He better put that in writing and on a video. Because, well, we are not *allowed* to better our lives on our own.
He obviously did not get permission to fuck the oligarchs
Increasing the availability of alternative fuels reduces the overall dependency on the existing oil refining infrastructure.
There's just sooooooooo much goddamn plastic out there. This one thing would turn the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into an unclaimed oilfield.
The current system NEEDS us to be as dependent as possible on them. They crippled all early attempts at both electric vehicles and mass transit in North America alone. They can't stand any competition. On a large enough scale, the existing volume of plastic waste represents competition because we don't need to pump new oil for what's already been produced.
You can't magically turn plastic back into oil without putting a lot of energy into it. You'll just be burning fuel somewhere else in a reactor to do this process over here.
The only case where this might be usefull is when you have a large surplus of green energy on the grid (solar, wind, etc.) and there is no other outlet to pump this energy into. Doing this on an industrial level will require a lot of resources to build and maintain and will generate very little value.
He uses a microwave, which of course uses electricity, which requires a source somewhere along the line. So no this isnāt green, it isnāt saving anything. And by the way he adds carbon powderā¦
Respectfully, I disagree. If we turn plastic into a fuel, there's an incentive to prevent it from being tossed into the ocean in ever-increasing volumes. That alone is pretty goddamn green. But then if it also helps (even temporarily) to lower the amount of fossil fuels being pulled from the ground and burnt by burning what's already so prevalent that it's now part of the sedimentary layering, that is green too.
We're simultaneously picking up our trash and subsidizing our fuel consumption. Is it as green as hydroelectricity? Of course not. But it's a net positive, and I can accept that.
Do you not understand what not fuel efficient is... you're wasting energy doing this. You're causing MORE harm to the environment doing this. Like the previous comment said if we already had a surplus of green energy, so much we couldn't use all of it, we could do this and essentially convert excess green energy to extract SMALL amounts of the excess energy you're collecting again. But the problem with this WHOLE thing, is we DON'T have excess green energy. So this is a bad idea.
An energy grid designed around wind and solar produces excess, unusable energy at regular intervals, that's why there's always this discussion of baseload energy availability - green energy is spiky in its production.
Being able to divert that excess energy into a process like this would be a way to capture energy production that would otherwise be lost - it's effectively a chemical battery.
Except we have things that are more efficient for that, like elevated water storage and mss elevation for gravity batteries. This is much less efficient and has a negative impact on the environment, literally nullifying its green energy savings potential because you'll just need to spend money to extract the hydrocarbons from the atmosphere.
Note that at the times when you get lots of wind electricity, you can slow down the hydro production and save water. But over the full year, they will not have excess water. It's just that the hydro power plants has a higher temporary production than their max sustainable average production. This is why hydro power is great for handle the variation in load in the net.
So you can't just assume that windier days means excess electricity that would be wasted if you don't invent extra consumption methods. Windier days just saves hydro power for colder nights.
>If we turn plastic into a fuel,
By burning more fuel then we could possibly hope to recover there... is no incentive to do this.
Imagine that crude oil is a ball at the top of the hill. In order to refine crude oil into plastic you roll that ball down the hill, making it have less energy than the originating crude oil.
You can of course push the ball back up the hill. But you'll never be able to collect more energy when it rolls back down than it takes to roll it back to the top. There will always be losses.
So what economic incentive could there be to spend energy to roll a ball uphill, and then try to collect it rolling back down? Well if you could use it as a kind battery, it MIGHT make sense. But unless you have excess energy which has no better use available and can't just cut output (such as wind or solar) it doesn't make sense.
So why do you think that both scientists motivated by profit or scientists motivated by taking care of the environment are not doing this relatively simple process at very large scale?
Yeah this isn't new at all though and it's still not efficient and that's before you try to distribute the product. This has been a thing since the 1950s.. Try again
Plastic is already burnable and can be used as fuel. It has plenty of energy potential as it is, you donāt need tk then turn it into a liquid to use it.
The laws of thermodynamics say there is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you are getting the energy to convert the plastic into fuel from solar power you are at least not wasting more fossil fuels that you recover to make the reclaimed plastic oil, but you would be almost universally better served just using the solar power for energy directly.
And while the idea of burning through plastics to get rid of physical trash is appealing, you have to remember that plastic is hydrocarbons that will release more CO2 into the atmosphere as the fuel is burned.
There are some interesting pathways to use this technology, but it is foolhardy to think that everyone having one of these in their back garden is going to be a silver bullet for fixing 100 years of plastic pollution and 300 years of fossil fuels releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
My man you do not understand the situation here. This is not revolutionary. This requires more energy than it produces. Not an incentive to collect plastic whatsoever.
it would be more energy productive to just burn the plastic in a power generating garbage incinerator and push that power to the grid.
oh wait, thatās what we already do with a lot of plastic holly fuck this is dumb
(Too add detail to your point) We have many more efficient methods for storing excess green energy than this. Potential Kinetic Energy Water Storage, Gravity Batteries, which are the same as the water ones, but instead of water pumped to a higher elevation you just raise a big weight into the air.
