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Among the energy holy grails out there are paths to take trash flows and turn them into value. Waste-to-fuel options range from methane digesters to biomass waste power plants to ways to turn trash dump streams into power.  Envion, as reported in today’s Washington Post, has put up a demonstration facility at the Montgomery County, Maryland, Solid Waste Transfer Station to make synthetic oil from plastics.

Envion is not unique in developing paths for transforming trash to fuel, but there are several elements of their approach that raise interest:

• Envion has put up a demonstration facility, in a public way, that will be processing plastics to fuel.  This suggests technology ‘on the shelf’, ready to move into broader use.
• Envion is providing direct fiscal cost estimates for the processing. Assuming that someone might actually look to invest the $6-7 million for a full-up system, Envion should (should) have the books & numbers to back up their claims.

Envion claims that it can convert one ton of plastics, depending on the type of plastic, to 3-6 barrels of fuel.  With oil on the market for about $70, that suggests a post-processing value of $210-420 per ton of plastics. (Note, the value might a bit higher as the resulting synthetic oil is high quality, with very few contaminants compared to oil coming out of the ground.)   Envion uses a “low-temperature far-infrared thermal cracking” Envion claims that the processing cost is $10 per barrel, leaving $180-$360  of value per ton — supposedly.

Let’s work these numbers for a moment.

• $6-7 million for a plant capable of processing 10,000 tons of plastics per year.
• Assume a plant life of 20 years (thus 200,000 tons/year), this would mean a capital cost (alone) amortized cost of $30-35 per ton or $5-10+ per barrel of oil.
• That capital cost does not, of course, deal with the energy costs, labor, land, etc …

Thus, it might actually be interesting to see Envion’s books & numbers to back up their claims about the costs to convert the plastic waste — are they providing estimates that solely consider incremental (energy?) costs rather than fully burdening the full system costs to transform a ton of plastics into fuel?

Now, some items to consider:

• Globally, plastics production requires about 8 percent of total oil production.
• According to Plastics Europe, a record amount of plastic was produced in 2005 – over 230 million metric tons worldwide.
• The EPA states that plastic waste accounted for over 12% of total municipal solid waste in the United States in 2007.
• The US uses roughly 50 million tons of plastics per year with roughly 2 million tons getting recycled.
• Plastics represent 9.5 percent by weight, or 3.8 million tons, of the total solid waste disposed in California. Plastic trash bags alone represent 1.0 percent, or 390,460 tons, of the total solid waste disposed in California.

This suggests a reasonably large market potential, a lot of plastics out there awaiting something better than permanent incarceration (or polluting the ocean).  That 3.8 million tons in California could represent 10-25 million barrels of oil or getting into the range of one full day’s US oil demand.

Taking Envion’s material at face value, their processes seem to offer some interesting benefits including turning the remnant (non fuel) material into a benign ash (that could end up in cement?) and the ability to process contaminated plastics .

Let’s put this into perspective for a moment.

Okay, that 3-6 barrels of synthetic fuel from a ton of plastic sounds great, no?  Well, perhaps

One ton of recycled plastic saves 16.3 barrels (685 gallons) of oil, 98 million Btus of energy and 30 cubic yards of landfill space (Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality). Recycling a ton of plastic also saves about as much energy as is stored in 197 gallons of gasoline

Hmm, it looks like recycling is more than three times effective, in energy terms than Envion’s reprocessing into synthetic fuel.

Thus, if you can recycle, recycle before considering reprocessing into fuel.

Of course, before consider that “recycling” or “reprocessing”, it is important to emphasize “reduce”: reduce the use and demand for plastics.

But, there are 100s of millions of tons of plastics sitting in America’s dumps, polluting our rivers, polluting the oceans, etc … Huge percentages of this are not recyclable (due to type of plastic) … Thus, if (a big if) all these could be ‘mined’ and transformed into (cleaner than drilled for oil) synthetic oil, that could be a useful path toward reducing plastic waste’s intrusive and extensive global reach.  And, perhaps Envion could provide a useful Silver Speck of Dust to reducing this global blight.