CSIRO claims revolutionary waste into fuel process solves energy problem

Stan Beer
Monday, 04 February 2008 03:45

Science - Energy

"As a ballpark figure, taking the equivalent volume of crude oil and the equivalent volume of wheat straw, the compaction factor is somewhere between 15 and 20 (that is 15 truckloads of straw makes one truckload of oil)," he says. "If we can have something that processes biomass to a crude oil locally, and you're not moving biomass huge distances, we think it's quite feasible."

Dr Loffler believes that there is potentially enough low value waste in countries like Australia to produce enough bio-fuel to completely replace the country's dependence on imported oil.

"While I haven't done the calculations, there is evidence to suggest that Australia could replace oil imports while larger countries (such as China and the US) could replace at least part of their imports," said Dr Lofler.

"Potentially you could take waste from anywhere, waste such as the one or two million tons of paper that go into landfills each year, cropping residues from farms, waste from woodyards. There's a range of sources that you could use."

According to Dr Loffler, the resulting bio-crude oil can be cracked in the same way as natural crude oil to produce a range of products aside from gasoline, such as plastics and polymers.

Dr Loffler says that his team is about two years away from putting together a full scale demonstration plant which would be located somewhere in regional Australia.

CSIRO and Monash University will apply to patent the chemical processes underpinning the conversion of green wastes to bio-crude oil once final laboratory trials are completed.

The research to date is supported by funding from CSIRO's Energy Transformed Flagship program, Monash University, Circa Group and Forest Wood Products Australia.