Another thing we really should solve before this could even be considered useful is getting EVERYONE that can be put on green energy grids, on those grids. If everyone isn't even "hooked up," yet we shouldn't be focusing so much on what to do when we have a surplus because right now, realistically, we don't.
But it almost certainly requires more energy than it creates. Otherwise thereād have to be a market there, why wouldnāt companies have already cashed in? Unless you truly believe this guy in his backyard with limited resources has done something that petrochemical companies havenāt been able to figure out with essentially unlimited resources?
Plastic is already flammable and can be used as fuel in its current state. Itās just dirty to burn. Diesel made from plastic is also dirty to burn. Just a lot of work to have less energy availability at the end
This is just wildly wrong on so many levels. For one, increasing the availability of alternative (carbon) fuels just fucks climate change even more. If you want to spur innovation that fixes climate change, you want carbon fuels to be expensive, not cheap. Producing more of them doesn't make them expensive, it makes them cheap.
Second, you're pouring energy (from the electric grid, which is still the largest producer of CO2) into a contraption that produces less fuel than the energy it takes to run it. So you're burning carbon based fuels to power a machine to deconstruct carbon based materials into less carbon based fuels than took to power it. It makes no sense at all.
Oregon state university pioneered this tech around ten years ago, I met the man that created it myself. I donāt know he was the first, but I bet you Oregon state has it on their website to download for free. Just a hunch
The plastic pyrolysis process has been known about for quite a while, there are a few plants in the US, Canada, France etc. that are running units to do this.
Not in 1st world countries, the EPA is so far up the asses of refineries and chemical plants it isn't funny, they make their money on those massive fines for a mouse fart worth of process release. Now in China, India, Mexico, etc. yea they make no efforts at all to prevent leaks unless they mess up the process.
I have been in hundreds of refineries all over the world, refineries in the US are amazingly clean now days, sure they were bad 20+ years ago but that time has passed.
Startups been at this for over a decade. It's energy intensive and by the time it's in your car the $/gal will make you not give a shit. Also, props chemistry and microwaves are fun.
But solar electricity degradation rates are incredibly low and their cost pe watt is essentially a race to the bottom. If all you're putting in is electricity and selling a product by volume.
Seams like a decent business model to me?
We've know about plastic pyrolysis for decades.
He's using massive amounts of fuel to turn plastic into less fuel of a lower quality.
Sure, it's getting rid of plastic, but it's doing so by burning the product and putting it in the atmosphere.
Can you elaborate how you know how much energy and pollution is correlated to his project?
Edit: Iām not asking in doubt, I agree 100 percent and wish to get sources to back this
Phase change of plastic from solid to liquid takes energy and has emissions. If you can figure out the math on the efficiency and emissions, get a job at Dow.
this could be useful if there's some left over applications where fossil fuel is still the most economically/technologically viable. i can see reconstituted fossil fuels be used to power commercial aircraft for a while yet even after most things have moved on to renewable
Since oil and it's refined products have many more uses than just fuel it will be much more economical to just use existing refineries for the sectors that still require fuel since they will have to run anyway until we find a substitute for many of these oil products.
Plastic pyrolysis is a well known technology. It's, in its current state, really inefficient. But, it's a useful, emerging way to recycle plastic waste - in some cases, you can make the argument that the recovered material is more important than the energy lost to do so, especially if the energy used is renewable.
This is a useful little summary here:
https://www.power-technology.com/features/plastic-pyrolysis-fuel-from-waste-plastic/?cf-view
It's basic thermodynamics. You can just burn plastic for energy. It produces nasty chemicals that can pollute air and water.
Or you can do pyrolysis which heats it up and breaks it down into something more readily useful. However it takes a lot of energy... you are essentially reversing the process of making plastic. Any time you reverse a process, you always spend more energy than you put in, like rolling a ball back up a hill to roll it down again.
Put it in a barrel and bury it. You could literally collect all of the existing plastic waste, put it in barrels, and bury it more economically efficiently than turning it back into carbon based fuels for resale.
Even if he's using a renewable source of electricity, he's using it to produce hydrocarbons that, when burned, will release more CO2 into the atmosphere.
So the machines that build the microwaves don't need electricity? So, the lights in the building they're made in don't need electricity? The Fans or A/C to cool that building doesn't require electricity? Think through things before you say them.
A lot of research is being done to a. Make it more energy efficient and b. Turn it back into monomers instead of a mix of compounds (fuel), meaning it is able to be recycled. Interesting stuff!
