MIT Chemical Engineers Develop New Way To Separate Crude Oil (thecooldown.com) 36
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the Cool Down: A team of chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented a new process to separate crude oil components, potentially bringing forward a replacement that can cut its harmful carbon pollution by 90%. The original technique, which uses heat to separate crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and heating oil, accounts for roughly 1% of all global energy consumption and 6% of dirty energy pollution from the carbon dioxide it releases.
"Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size?" said Zachary P. Smith, associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, as previously reported in Interesting Engineering. The team invented a polymer membrane that divides crude oil into its various uses like a sieve. The new process follows a similar strategy used by the water industry for desalination, which uses reverse osmosis membranes and has been around since the 1970s. [The membrane excelled in lab tests. It increased the toluene concentration by 20 times in a mixture with triisopropylbenzene. It also effectively separated real industrial oil samples containing naphtha, kerosene, and diesel.]
"Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size?" said Zachary P. Smith, associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, as previously reported in Interesting Engineering. The team invented a polymer membrane that divides crude oil into its various uses like a sieve. The new process follows a similar strategy used by the water industry for desalination, which uses reverse osmosis membranes and has been around since the 1970s. [The membrane excelled in lab tests. It increased the toluene concentration by 20 times in a mixture with triisopropylbenzene. It also effectively separated real industrial oil samples containing naphtha, kerosene, and diesel.]
90% (Score:2, Troll)
I know a way to cut the carbon emmission by about 100%
Leave it in the ground
Re:90% (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy to say, hard to do. Do you travel--at all? Do you buy things made in in places too far to walk to? Do you buy things made of iron or aluminum or plastic?
It's a lot easier to reduce emissions by 90% by reducing pollution from the refining process, than it is to change the way every human being on earth lives.
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While that is true it's important to not get caught up on the number 90%. The problem with getting oil out of the ground is that most emissions aren't the result of refining it, it's the result of burning it. You're actually only talking about 5.5% carbon emissions when you focus only on the emissions from the stack from heating, and we have ways that can be managed if we put the right pressure on creating the necessary investments. A scary number of places still run oil fired furnaces for the heating purpo
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Easy to say, hard to do. Do you travel--at all? Do you buy things made in in places too far to walk to? Do you buy things made of iron or aluminum or plastic?
It's a lot easier to reduce emissions by 90% by reducing pollution from the refining process, than it is to change the way every human being on earth lives.
You're treating this like it's a binary proposition.
The GP post is correct, if it's left in the ground then the carbon in the hydrocarbon soup remains contained, sequestered. The GP post didn't say anything about all of the byproducts that society has become accustomed to, you brought up all of that.
A great many products that people buy and use only exist or came to exist because of a desire to find a use for the byproducts of crude oil refining for fuel purposes. There are other ways of accomplishing the
This will be immediately denounced.., (Score:2, Funny)
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i was pretty sure coming into these comments that someone would call these guys would label these guys war criminal anti-revolutionaries that need to be purged for even mentioning Little Satan Petroleum.
But i also somewhat agree that it's a relatively small win since it's 90% reduction of a slice that's maybe ~15% (from other sources) of warming of full life cycle of petroleum. But still that would be like a 13% "mileage" improvement for our petroleum which ok that IS pretty huge if it pans out given how
It's either a 0.9% or 5.4% reduction (Score:3)
But i also somewhat agree that it's a relatively small win since it's 90% reduction of a slice that's maybe ~15% (from other sources) of warming of full life cycle of petroleum.
The summary actually says that the current technique corresponds to 1% of global energy consumption it then talks about it being 6% of dirty energy pollution. So depending on what that actually means it will either be a 0.9% or 5.4% reduction in global carbon emissions which is pretty good. Plus, unless the membrane itself is insanely expensive, the reduction in energy use will mean reductions in cost too so I'd expect industry to jump all over it provided it can be scaled up to industrial applications.
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it will be slow and expensive and nobody will use it unless forced. And then the other countries that aren't forced, will sell twice as much as you do.
Most refining capacity increases in North America currently come from the upgrading of existing refineries. It's almost impossible to build new ones these days (for the same reason we can't have many nice things), so unless it can be retrofit you are quite likely correct.
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no (Score:1)
Sure, screwball. (Score:1)
By the vast amount of folks ideological invested in opposing the oil industry vs. actually reducing emissions.
The idea behind reducing emissions is that the emissions will eventually be eliminated. To that end, this does nothing of the sort. At best this could provide a false notion of progress toward eliminating emissions. It reminds me of when tobacco companies donated money toward cancer research, it doesn't address the root cause.
That said, I welcome this advancement so long as it doesn't take time, money, or focus away from efforts to eliminate emissions.
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And by the oil industry because it's too expensive....
