Texas Tea Theory
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read all day. Apparently some person has come up with a design for a Fisher-Tropsch reactor that is supposed to turn garbage and organic waste into gasoline. If you like to be confused and amazed that somebody would figure this all out, click here.
I seriously doubt this will ever solve the energy crisis. Setting up a lot of small, high-temperature, high-pressure syn-fuel plants is not going to save the earth. If this process were really that economic the petroleum companies would have set up plants long ago to turn coal into gasoline. In fact, the Nazis used this same technology in World War II to provide motor fuel for their armies.
It’s well-meanimg that a person would want to save the earth from high fuel prices. It might be nice to live in a world where we can throw our trash into a pipe and cook it and make fuel for our motor vehicles. The problem is that small scale chemical plants are very inefficient and high pressure, high temperature reactors such as this are inherently dangerous. It is probably a good thing that this person never constructed his own device. It is probably a good thing that his instructions are so vague and confusing that no person could follow them to build this thing.
I have to say that I just don’t believe this whole Texas Tea Theory. The best thing to do with garbage is either to burn it for energy or bury it in a landfill and let bacteria ferment it into methane. Cooking trash up into synthetic gasoline would consume more energy than the trash contains. This is why people don’t do these things. In theory we could turn all our coal into gasoline by a similar process, but the cost would be pretty high. Setting up your own chemical plant is not the answer to high fuel prices.