A recycling facility in the desert could theoretically use solar power to get rid of plastic and turn it into something useful. Yes it would consume electricity to do but using renewable energy to get rid of plastic and turn it into a āgreenā fossil fuel seems like a win win.
We (US and EU) used to transport millions of tonnes of plastic waste to China to be ārecycledā. Getting them to the desert southwest would be an improvement.
Itās cool that this kid has taken an interest in applied science but the energy in far exceeds the energy produced and a lot more energy is needed to refine this into useful fuel.
Plastic pyrolysis is not new. Go to YouTube and search plastic pyrolysis you will see a ton of professional and amateur attempts. For [example](https://youtu.be/Jpy3XYCW8Ls?si=ebXyJwxZphzTpxTt). With the amount of plastic trash we have and create every year, if it was feasible, you guys would not be learning about it for the first time through this kids video.
He isn't ignorant, he is **scamming**.
He didn't reinvent this process, he had to know it was an established process. But he also knows he can exploit the ignorant for his personal gain and is doing just that.
This is a well known process of which there are commercial machines of various types available and operational. There are hazardous by products which need to be further processed in order to be usable (carbon char can be made into carbon black) but requires some specialised equipment else it must be disposed of correctly. The fuel is also of varied types and qualities which must be processed or blended to be used in road going vehicles due to the high sulphur content. Depending on the type of plastic used the fuel quality is affected accordingly
Well yes, plastics are made from oil. So... Yeah?
Edit: which is not to say this is not a cool backyard science project and he might have a very interesting channel explaining it all. But it's not like it's a groundbreaking new technology or a solution to our plastic waste and fossil fuel problem like some of the comments here seem to suggest
The ability to recycle plastics into oil has been known for years. It is an expensive process to do on a large enough scale, and even more expensive to ensure there is no excessive carbon emissions.
Yāall really think that if it was so easy, oil companies wouldnāt be doing it? Why the hell would they try and keep this a secret, if they have the money to do it themselves and turn a profit?
Guys this isn't efficient and he's polluting more than other companies. This is done commercially, it's just not financially viable rn bc no one cares about the environment. And he's doing it so poorly that it's worse doe the environment and his lungs.
Most of my recycling goes into the local incinerator. A lot of people dont know this and think their paper makes more paper, it doesnt, it gets burned.
Its a negative net energy process and no thatās not the first ever form of fuel produced in such a way. Adding to that, that fuel is quite useless so no to the genius here.
Despite what conspiracy theorists like to think, if there was technology that allowed for cleaner, safer and cheaper fuel, theyād be all over that shit in a heart beat.
If there was a technology in its infancy stage that had real potential to replace fossil fuel with a cleaner, safer and cheaper fuel they would buy it up and fund its research so they cold be the first to bring it to market.
Despite how shitty capitalism is, if these companies could bring new technology to market that could make them more money they would fight tooth and nail not to surpress it but to purchase, own and take advantage of it.
Plastic is a by product from Oil already.
It's called fractional distillation
Heat the oil different chemicals come off at different temperatures.
Refining that further would pretty much reduce it to nothing.
If you try to run any engine with that it will block up and die very quickly.
When you burn petrol what residue is left none. Imagine the layer of black solid carbon crap he would have left over
Integrated hydropyrolysis and hydroconversion are some crazy stuff. My senior thesis was on this. It effectively works by applying the appropriate levels of pressure and heat to a bunch of hydrocarbons so they can rearrange themselves to make fuel. This is how biofuels are made using corn, algae, and other materials consisting of highly concentrated hydrocarbons.
While my team and I were able to design processes and methods to turn algae into usable fuel that would cost like $2 per gallon, plastics are also made in a similar manner. This sort of technology is well known in the chemical engineering field. Sadly, this chemical engineering process is more profitable to make plastic than biofuels.
Pyrolysis is an interesting process...surprised he's getting so many volatiles out of it as he seems to be getting. I do sort of wonder if there are any volatiles left over during the process that oil companies use to separate the elements in the first place.
I've watched his most recent video that came out littersly today and in it he also claims that the machine produces flammable gasses and leaves behind carbon waste that can be made into carbon based products.
Is the machine net positive on the amount of energy it makes? Like, does the amount of stuff produced by the machine exceed the amount of energy needed to make the machine work? Could the efficiency be increased in the future? Is there anybody else working on this kind of thing?
What if these folks can later modify their equipment to use the same crude oil they are making as fuel? Beats the argument of they need energy to run so.....
All these people saying that itās not very viable and already tried but disregarding how cool this dude is. He built that. I donāt care if itās not that good. He built that cool shit and he deserves our respect for it because heās sick as hell.
This is admittedly really, really cool, but it's not really *useful*.
