“Just converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2 billion barrels of oil.” — Discovery Magazine (May, 2003)

An article in “Discover Magazine,” dated May 2003, talks about a company named Changing World Technologies (CTW), which claims nearly to have perfected a technique of converting many different sorts of modern industrial products into solarpowered, self-contained, environmentally- friendly homes.

Ha! Just kidding. Oil’s the treasure, here. Light crude.

“This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind,” says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrialsize installation in Missouri. “This process can deal with the world’s waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming.” Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.

Or, maybe, it sounds too true to be good?

The article talks turkey — recycled turkey. CWT makes the claim that a process called “thermal depolymerization” can turn turkey offal, for example, into light crude oil (“essentially the same as a mix of half fuel oil, half gasoline”), using a two-step crush-andrelease process that “makes water our friend” in order to coax the right polymer molecule chains into being. Many various sorts of waste, actually, from the organic to the completely manufactured, can be ground into slurry and distilled into an oil baron’s wet dream [see the chart on this page].

Changing World, eh?

How about these lines from Appel:

“It will fit right into the existing infrastructure.”

“You’re not only cleaning up waste; you’re talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world.”

Furthermore, Appel says “a modified version of thermal depolymerization could be used to inject steam into underground tar-sand deposits and then refine them into light oils at the surface, making this abundant, difficult- to-access resource far more available.... The coal industry may become thermal depolymerization’s biggest fossil-fuel beneficiary.”

Appel would have it (perhaps correctly) that “anything with carbon” can be effectively rehabilitated by the process. Most of our general industrial categories, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC), wood, fiberglass, metal, rubber, and sewage fit at least roughly beneath this descriptive heading: meaning that such finished products as computers, major appliances, tires, bottles, animal flesh, municipal sewage, etc., are all candidate helpers in the production of New Oil.

Nuclear waste, however, remains untouchable.

The “Discovery” article focuses on fiscal positives and colorful details, and is decidedly mute on the question of what sorts of waste products are, in turn, produced by mechanized thermal depolymerization. The most ambivalently encouraging statement addressing this critical issue is posed this way: “The oil-to-mineral [byproduct] ratios vary.... Plastic bottles, for instance, yield copious amounts of oil, while tires yield more minerals and other solids. So far, says [project consultant Terry] Adams, ‘nothing hazardous comes from any feedstock we try.’”

All doubts of motive and benefit taken in stride, still, the article’s details need closer scrutiny. It can be read through at http://www.discover.com/may_03/featoil.html. You can check out the CWT site, at www.changingworldtech.com. To sum it up: CWT claims, indirectly, that our rampant consumer waste will actually retro-fuel the progress of wasteful society (at an 85% efficiency rate), and that the artificial manufacture of oil will slow or stop the current process of unnatural global warming.

But I ask, do we need more of the “existing infrastructure”? No. It may be hard to argue with a plan that proposes to make society’s wasteful by-products useful to human society. However, to those who would prefer to reduce overall consumption, to focus on finding and using cleaner, less destructive sources of energy, and to teach responsibility to the industrialized nations of the world, it may not sound a pleasant bell to hear that we may soon be capable of manufacturing petroleum source products at highway speeds.

Appel’s oil sales pitch is reminiscent of Jay Leno’s Doritos endorsements, of a few years back: “Hey, crunch all you want. We’ll make more.”

I’m sure he means it. And let’s not forget that other Swiftian principle in the meantime: if poverty and hunger (another two of the world’s biggest problems) really become just too much to bear, we can harvest the gross excess flesh of poverty-level infants, to be used as lunch meat on the tables of the wealthy.