This is so not going to scale (Score:2, Informative)
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Seawater desalination is done at industrial scales. If this uses a similar process, why couldn't it scale too?
Re:This is so not going to scale (Score:5, Insightful)
If your average slashdot user had worked in Bell labs in 1947 they'd be bitching about how that lump of Germanium barely amplifies anything compared to the current 6SN7 vacuum tube.
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And?
Just like any other process that needs to scale: can you produce the same or more volume of wanted product, in the same or less amount of time, for less than what it costs today?
This is a process that has the potential to increase production yields by being more efficient. If it scales, they'll be all over it because it reduces costs while making them look like the good guys by making a meaningful cut in emissions. And it gives Big Oil something to point at when they say oil use isn't the problem, jus
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Global Desalination Capacity [wikipedia.org]: approximately 100 million m^3 per day
Global Oil Production [wikipedia.org]: approximately 100 million barrels per day, or about 16M m^3 per day
So, within about an order of magnitude anyway.
Re:This is so not going to scale (Score:5, Informative)
Making some process using a polymer membrane work for industrial volumes currently handled by fractionating columns is almost certainly going to be impractical. The membrane won't hold up long enough, and to get the separation to happen fast enough you're going to have to heat it anyway.
Somewhat addressed in TFA:
Previous attempts to adapt this process for crude oil have had the hurdle of the membrane swelling and interfering with successful separation. By replacing the amide bond with an imide bond instead, the team made the film more hydrophobic, allowing hydrocarbons to pass through the membrane without this issue arising.
Re:I wish they would stop calling it (Score:5, Informative)
The word "fossil" derives from a Latin word that means "dug up". This means that "fossil fuels" are fuels we dug up. If you don't believe me on the origin of the word then look it up. The description is accurate.
Because "fossil" has taken on the meaning of something old I find a double meaning to "fossil fuels". Fossil fuels are the fuels from old times, or for old thinking.
Feel better about the term now?
Then call it what? (Score:2)
If you're going to complain about the name of a category then you should at least present a viable alternative.
Here's my suggestion: use "olim" (Latin for "a long time ago") with the suffix "-ar" meaning "relating to". Don't like "olimar fuels"? That's OK because we'll just keep calling them fossil fuels not matter what.
FYI (Score:4, Informative)
English wiktionary.org entry: [wiktionary.org]
fossil
Etymology: From French fossile, from Latin fossilis (“something which has been dug up”), from fodio (“I dig up”).
1. The mineralized remains of an animal or plant.
2. (paleontology) Any preserved evidence of ancient life, including shells, imprints, burrows, coprolites, and organically-produced chemicals.
It would see the name is spot on because it's all stuff that's been dug up. You seem to have strongly associated the term with biomineralisation [wikipedia.org] which is what the first definition describes.
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You do realize that a lot of the plankton and marine organisms that became fossil fuels are actually older than most dinosaurs?
dirty refineries (Score:3)
Oil refineries are wasteful and dirty. You can see mile after mile of them in places on the Texas coast. They crack the oil with heat and pressure and draw off the distillates, anything not wanted gets flared off into the atmosphere. If these guys have a process that distills oil more efficiently and with less pollution more power to them.
Meanwhile we need to get off of oil, and fast.
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Woops you beat me to it. Well almost. If anything this technology will keep people on oil for longer.
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I hear you, but those refineries are going to operate at or near full capacity until demand for oil declines. Any reduction in pollution from the refinement process would be helpful.
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So, the dirty part, which is cracking
Distillation isn't clean. It requires heat. And while more heat is used for cracking, heat is used for distillation *in more places* in a refinery. Crude oil is heated in furnaces, after distillation it is heated again in furnaces for another round in vacuum conditions. Downstream of a cracking unit it will be heated again so the cracked products can be distilled.
While I'm skeptical that this will ever find use in the industry, the reality is oil (and previously distilled products) are distilled in many pla
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anything not wanted gets flared off into the atmosphere
Right there with you until you got to this point. Very rarely do refineries (in the west) flare unwanted products. At the refining stage virtually all products are wanted to some degree as they can all be sold at some price. Why do you see flames anyway? Well two reasons:
a) safety - almost all western refineries flare for safety reasons during process upsets, changes, or to prevent outright dangerous overpressure scenarios where relief valves direct hydrocarbons to flare.
b) safety - I said it again because
Carbon pollution not the real problem (Score:2)
Oil refineries suck. They're dirty and have a history of emitting some nasty environmental pollutants. You really don't want to live near one if you can avoid it. If this new process can reduce or eliminate environmental localized pollution around refineries, it would allow post-industrial countries to expand refinery capacity rather than importing refined product from countries willing to trash their own land/air/water for cash.
Repeat after me! (Score:1)
Oil is bad - mkay