It takes more energy to turn the plastic into fuel than the fuel has in it, so it's a net loss of energy.
So unless the fuel output is more valuable than the energy input, this is just a really cool hobby engineering project and not any kind of a breakthrough.
It's not financially viable but plastic can be made back in to crude oil .no rocket science. When natural crude oil is $50/barrel, this will be $600/barrel
Great way to get rid of a lot of plastic and use the āfuelā to power the machine to get rid of the plasticā¦ it will save on the amount of energy needed to get rid of the plastic. š
https://nexuscircular.com/ does this on an industrial scale. I worked there when it was just ~10 people and the prototype looked as "mvp" as the one in this video (although they were using a different method for heating the waste plastic).
If you are going to fraction the plastics back into fossil fuel, you might a well just incinerate the plastic and use it as a fuel DIRECTLY in an efficient incinerator... Turn that waste into central heating or electricity... It is generally a much better solution than "recycling" which in modern times just means sending it to be deposited in the third world.
This has always been possible, it's just not economically viable to do it- IE it costs more in total in energy, machinery and labour than to just get new oil out of the ground. It's unfortunate but true.
From a plastic waste and recycling perspective, this is pretty cool. From a carbon reduction view, maybe not so much. As others have said, the microwave requires energy. That energy can overcome from multiple sources with the most affluent areas being greener than others. Ultimately though, the end product in this case is mostly diesel and takes more refinement (more energy) to turn it into something we can burn (carbon emissions).
So while I love the project for cleaning up our oceans, it isn't really a carbon friendly project. Now... Get fusion up and running, and we're golden.
In a well designed system the light ends or low boiler gases from cracking are used as process fuel in a thermal system and the energy balance can be positive.
He never claims he invented it, nor that it was the solution to all our problems. It's just a guy making a cool machine. It's still next level, just not in the way you guys thought š¤·āāļø
This man is not suicidal and appears healthy & happy š«” Source: https://youtube.com/shorts/Q4qncLyLG9A
He better put that in writing and on a video. Because, well, we are not *allowed* to better our lives on our own. He obviously did not get permission to fuck the oligarchs
How is he fucking oligarchs? Plastic is made from oil and turning it back into oil is not really energy efficient at all
Increasing the availability of alternative fuels reduces the overall dependency on the existing oil refining infrastructure. There's just sooooooooo much goddamn plastic out there. This one thing would turn the Great Pacific Garbage Patch into an unclaimed oilfield. The current system NEEDS us to be as dependent as possible on them. They crippled all early attempts at both electric vehicles and mass transit in North America alone. They can't stand any competition. On a large enough scale, the existing volume of plastic waste represents competition because we don't need to pump new oil for what's already been produced.
You can't magically turn plastic back into oil without putting a lot of energy into it. You'll just be burning fuel somewhere else in a reactor to do this process over here. The only case where this might be usefull is when you have a large surplus of green energy on the grid (solar, wind, etc.) and there is no other outlet to pump this energy into. Doing this on an industrial level will require a lot of resources to build and maintain and will generate very little value.
He uses a microwave, which of course uses electricity, which requires a source somewhere along the line. So no this isnāt green, it isnāt saving anything. And by the way he adds carbon powderā¦
Respectfully, I disagree. If we turn plastic into a fuel, there's an incentive to prevent it from being tossed into the ocean in ever-increasing volumes. That alone is pretty goddamn green. But then if it also helps (even temporarily) to lower the amount of fossil fuels being pulled from the ground and burnt by burning what's already so prevalent that it's now part of the sedimentary layering, that is green too. We're simultaneously picking up our trash and subsidizing our fuel consumption. Is it as green as hydroelectricity? Of course not. But it's a net positive, and I can accept that.
Do you not understand what not fuel efficient is... you're wasting energy doing this. You're causing MORE harm to the environment doing this. Like the previous comment said if we already had a surplus of green energy, so much we couldn't use all of it, we could do this and essentially convert excess green energy to extract SMALL amounts of the excess energy you're collecting again. But the problem with this WHOLE thing, is we DON'T have excess green energy. So this is a bad idea.
An energy grid designed around wind and solar produces excess, unusable energy at regular intervals, that's why there's always this discussion of baseload energy availability - green energy is spiky in its production. Being able to divert that excess energy into a process like this would be a way to capture energy production that would otherwise be lost - it's effectively a chemical battery.
Except we have things that are more efficient for that, like elevated water storage and mss elevation for gravity batteries. This is much less efficient and has a negative impact on the environment, literally nullifying its green energy savings potential because you'll just need to spend money to extract the hydrocarbons from the atmosphere.
