternatives for all the different fractions produced when crude oil is cracked. If the world moves to electric vehicles what do you do with the petrol and diesel fractions produced in cracking? You can't dump it because it is toxic, you can't burn it or changing from fossil fuel vehicles is pointless, it is too volatile to pump back down into the ground. The same applies to the levy recently applied on shipping to create a fund for research into alternatives to heavy fuel oil. If you don't power ships with heavy fuel oil what do you do with that surplus fraction? If we create aircraft that don't run on kerosene what do we do with that fraction? We will always need the light oil fraction for lubrication so an alternative way of creating light oil without making it from crude is required. We will always use some plastic so being able to recycle mixed waste plastic into individual grades of new plastic rather than deriving it from the lighter fractions of the cracking process is required. This technology means that all plastic can be economically recycled without presorting and separation into separate streams which is what currently makes most plastic recycling not viable. It is even claimed to cope with plastic contaminated with paper and food waste or wet plastic recovered from rivers and the oceans. I have sent an email to suggest co location of plastics recycling plants with conventional power stations to use waste steam for the process rather than venting steam to atmosphere through cooling towers and creating acid rain. Plastics waste, power generation, greenhouse gasses, global warming all need to be tackled with joined up thinking.

Plastic waste is a small problem? Not if you listen to all the environmentalists. Using energy to turn plastic back into oil seems silly, especially if you espouse moving away from fossil fuels.

Just bury the plastic to sequester the carbon and save the world.

The rest of your diatribe hardly makes any sense and is so poorly organized that it is painful to read.

"venting steam through cooling towers and creating acid rain" is patently false. Totally unrelated.

Acid rain comes from sulfur emissions from primarily the burning of coal or other fossil fuels containing sulfur (diesel etc.)

Targets and estimates are different things.

Some here seem to have missed the point. This technology has the potential to put plastic and it's source material in a closed loop i.e. plastic to oil to plastic to ..... etc. If the plastics are burnt for energy production then the carbon will be released and new oil will be required to produce the next generation of plastics which in turn will release the carbon content when burnt. The whole thing is not really about reducing land fill but restoring the atmosphere.

An admirable ambition, which will work provided the energy needed to produce the final product comes from a non-carbon source.

Side note- Most plastic originates from natural gas, not oil.

I don't think this is correct. Certainly some is made from natural gas condensates.

The feedstock for most chemical plants producing HDPE, LDPE etc is Naphtha which in most cases comes from crude oil refineries.

Does this mean we can start using plastic straws again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

Sounds like the pilot plant near. They have also been researching processing tyres to create a light oil that can be used in refineries. The pilot plant was only at capacity of 20,000 passenger car tyres per year and from memory was yielding something like 800kg/tonne of oil, recyclable steel from the radial belting and carbon black for inks and other industries.

Recently they announced they were to commercialise the process with "overseas interest".

The plant is "decentralised" in Western New south Wales, providing employment in a rather depressed rural area.

While they do have a small solar PV system on site I don't think that is their primary power source.