[More on Changing World Technologies]
Mindfully.org note: This is no great debate. But then, we really haven't seen anything from CWT that can be openly and honestly debated. They have not opened their books, so to speak, and allowed third-party analysis to be publically viewed. For that matter, as far as we know, CWT claims have not been analysed by an independent 3rd party. In spite of this latest response being rather meaningless, we've posted it because it illustrates the logic with which CWT is argued.
8 May 2006
OK, I guess I was right after all about your understanding of this technology. I don't intend to continue this debate. You've made up your mind. Time will tell if this technology is viable or not, and will eventually prove which of us is correct in our assessment.
Andrew Gallien, Shell Oil
6 May 2006
I read a rebuttal to an article about thermal depolymerization at this URL: http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2003/Anything-Into-Oil1may03.htm
There are numerous errors in your rebuttal:
1) Thermal depolymerization will reduce greenhouse emissions because the carbon loop is closed. The same carbon you pump out of your tailpipe is drawn back through the normal processes of growth and feed and eventually waste. The cheaper this becomes the less need there will be to consume crude oil which is "new" carbon added to the chain.
2) Plastics going through thermal depolymerization are indeed recycled. They go all the way back to the oil stage where reforming can produce hydrocarbon chains of any desired length.
I agree with the statements on the current practices of agriculture, but the analogy to thermal depolymerization is not accurate. The goal is to recycle waste streams, not defer them for later. I also agree that the society is too materialistic and uses too much of our natural resources. That is not the fault of CWT. That is an issue for society.
Most of the rest of the rebuttal comes across, frankly, as a frothing-at-the-mouth rant.
Ranting and inaccuracies are ways to destroy whatever credibility you are trying to build.
Andrew Gallien, Shell Oil
3 May 2006
Dear Mr. Gallien:
I looked forward to reading your reaction to my writing about CWT because, with your Shell address, I guessed that you are a chemist and could put together a well-reasoned criticism from which I might learn something. I was much disappointed.
You claim to have read my debunking yet you fail to absorb the simple fact that CWT is a fraud and they are not going to impact any amount of carbon anywhere. They don't do anything new or innovative or environmentally beneficial, other than steaming turkey guts for grease and promoting themselves shamelessly.
You chide me as though it were a given that CWT is proceeding with thermal depolymerization and I had somehow missed its blessings. What is the matter with you? Don't you understand that TD is nothing but promotional blather? Are you so impressed with a seven syllable bit of jargon that your common sense flies out the window? I see I am wrong. You don't have the sense to be included in our wonderful brotherhood of chemists.
Go back and ACTUALLY READ their baloney. Maybe then you will begin to understand that they are not doing anything going by the name of thermal depolymerization. In fact, their whole discussion of that is juvenile nonsense. They make much of the way they are actually using water or heat or heat exchange etc. ad nauseum. Do you have any notion of what thermal depolymerization is? Does it occur to you that some polymer has to be shredded into monomers to qualify? What, pray tell, is the polymer in a refrigerator that they are going to unpack into monomer?
Okay, you turn to plastics (very generously on your part since they claim to turn EVERYTHING into oil). Tell me what kinds of plastics can be turned into monomer with a little steam. Polyethylene? PVC? Polysulfone? Polyimide? Nylon polyamide? The only one with even a chance is polyester and that requires a strong base to open the ester group. Steam doesn't touch it. And what if they could reduce polyethylene into monomers? Is ethylene suddenly an oil in your trusting imagination? Polyethylene glycols are well known but no one would call them oils. How about terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol? Or bisphenol A? Does it entirely escape you that there is not an oil in the bunch?
Wake up and smell the snake oil!!! That's the only oil they are putting out.
Paul Palmer, PhD
His latest book is Getting
To Zero Waste
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