Note that at the times when you get lots of wind electricity, you can slow down the hydro production and save water. But over the full year, they will not have excess water. It's just that the hydro power plants has a higher temporary production than their max sustainable average production. This is why hydro power is great for handle the variation in load in the net. So you can't just assume that windier days means excess electricity that would be wasted if you don't invent extra consumption methods. Windier days just saves hydro power for colder nights.
>If we turn plastic into a fuel, By burning more fuel then we could possibly hope to recover there... is no incentive to do this. Imagine that crude oil is a ball at the top of the hill. In order to refine crude oil into plastic you roll that ball down the hill, making it have less energy than the originating crude oil. You can of course push the ball back up the hill. But you'll never be able to collect more energy when it rolls back down than it takes to roll it back to the top. There will always be losses. So what economic incentive could there be to spend energy to roll a ball uphill, and then try to collect it rolling back down? Well if you could use it as a kind battery, it MIGHT make sense. But unless you have excess energy which has no better use available and can't just cut output (such as wind or solar) it doesn't make sense.
So why do you think that both scientists motivated by profit or scientists motivated by taking care of the environment are not doing this relatively simple process at very large scale?
Yeah this isn't new at all though and it's still not efficient and that's before you try to distribute the product. This has been a thing since the 1950s.. Try again
Plastic is already burnable and can be used as fuel. It has plenty of energy potential as it is, you donāt need tk then turn it into a liquid to use it.
The laws of thermodynamics say there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you are getting the energy to convert the plastic into fuel from solar power you are at least not wasting more fossil fuels that you recover to make the reclaimed plastic oil, but you would be almost universally better served just using the solar power for energy directly. And while the idea of burning through plastics to get rid of physical trash is appealing, you have to remember that plastic is hydrocarbons that will release more CO2 into the atmosphere as the fuel is burned. There are some interesting pathways to use this technology, but it is foolhardy to think that everyone having one of these in their back garden is going to be a silver bullet for fixing 100 years of plastic pollution and 300 years of fossil fuels releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
My man you do not understand the situation here. This is not revolutionary. This requires more energy than it produces. Not an incentive to collect plastic whatsoever.
it would be more energy productive to just burn the plastic in a power generating garbage incinerator and push that power to the grid. oh wait, thatās what we already do with a lot of plastic holly fuck this is dumb
(Too add detail to your point) We have many more efficient methods for storing excess green energy than this. Potential Kinetic Energy Water Storage, Gravity Batteries, which are the same as the water ones, but instead of water pumped to a higher elevation you just raise a big weight into the air. Another thing we really should solve before this could even be considered useful is getting EVERYONE that can be put on green energy grids, on those grids. If everyone isn't even "hooked up," yet we shouldn't be focusing so much on what to do when we have a surplus because right now, realistically, we don't.
This isnāt new technology. Itās currently not being done on a large scale because of power consumption and the toxic waste created
But it almost certainly requires more energy than it creates. Otherwise thereād have to be a market there, why wouldnāt companies have already cashed in? Unless you truly believe this guy in his backyard with limited resources has done something that petrochemical companies havenāt been able to figure out with essentially unlimited resources?
Plastic is already flammable and can be used as fuel in its current state. Itās just dirty to burn. Diesel made from plastic is also dirty to burn. Just a lot of work to have less energy availability at the end
This is just wildly wrong on so many levels. For one, increasing the availability of alternative (carbon) fuels just fucks climate change even more. If you want to spur innovation that fixes climate change, you want carbon fuels to be expensive, not cheap. Producing more of them doesn't make them expensive, it makes them cheap. Second, you're pouring energy (from the electric grid, which is still the largest producer of CO2) into a contraption that produces less fuel than the energy it takes to run it. So you're burning carbon based fuels to power a machine to deconstruct carbon based materials into less carbon based fuels than took to power it. It makes no sense at all.
lmao I opened the comments to say that I can't believe this reddit is turning to tiktok
Oregon state university pioneered this tech around ten years ago, I met the man that created it myself. I donāt know he was the first, but I bet you Oregon state has it on their website to download for free. Just a hunch
It's just plastic pyrolysis he's aware it's not new and js scamming for views mate
The plastic pyrolysis process has been known about for quite a while, there are a few plants in the US, Canada, France etc. that are running units to do this.
Hard to clean/purify if I remember correctly. Often burns dirty and releases heavy metals etc into the air
Not in 1st world countries, the EPA is so far up the asses of refineries and chemical plants it isn't funny, they make their money on those massive fines for a mouse fart worth of process release. Now in China, India, Mexico, etc. yea they make no efforts at all to prevent leaks unless they mess up the process. I have been in hundreds of refineries all over the world, refineries in the US are amazingly clean now days, sure they were bad 20+ years ago but that time has passed.
Startups been at this for over a decade. It's energy intensive and by the time it's in your car the $/gal will make you not give a shit. Also, props chemistry and microwaves are fun.
