So long as we're going to be making plastics, it seemed that pyrolysis and/or incineration made sense to destroy the plastic waste. Then reduce the amount of plastics at the start of the pipeline.
(Obviously it's more efficient to make fuel directly from oil, but that's not the point. Narrowly from an energy perspective, the comparison to make is (a) make plastic from oil, separately make jet fuel from oil, burn the jet fuel, and send plastic to the landfill, vs (b) make plastic from oil, use it, then turn it into jet fuel and then burn that. Obviously you don't make plastic as only an inefficient intermediate step in jet fuel production.)
But if the pyrolysis process is going to release potent carcinogens up the smokestack, then that changes everything.
The article is a little bit bad, in that it doesn't clearly explain whether the fuel itself is carcinogenic, or if it's a byproduct of the pyrolysis process that is. It also doesn't explain what those chemicals are (I assume they are hydrocarbons, cousins of benzene), or why they are not burned in the process that powers the pyrolysis. Is the combustion too dirty, not high-temperature enough? Are volatile gasses leaking through some insufficiently-selective distillation process? Are products just recklessly being vented to atmosphere?
There are plenty of examples of corporations doing horrible things to make a buck, and the corporate/PR/lawyer-speak from Chevron does nothing to allay my fears. But I assume there are also chemists involved who do give a shit and are not setting out to poison people nearby. We've heard from the whistleblower. We've heard from the lawyer/PR flaks. I'd like to hear from some chemists.
From what I understand of the process, simple incineration (i.e. put it in a barrel and burn it) is the problem. High temp incineration does break up nearly every possible carcinogen of hydrocarbon origin into simpler non-carcinogenic compounds, with the caveat that if it’s high temp while using atmospheric oxygen it will likely produce a lot more NOx emissions, which is also bad.
So long as we're going to be making plastics, it seemed that pyrolysis and/or incineration made sense to destroy the plastic waste. Then reduce the amount of plastics at the start of the pipeline.
(Obviously it's more efficient to make fuel directly from oil, but that's not the point. Narrowly from an energy perspective, the comparison to make is (a) make plastic from oil, separately make jet fuel from oil, burn the jet fuel, and send plastic to the landfill, vs (b) make plastic from oil, use it, then turn it into jet fuel and then burn that. Obviously you don't make plastic as only an inefficient intermediate step in jet fuel production.)
But if the pyrolysis process is going to release potent carcinogens up the smokestack, then that changes everything.
The article is a little bit bad, in that it doesn't clearly explain whether the fuel itself is carcinogenic, or if it's a byproduct of the pyrolysis process that is. It also doesn't explain what those chemicals are (I assume they are hydrocarbons, cousins of benzene), or why they are not burned in the process that powers the pyrolysis. Is the combustion too dirty, not high-temperature enough? Are volatile gasses leaking through some insufficiently-selective distillation process? Are products just recklessly being vented to atmosphere?
There are plenty of examples of corporations doing horrible things to make a buck, and the corporate/PR/lawyer-speak from Chevron does nothing to allay my fears. But I assume there are also chemists involved who do give a shit and are not setting out to poison people nearby. We've heard from the whistleblower. We've heard from the lawyer/PR flaks. I'd like to hear from some chemists.