Is this real or a joke?

Mar 16 02:25 UTC 2006

seems like the time has come to have a really great discovery come along, one
that provides us with oil, gets rid of our garbage, and reduces global
warming.

OH! look!  Here it is!

Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too
good to be true.

"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has
assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed
investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization
process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product
imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged
muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent,
infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such
as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out
the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign:
high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used
as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol,
this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man
fell into one end , he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7
pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized
water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization
machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There
is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a
glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city
of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin
doing exactly that."

Is this for real?

This is from the April issue of Discover magazine, but there seems to be some
suggestion that this was originally brought out in Discover in April of 2001.
I am confused.  Does Discover go in for big practical jokes?

response 4 of 33:

Mar 16 06:51 UTC 2006

"thermal depolymerization" has also been mentioned in the professional 
literature. But so far I've only seen general descriptions, not any 
peer-reviewed quantitative information about conditions and products. Some 
of the history and this kind of unsubstantiated information is recounted 
in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

A lot of the accounts that appear quote pretty much directly from the 
inventor's remarks. 

What is questionable is that this process has been touted since 2001 but 
only one pilot plant has apparently been built. Also there are many 
chemical plants that produce smelly intermediates or products with little 
or none getting released if they are designed and run properly, so why 
isn't this process operating without odor?

response 6 of 33:

Mar 16 21:09 UTC 2006

What a jerk....

response 8 of 33:

Mar 16 23:00 UTC 2006

Todd, you can't be from West Virginia! Your legs are the same length!

response 10 of 33:

Mar 17 03:54 UTC 2006

thats what is great about this new process, it produces more than it takes
to make it.

response 12 of 33:

Mar 17 05:02 UTC 2006

I was not refering to coal, but to the new plant turning trash to oil.

response 14 of 33:

Mar 17 18:17 UTC 2006

re #8
That's not my leg!

response 16 of 33:

Mar 17 20:27 UTC 2006

;)

response 18 of 33:

Mar 18 06:49 UTC 2006

frozen methane ... that is a real answer IFF it can be controled in
te thawing process.