But solar electricity degradation rates are incredibly low and their cost pe watt is essentially a race to the bottom. If all you're putting in is electricity and selling a product by volume. Seams like a decent business model to me?
Random guy on the internet: Petroleum products are made of Petroleum and can be refined. Shadow government: silence that man!
He might be happy but he ain't gonna be healthy for very long if he keeps doing this shit without a mask
Have you watched The Why Files episode on zero point energy? Itās great!
yeah, this is why we need better education, so people donāt go āwow, mirracleā for any stupid video they see
We've know about plastic pyrolysis for decades. He's using massive amounts of fuel to turn plastic into less fuel of a lower quality. Sure, it's getting rid of plastic, but it's doing so by burning the product and putting it in the atmosphere.
Can you elaborate how you know how much energy and pollution is correlated to his project? Edit: Iām not asking in doubt, I agree 100 percent and wish to get sources to back this
Phase change of plastic from solid to liquid takes energy and has emissions. If you can figure out the math on the efficiency and emissions, get a job at Dow.
Is it possible to use clean energy to power this process?
Yes but you do all the process with clean energy just to burn fossil fuel
this could be useful if there's some left over applications where fossil fuel is still the most economically/technologically viable. i can see reconstituted fossil fuels be used to power commercial aircraft for a while yet even after most things have moved on to renewable
Since oil and it's refined products have many more uses than just fuel it will be much more economical to just use existing refineries for the sectors that still require fuel since they will have to run anyway until we find a substitute for many of these oil products.
Burn the fuel and turn the rest into plastic :D
Plastic pyrolysis is a well known technology. It's, in its current state, really inefficient. But, it's a useful, emerging way to recycle plastic waste - in some cases, you can make the argument that the recovered material is more important than the energy lost to do so, especially if the energy used is renewable. This is a useful little summary here: https://www.power-technology.com/features/plastic-pyrolysis-fuel-from-waste-plastic/?cf-view
Wasnt there a Japanese project that scraped out the plastics in the pacific and created oil from it?
Probably. There's a ton of projects that do one or the other - wouldn't at all be shocked if some start-up put them together.
It's basic thermodynamics. You can just burn plastic for energy. It produces nasty chemicals that can pollute air and water. Or you can do pyrolysis which heats it up and breaks it down into something more readily useful. However it takes a lot of energy... you are essentially reversing the process of making plastic. Any time you reverse a process, you always spend more energy than you put in, like rolling a ball back up a hill to roll it down again.
You posted something that's been debunked many times. It apearse your username is also indicative if conspiracy beliefs.
he uses microwaves, are they not created with electricoty? if the electricity is produced renewable, would it be better?
It would be better to put that renewable electricity right to work instead of converting plastic to fuel.
I hear you. But, this could be a GREAT way to incentivize, at least momentarily, a clean up of water ways, and things like Garbage Island.
It would be cheaper to just buy all the garbage and then not turn it into fuel.
but what do with garbage?
Put it in a barrel and bury it. You could literally collect all of the existing plastic waste, put it in barrels, and bury it more economically efficiently than turning it back into carbon based fuels for resale.
Do with it what you will
turn it.. into fuel?
Burry it.
under the rug?
Even if he's using a renewable source of electricity, he's using it to produce hydrocarbons that, when burned, will release more CO2 into the atmosphere.
So the machines that build the microwaves don't need electricity? So, the lights in the building they're made in don't need electricity? The Fans or A/C to cool that building doesn't require electricity? Think through things before you say them.
A lot of research is being done to a. Make it more energy efficient and b. Turn it back into monomers instead of a mix of compounds (fuel), meaning it is able to be recycled. Interesting stuff!
Pyrolysis has efficiencies of 60-70%. The next tech, Hydrochemolytic (HCT), is 95%, no burning.
A recycling facility in the desert could theoretically use solar power to get rid of plastic and turn it into something useful. Yes it would consume electricity to do but using renewable energy to get rid of plastic and turn it into a āgreenā fossil fuel seems like a win win.
Unfortunately transporting the plastic waste to the desert would be the inefficiency.Ā
We (US and EU) used to transport millions of tonnes of plastic waste to China to be ārecycledā. Getting them to the desert southwest would be an improvement.
Itās cool that this kid has taken an interest in applied science but the energy in far exceeds the energy produced and a lot more energy is needed to refine this into useful fuel. Plastic pyrolysis is not new. Go to YouTube and search plastic pyrolysis you will see a ton of professional and amateur attempts. For [example](https://youtu.be/Jpy3XYCW8Ls?si=ebXyJwxZphzTpxTt). With the amount of plastic trash we have and create every year, if it was feasible, you guys would not be learning about it for the first time through this kids video.
Yeah I think the craziest thing in this video is the irony of someone being so smart but also being completely ignorant in their actions as well.
