Clean Hydrocarbon Energy and Recycling Plants (CHERPs) as anchors for industrial parks to help resolve the climate crisis, generate energy, reclaim raw materials and revive regional economies

From https://app.box.com/s/e9rglmcokwv8abtvp2jw6p0nx8b1my97
Clean Hydrocarbon Energy and Recycling Plants(CHERPs) as anchors for industrial parks to help resolve the climate crisis, generate energy, reclaim raw materials and revive regional economies across our nation and eventually the world.

The technology is NASA based and originated as part of President Reagan’s “Star Wars” studies.

INTRODUCTION

I am submitting this idea as a concept describing one way to resolve the environmental crisis while at the same time providing clean and renewable sources of energy utilizing what I refer to as Clean Hydrocarbon Energy and Recycling Plants (CHERPs) as anchors for industrial parks to revive regional economies across our nation and eventually the world. I have since 2003 been promoting this concept for my own home town of Weirton, West Virginia.

Currently in the public awareness are climate change concerns, prompted in part by the perceived increase in carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere contributing to the global rise in temperature and sea level rises resulting from melting icecaps. As well, developing clean alternative energy sources is the hot topic of the day, with our nation finally coming to the realization that it is time to advance into maturity by weaning itself off of the imported foreign oil bottle.

Equally of concern however is the plethora of waste by-products our societies produce which is polluting our lands and seas, like mold growing on an orange. Admirable and sometimes gargantuan efforts collect these pollutants, but the question is what then do we do with this waste once we have it? Simply burying solid waste pollutants such as plastics with their virtual indestructible nature is not really a viable long-term option as we are already encumbered with numerous landfills at or nearing capacity. A more rational approach would be to be able to break all waste, regardless of its nature, down to its elemental components to reclaim it and this is what CHERP-anchored industrial parks is all about

Fusion, wind, solar, tides, fission, along with the clean efficient extraction and reclamation of the hydrocarbons stored in coal, agriculture and waste residues; will all be components contributing towards the complete alternative energy picture resolving the climate change crisis. Going forward I will try to limit using the “waste” noun and replace it with “residue”, since “waste” generally means something which no longer has any use, which is not true with the CHERP approach. Thus residue becomes a renewable resource as well since it is constantly being created as the by-product of our societies.

We need to be open-minded about climate solutions. Outright condemning fossil fuels in favor of so-called renewable sources popularly proposed is NOT the solution but a play for tax based venture capital. The true culprit is the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Wind and solar are often advanced as the solutions but there is a problem in that the wind does not always blow nor the sun always shine, and both have low power densities that require tying up acres of surface that might better be used for other purposes. I also wonder how effective solar panels are when they become snow covered or wind turbines are if they are not properly winterized and allowed to freeze up. Going all electric is a single point of failure vulnerable to both natural and man-made acts regardless of how the power is generated, as witness the collapse of the Texas grid. Imagine if that occurred twenty years from now when all of those electric vehicles being touted were plugged in charging up. No heat, no way to move produce around. Better to have multiple sources at the consumption point, such as residential natural gas which could be used to run emergency generators. But I digress.

We need NOT look at WHAT energy source is being utilized but instead concentrate on HOW it is being utilized. ALL energy sources processed with the right technology can be environmentally safe and we need ALL energy sources, cleanly utilized, to insure we have a prosperous energy independent economy! We also need to stop condemning one energy source (e.g. hydrocarbons a.k.a. fossil fuels and their less dense “waste” forms) over another for what really is just a fight for venture capital, as long as that source can be processed in a carbon neutral fashion, especially if such an approach generates long-term jobs and revives local economies while at the time recycling hydrocarbon residues for use.

