As gas prices creep higher and higher, I'd like to revive a topic I mentioned in my ill-fated run for President of the United States last fall. I do this mostly to drum up traffic for my blog (at least I'm honest about my motives), but also to spur conversation about what I feel will be the technology that allows for perpetual global economic expansion.
Remember, I am both an economist and a petroleum industry businessman... so I am not to be questions on such matters. Your only questions should be "where can I invest in such technology" or "where can I sign up to be turned into high value crude oil".
http://redstripedshirt.blogspot.com/...impending.html
I Have the Answer to the World's Impending Energy Crisis!!!
A cold hard fact facing not only America, but the world, is that crude oil is a limit resource, that will one day be depleted. Some estimates say we have as little as 40 years of global crude oil reserves remaining. Clearly, this presents a problem for the consumers of gasoline, diesel fuel, lighter fluid, asphalt, carpet, plastic, eye drops, and just about everything you can possibly think of.
Because I am always concerned about global welfare, I have developed a solution that I will now share with all of you, completely free of charge. Now, before you go all bananas on me... I want you to hear me out to the end. My solution might sound strange at first but TRUST ME... it will make the world a better place! First, take a look at a typical crude oil refining process:
What is this amazing solution I have developed? Why it's crude oil made out of human beings of course!
Whoa... slow down there... remember our deal? Hear me out.
Crude oil varies in chemical composition from one type to another, but for the most part it is an aggregate of several hydrocarbon chains (meaning... it's mostly hydrogen and carbon). Well, what happens to be a staple of the American diet, even despite Atkins? That's right... CARBOHYDRATES... which have an oxygen molecule thrown into the mix. Our bodies are natural oil refineries... they take these CH3O chains (Carbohydrates), break them down, and produce CH4, methane gas (otherwise known as farts). Obviously the human body is full of all kinds of energy, but capturing methane is hard, and it isn't a very efficient fuel.
So instead of trying to make a square well spin, I have invented a process by which normal human beings can be turned into high quality crude oil, which will then be refined via a normal process to power the world's economy. Take a look:
How exactly does this process work, you ask? Well... don't ask - it is highly technical. But the secret to the entire process is the mysterious black box. A curious human being enters the device, and is then processed into black gold through a series of physical and chemical reactions. No worries though, the process is completely painless and beta testers tell us that it actually feels good, a lot like being tickled... BUT IN A GOOD WAY.
Now, I know what you might be thinking... Where are we going to find people to turn into crude? Well that is an easy one... where ever there is an abundant supply of carbohydrate rich humans! Oh, you meant where are we going to find people who WANT to be turned into crude? Well... that is tougher. Obviously no one wants to see their loved one turned into oil out of fear that someone we don't like will end up using the gasoline produced by our friends.
One proposed solution is to use clones. This presents another problem, however, since Republicans currently control our government and they hate clones almost as much as they hate gays. Because of this, I've developed a strategy.
What is the one thing Republicans like as much as oil? Well it is capital punishment of course!!! So, I say we use prisoners! Surely Republicans will jump on board with such a proposal, because through my patented process we can send evil-doers to meet their maker faster than some beaureacratic court system can. Once all the prisoners have been turned to crude oil, Republicans will be addicted to my synthetic black gold that they will have no choice but to allow cloning to continue production, and then everyone wins... finally we will be able to clone people and cure all kinds of diseases, not to mention create CloneSlaves to do our bidding.
And tree hugging hippes, don't worry about any harmful pollution, because my process is completely safe and will not result in any toxic industrial gases. In fact, in beta tests our exhaust has been described by experts as "pleasant and sweet... it is the smell of freedom." The detailed process flow provided shows just how perfect this process is.
I cannot stress how important this process is to our national security. We can longer sit around and let free market economics dictate our never ending thirst for petroleum. I hate to put it so bluntly, but you'd have to really hate America to not love my idea.
In closing, I urge you all to write your elected representatives and tell them to pass legislation immediately to continue to phase II of controlled testing, where we will use children and old people who don't contribute to the economy anyway to determine the optimal mix of carbohydrates and protein in the process.
Nice!The gum your mother warned you not to eat
but if you use children for testing, aren't you cutting-your-own-financial-throat, so to say? Who will be left to buy your human crude? Better to play it safe and use animals and skinny white chicks. Besides, think of all the free publicity!
Sounds pretty slick.
Why don't you volunteer to go first so we can see that it really works and then we will be sure you get the credit due. Deal?
Fill 'er up with Soylent High-test.
I smell Reality TV GOLD.
I just smell methane. :vomit
How much crude can you get out of one human being? We're 78% water, so you're looking at 50 lbs. of feedstock at most per human. I suppose you'd get the water out by pureeing the humans into a pulpy non-Newtonian fluid, then running that through a belt press to get a high-solids feed.
To make crude out of humans, you'd be looking at partial combustion, right? Would that be done in a cracking furnace? Would you need a solvent? I would think that human filter cake would be highly viscous and difficult to process that way.
Perhaps it would be better to use the biodiesel process? There is existing technology for that and existing infrastructure. We'd just have to adapt it to handle the different feed, although I can't imagine the man-pulp is that different from bananas or rice hulls or whatever else they use now.
It seems to me that the cloning plan has the same problem as corn ethanol --> the net energy out of the process is negative. You have to feed and care for the clones for many years even though they will reproduce.
I'd recommend just using this process to dispose of the liberals. Earlier in this forum, we'd talked about how easy it would be to get the liberals on the trains because we could tell them it's just the latest form of mass transit. They might actually pay us to board. Of course, industrial sites have rail infrastructure already.