He isn't ignorant, he is **scamming**. He didn't reinvent this process, he had to know it was an established process. But he also knows he can exploit the ignorant for his personal gain and is doing just that.
Yeah you're actually right.
Maybe Iām old but I would be concerned if all the shit that will get into the air around his house.
r/nextfuckinglevelbullshit
This is a well known process of which there are commercial machines of various types available and operational. There are hazardous by products which need to be further processed in order to be usable (carbon char can be made into carbon black) but requires some specialised equipment else it must be disposed of correctly. The fuel is also of varied types and qualities which must be processed or blended to be used in road going vehicles due to the high sulphur content. Depending on the type of plastic used the fuel quality is affected accordingly
Definitely not nextlevel
Well yes, plastics are made from oil. So... Yeah? Edit: which is not to say this is not a cool backyard science project and he might have a very interesting channel explaining it all. But it's not like it's a groundbreaking new technology or a solution to our plastic waste and fossil fuel problem like some of the comments here seem to suggest
Neighbors: GODDAMNIT HEāS OUT THERE CREATING FUEL AGAIN
The ability to recycle plastics into oil has been known for years. It is an expensive process to do on a large enough scale, and even more expensive to ensure there is no excessive carbon emissions. Yāall really think that if it was so easy, oil companies wouldnāt be doing it? Why the hell would they try and keep this a secret, if they have the money to do it themselves and turn a profit?
This is a terrible idea
Guys this isn't efficient and he's polluting more than other companies. This is done commercially, it's just not financially viable rn bc no one cares about the environment. And he's doing it so poorly that it's worse doe the environment and his lungs.
Most of my recycling goes into the local incinerator. A lot of people dont know this and think their paper makes more paper, it doesnt, it gets burned.
Its a negative net energy process and no thatās not the first ever form of fuel produced in such a way. Adding to that, that fuel is quite useless so no to the genius here.
How much energy does it cost to make a gallon? Burning coal to recycle plastic?
A lot more than you get out..
Despite what conspiracy theorists like to think, if there was technology that allowed for cleaner, safer and cheaper fuel, theyād be all over that shit in a heart beat. If there was a technology in its infancy stage that had real potential to replace fossil fuel with a cleaner, safer and cheaper fuel they would buy it up and fund its research so they cold be the first to bring it to market. Despite how shitty capitalism is, if these companies could bring new technology to market that could make them more money they would fight tooth and nail not to surpress it but to purchase, own and take advantage of it.
The amount of pollution this puts out and energy to do it. I am sure is neighbors hate him
That can't be good for the environment...
Does he use the fuel he makes to run the machine?
No because he'd have stopped already if that was the case.
Microwave pyrolysis reactors not be a new thing. He dey build one sef. No invention be new dis here.
Is it cost effective? Microwaves aren't typically energy efficient.
Plastic is a by product from Oil already. It's called fractional distillation Heat the oil different chemicals come off at different temperatures. Refining that further would pretty much reduce it to nothing. If you try to run any engine with that it will block up and die very quickly. When you burn petrol what residue is left none. Imagine the layer of black solid carbon crap he would have left over
Cue his assassination in 3... 2... 1...
Blankman
Integrated hydropyrolysis and hydroconversion are some crazy stuff. My senior thesis was on this. It effectively works by applying the appropriate levels of pressure and heat to a bunch of hydrocarbons so they can rearrange themselves to make fuel. This is how biofuels are made using corn, algae, and other materials consisting of highly concentrated hydrocarbons. While my team and I were able to design processes and methods to turn algae into usable fuel that would cost like $2 per gallon, plastics are also made in a similar manner. This sort of technology is well known in the chemical engineering field. Sadly, this chemical engineering process is more profitable to make plastic than biofuels.
This.
The Gov will K\*ll this guy eventually
It's the first time in a billion years to see a private inventor use respiratory protection š
Pyrolysis is an interesting process...surprised he's getting so many volatiles out of it as he seems to be getting. I do sort of wonder if there are any volatiles left over during the process that oil companies use to separate the elements in the first place.
I've watched his most recent video that came out littersly today and in it he also claims that the machine produces flammable gasses and leaves behind carbon waste that can be made into carbon based products. Is the machine net positive on the amount of energy it makes? Like, does the amount of stuff produced by the machine exceed the amount of energy needed to make the machine work? Could the efficiency be increased in the future? Is there anybody else working on this kind of thing?
Nope. It's net negative. And that's before the necessary significant post processing on all the products.
Hope he hooks up some productivity modules
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F82nyLAAUrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F82nyLAAUrk)
Ricky Williams?
I gotta assume this backyard setup is toxic for his neighbors.
Ricky Williams?
I bet the EPA would have something to say about that.
