Tuesday, January 13, 2009

What happen after no oil anymore?

I discovered something amazing recently and I tried to tell a bunch of friends about it. A guy in Illinois has, it seems, invented a device that can turn almost anything into oil, plus a few byproducts (all useful).

I, for example, could be transformed into 40 pounds of light sweet crude, 7 pounds of flammable gas, 8 pounds of high-quality mineral fertilizer, and 125 pounds of slightly cloudy water, give or take. Individual results may vary.

Inventor Paul Buskis is not planning to process people, of course. He's going after trash. His thermo-depolymerization process works on any carbon-based substance--chicken entrails, tires, plastic milk jugs, you name it. Garbage in, oil out--that's the promise.

My friends scoffed. "Sounds too good to be true," was their consensus. "It'll never work."

Ah, but it's already working. A company called Changing World Technologies has built a plant in Carthage, Missouri, based on Buskis's process. It's producing 400 barrels of oil a day right now, extruded from the wastes of nearby turkey processing plants. The company is building another plant in Philadelphia to process sewage into black gold.

My friends would have none of this. They assured me the invention will emit toxic pollution. (It doesn't.) It will use more energy than it produces. (Quite the opposite.) It's voodoo science: "How can oil be created?"

Well, it's been done before. The earth created oil by heating, cooling, and squeezing the rotted remains of plants and animals. Buskis replicates that process mechanically. What took millions of years in nature, his process achieves in a day.

Inconceivable? Not really. Even in nature, Buskis says, the transformation occurred rapidly. What took millions of years was for the right conditions to line up by chance.

A monkey banging on a typewriter might take millions of years to come up with a great sonnet. That doesn't make us doubt that Shakespeare could do it in a day. But if this thing is real, my friends countered, why aren't people stampeding to buy the stock?

Because there is no stock. This technology is closely held by a small group of private investors including James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and Howard Buffet, son of the legendary investing genius Warren Buffet.

Ah. Now the skepticism faded away.

"I knew it," one of my friends uttered bitterly.

"And it's still oil," another scolded. "Burning it still creates pollution...."
Everyone leaned back, relieved. They had no trouble believing my news as long as it wasn't that thing with feathers. You know. Hope.

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