We'd just be talking about a liberal processing unit on the front end to unload the railcars, grind the liberals up and dewater them. The environmentalists could die happy knowing they are doing their part to wean us off foreign oil.
Let's give tax breaks to companies who figure out ways to use solar or wind energy to convert liberals into usable fuels.
Perhaps we could burn the de-watered liberal sludge and use the heat to run steam turbines in a conventional generation plant.
But that only gets you 30-40% thermal efficiency. And conventional combustion of human material creates some odor problems.
By the way, what kind of BTU/lb does one get out of dewatered liberals?
We'd have to boost the operating temperature by using a fluid with a higher boiling point to get increased Carnot efficiency and permeate the exhaust gasses through calcified beds to collect the flyash.
Considering the amount of hot air they put out per capita, it's got to be damn high.By the way, what kind of BTU/lb does one get out of dewatered liberals?
1996 Academic Award
Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge
Just add liberals to this list.Professor Mark Holtzapple
Department of Chemical Engineering
Texas A&M University
Conversion of Waste Biomass to Animal Feed, Chemicals, and Fuels
A family of technologies has been developed at Texas A&M that converts waste biomass into animal feed, industrial chemicals and fuels. Waste biomass includes such resources as municipal solid waste, sewage sludge, manure, and agricultural residues.
Putting the green in Soylent Green!Currently these resources are under-utilized; in fact, many have a cost associated with their disposal. Waste biomass is treated with lime to render it more digestible. Lime-treated agricultural residues (e.g. straw, stover, bagasse) may be used as ruminant animal feeds.
In addition, the use of liberals as biomass will reduce overall demand for nonrenewable resources and will reduce environmental impact along coastal areas.Alternatively, the lime-treated biomass can be fed to a large anaerobic fermentor in which rumen microorganisms convert the biomass into volatile fatty acid (VFA) salts such as calcium acetate, propionate, and butyrate. The VFA salts are concentrated and may be converted into chemicals or fuels via three routes. In one route, the VFA salts are acidified releasing acetic, propionic, and butyric acids. In a second route, the VFA salts are thermally converted to ketones such as acetone, methyl ethyl ketone, and diethyl ketone. In a third route, the ketones may be hydrogenated to their corresponding alcohols such as isopropanol, isobutanol, and isopentanol.
This family of technologies offers many benefits for human health and the environment. Lime-treated animal feed can replace feed corn, which is approximately 88 percent of corn production. Growing corn requires plowing, which exacerbates soil erosion; approximately two bushels of top soil are lost for each bushel of corn harvested. Also, corn requires intensive inputs of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, all of which are contaminating ground water.
Chemicals (e.g. organic acids and ketones) may be produced economically from waste biomass that has a negative impact on the environment, such as municipal solid waste and sewage sludge. Typically, these wastes are landfilled or incinerated, which incurs a disposal cost while contributing to land or air pollution. By producing chemicals from biomass, nonrenewable resources such as petroleum and natural gas, are conserved for later generations. Because 50 percent of U.S. petroleum consumption is now imported, displacing foreign oil will help reduce the U.S. trade deficit.
Fuels (e.g. alcohols) produced from waste biomass have the benefits cited above, i.e., reduced environmental impact from waste disposal and reduced trade deficit. In addition, oxygenated fuels derived from biomass are cleaner burning and do not add net carbon dioxide to the environment, thereby reducing factors that contribute to global warming.
This is getting very "final solution"-like... um, how 'bout we just deport them to Venezuela?
Well, they're going to call us Nazis anyway.
Yeah, I don't think the far-right would go along with this plan, them being so Pro-American life and all. We're obviously gonna have to use foreigners here.
No, the Right would want to use convicted criminals.
The Left would prefer fetuses.
I say use both.
That's the kind of outside-the-box innovation that good ol' American capitalists are known for. Good job, Nbadan, I knew you'd come around eventually!We're obviously gonna have to use foreigners here.
Actually, I guess we could have the Minutemen round up illegal Mexican immigrants...
We'd be better off rounding up lazy college students.
I think you're onto something here. We only have so many dozen million liberals around, but there are like 5.8 billion furriners running around.
All they do right now is get in the way when we're trying to get at the oil in the first place, so it would be fitting if we actually made fuel out of them.
You're brilliant, Dan. Following the revolution, you get to be a slave rather than becoming gasoline.
I say we start with the Canadians.
What? Canda sucks!
Good thoughts, Extra Stout.
I envision Soilent Black to resemble the West Canadian oil sands processes. Processed human crude will be rather viscous, likely resembling a a bitumen. From there, we could either blend the human bit back with a condensate to get it to flow, leaving the bottoms intact for a refiner who prefers a full distillation curve. Or, we can toss the human crude into a delayed coker and end up with a bottomless light, which we can sell to legacy refiners without a great deal of upgrading capacity or blend it with some bitumen to get more a medium sour/USGC type grade. The coke can be fed to gasification plants for energy cogeneration.
Your concerns with "Human filter cake" shouldn't be a problem. I don't see human residua as being any more difficult to process than any vacuum tower bottoms.
On your standard human crude, you are probably going to have around a 35% vacuum bottom resid yield, similar to that of Maya from Mexico. The refiners with coking, resid fluid cat cracking, resid hydrocracking, and to a lesser extent visbreaking capacity will be most advantaged to get the stuff. Otherwise, the VTBs will have to either be sent to asphalt (Human Crude will make a great asphalt feed - lots of gas oil in the distillation curve) or blended with a cutter stock back to fuel oil.
We'd have to study using liberals as the main feedstock. Vegitarians wouldn't be a very good feed, and the propensity for liberals to give up on the goodness of meat is higher than in non-liberals.
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