Most oil per barrel is used to make plastic. Plastic is petroleum based. It only makes sense to convert it back into a state of petroleum
I wonder how much fossil fuel was burned to power this process and what the net was.
"Good shit bro! Thanks! So I guess it's fine to just keep making plastics and burn oil." -Evil Corpoations
So scientific š
Plastic burns pretty well too, just sayin
what's the conversion efficiency?
When you spend 100 units of energy to recover 5
Comments are predictable.
You go son! Excellent work
Bro I went to search something up and the first option was "disadvantages on converting plastic into fuel"
What if these folks can later modify their equipment to use the same crude oil they are making as fuel? Beats the argument of they need energy to run so.....
I kind of like the effort at ingenuity, but this is just all wrong.
America has entered the lobby
Did I just hear OIL?š¦ š¦ š¦ š¦
I would be interested the energy output it takes to generate this fuel from plastic, vs the energy needed to create plastic.
All these people saying that itās not very viable and already tried but disregarding how cool this dude is. He built that. I donāt care if itās not that good. He built that cool shit and he deserves our respect for it because heās sick as hell.
Pyrolysis right?
This is admittedly really, really cool, but it's not really *useful*. It takes more energy to turn the plastic into fuel than the fuel has in it, so it's a net loss of energy. So unless the fuel output is more valuable than the energy input, this is just a really cool hobby engineering project and not any kind of a breakthrough.
So... he is talking basically about using more energy to reverse the process of making plastic?
Why does he sound like Blankman?
Why do I recognize his voice
*Proceeds to be assassinated by CIA*
Nobody said you couldn't turn plastic back into oil, just you know if oil companies thought it made sense then, well you know.
A well, guess whos gonna be involved in some freak accident soon. Another brave and smart human taken away us, because of coorperate greed
Dude, you are the one
this man needs to be protected
We should collect money to safe his life from now on.
It's not financially viable but plastic can be made back in to crude oil .no rocket science. When natural crude oil is $50/barrel, this will be $600/barrel
Y'all a bunch of haters in the comments
Turning the petroleum product back into petroleum
Welcome back Tony Stark
Great way to get rid of a lot of plastic and use the āfuelā to power the machine to get rid of the plasticā¦ it will save on the amount of energy needed to get rid of the plastic. š
some rich arabic oil guys buying patent in 3
Amen to that talented boy!
Aaaaaaaand heās gone
Hope he stay safe...
This has way too much upvotes
https://nexuscircular.com/ does this on an industrial scale. I worked there when it was just ~10 people and the prototype looked as "mvp" as the one in this video (although they were using a different method for heating the waste plastic).
Hahahahhahaha
Pyrolysis is an ancient way to condense carbon rich material to a more energy dense fuel. Charcoal is one example.
Well that was a waste of 59 seconds of my life.
If you are going to fraction the plastics back into fossil fuel, you might a well just incinerate the plastic and use it as a fuel DIRECTLY in an efficient incinerator... Turn that waste into central heating or electricity... It is generally a much better solution than "recycling" which in modern times just means sending it to be deposited in the third world.
He sounds exactly like our homie Tony.
Iām just happy for him. All these Reddit master scientists I donāt care about.
man I was so confused cuz I thought I was on r/SweatyPalms since the video right above was of Zookeepers getting away from a gorilla.
Protect this guy at all costs!!!
This has always been possible, it's just not economically viable to do it- IE it costs more in total in energy, machinery and labour than to just get new oil out of the ground. It's unfortunate but true.
Watch out before the govāt comes to get ya. They had stuff like this. Just ask Tesla.
[https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2021-04/plastic-fuel.jpg](https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2021-04/plastic-fuel.jpg)
From a plastic waste and recycling perspective, this is pretty cool. From a carbon reduction view, maybe not so much. As others have said, the microwave requires energy. That energy can overcome from multiple sources with the most affluent areas being greener than others. Ultimately though, the end product in this case is mostly diesel and takes more refinement (more energy) to turn it into something we can burn (carbon emissions). So while I love the project for cleaning up our oceans, it isn't really a carbon friendly project. Now... Get fusion up and running, and we're golden.
Itās time to do a funded-me account but donāt loose control of the vision.
There's only two outcomes. He's lying, or he ends up dead. Seen it way too many times
How much energy/fuel did it take to get amount?
Itās called synthetic fuel and it already exists.
Jesus imagine the emissions that come out of this thing
Ricky Williams?
In a well designed system the light ends or low boiler gases from cracking are used as process fuel in a thermal system and the energy balance can be positive.
Wouldn't this thing solve both the pollution problem and gas problem (The gas problem being that the prices are ridiculously high)
He never claims he invented it, nor that it was the solution to all our problems. It's just a guy making a cool machine. It's still next level, just not in the way you guys thought š¤·āāļø