Electric Currents

The Return of Turkey Guts
JR posted in Web news on June 19th, 2006

We haven’t heard much from the world of turkey guts in recent months.  Late in 2003, a company called Changing World Technologies received a lot of science press coverage for their pilot plant in Philadelphia that was converting organic waste from a turkey processing plant into a high quality oil.  The oil was so good that it could be produced for an estimated $40 per barrel and was easily refined for anything that conventional oil could be used for.  They were in the midst of building a demonstrator plant in Missouri.

Like many readers pained by the rising price of gasoline, I wondered what had happened to the project.  After all, $40 per barrel sounds pretty good considering that crude is presently at just under $70 per barrel today.  Discover magazine’s April 2006 edition has answered the questions.

First, it turns out that scaling up the plant wasn’t as easy as the developers originally thought.  Building took more than a year longer than originally planned.  Then there was the tweaking which is still going on.

One of the problems was that the process was sensitive to differences in what was being fed to the plant.  Too much fluid in one batch required different tweaks than when they received truckloads of feathers.  Eventually they settled that by simply blending a number of loads into a more consistent gruel.

Second, their estimated price of product was well short of the $40 they were expecting.  One of these was understandable; they had originally thought that they were going to be paid to dispose of the turkey waste.  After a ruling from the FDA that allowed turkey producers to use their waste as part of the feedstock for turkey feed (something that is suspected to have lead to mad cow disease when done with beef), they actually have to pay the turkey producers for their waste.

Third, they were competing with products like biodiesel which has a $1 per gallon subsidy from the US federal government. Just recently they started receiving the same subsidy and started managing a profit of about $4 per barrel of oil produced.  Not a huge profit, but if the rules on waste change, a tremendous profit again.

Good news for the company is that there are several European countries that already have very restrictive waste rules and higher fuel costs.  There, the company would already be very profitable and doing the good work of getting rid of the waste.