The locale will play a large part in determining which solution to best implement, which is why in industrial "rust belt" manufacturing and similar areas we should consider efficient CHERP technology with its benefit of recovering for reuse the metallic and silicate elements from waste and landfills utilizing advanced hydrocarbon and recycling technologies. This will revive the local economies of these areas by attracting additional industries in to process the recovered elements, transforming these areas into integrated industrial parks (which we hope are well planned and thought out) while transforming existing landfills into reusable hydrocarbon storage reservoirs that can be mined for their contents. I had sought to introduce CHERP technology into my own home town of Weirton, WV back in 2003 and was almost successful but the effort failed when the economic recession hit and the venture capitalists “pulled in their horns” causing the tech people I knew to walk away. At age 67 now, I am still hopeful in seeing this concept brought into my home town, but if this technology or something similar comes here it will require some source of government and/or private funding that alone I am unable to line up along with good business organizing talent. My contact has informed me that if the funding can be raised that he can re-assemble the necessary technical personnel and so I continue seeking to spread awareness of this technology and/or similar ones to benefit my home town area, WV, then the rest of the nation and finally the world. And even more important CHERP-anchored industrial parks would generate LOTS of jobs for LOTS of people!!!

ABOUT CHERP TECHNOLOGY

The process utilized by CHERPs is a Gasification-To-Energy (GTE) plasma approach stemming in part from efforts to develop and promote for commercial use technology originating from access to previously classified high temperature analysis and testing results of NASA systems and the “Star Wars” era. Coming myself from a NASA background, I was drawn to this technology as it appears from the physics point of view to be a very efficient means for extracting hydrocarbons from municipal and industrial residue compounds and coal plus breaking down any compound back into its elemental components for reuse without adverse environmental impacts. Some extracts from my white paper on the subject:

"The center core temperature in a Plasma Torch plume exceeds 17,000°F. No known compound can survive this temperature level. There is no residual ash from this process and the only primary exhaust emissions are nitrogen and water vapor." (N.B. to environmentalists, read that as NO BURNING, NO GREENHOUSE GASES!!!)

"By generating extremely high temperatures, the (hydrocarbon and other) waste media to be destroyed or treated undergoes virtually complete molecular dissociation (NOT burning by the way), returning to its original component atoms and excited particles (free electrons, ions and radicals). These basic elements can then be reformed into more stable compounds because the chemical reactions are readily controllable under the reduced oxygen levels allowed by plasma heating. This virtually eliminates the formation of dioxins, furans, NOx, and other toxic gas emissions. No fossil fuels are required and the conversion of organic material to the gaseous state is virtually 99.9% complete."

Now what that 17,000°F degree temperature tells me from a physics point of view is that the process has the ability to break any compound back down into its elemental components so that they can be reused. This is the natural closure to the manufacturing cycle which has been left “open ended” until now, the “golden objective” of recycling. What we are talking about here are recycling processes operating at the physics based level, breaking compounds down into their elements through the brute force of extremely high temperatures now economically possible with Gasification-To-Energy technologies. This is not at all unnatural to think about; in fact all of the heavier elements on our planet were recycled from the super hot interior remnants of the early stars of our universe.

The immediate moneymaker is of course the hydrocarbon synthesis gas. Different feedstock will have varying amounts of hydrocarbon content but we can stabilize the hydrocarbon output by blending in as needed more dense hydrocarbon sources. Again from the white paper “The Company has developed a technology capable of 30%-40% more burnable synthesis gas from the same amount of coal than by conventional methods. In addition, this technology can utilize high sulfur coal, "brown coal" or petrochemical sludge while maintaining present and future projected air emissions standards. The U.S. Customs unit has already been operated with crumb rubber to demonstrate this technology on a large scale." And while in my white paper I propose using the dense hydrocarbon crushed or powdered coal as a regulator feed source to “even out” the amount of hydrocarbon synthesis gas produced when processing various less dense waste feed stocks but this as mentioned above still produces no greenhouse gases .

For details please see:

1. My year 2010 white paper at https://app.box.com/s/xhqpsnaektxmrowodi92 then
2. This link to the SUI brochure on molecular dissociation at https://app.box.com/files/1/f/641323347/1/f_6060619405,
3. “AC Plasma Waste Destruction Questions and Answers” at https://app.box.com/s/bjy0vjpcrr9g491t3zn5
4. “About the Weirton-GTE Concept” at https://app.box.com/files/1/f/641323347/1/f_6060619405.
5. The “Weirton-GTE Points Presentation.ppt” at https://app.box.com/s/itgk1bngd4sdbxbl3nn2aqgev9yee8jl
6. Finally, this link to my "Project Weirton" folder: https://www.box.com/s/n1ffwagg2374vva1umo4

Regards,

Richard N. Cox
105 Front Street
Weirton, WV 26062
rncox01@gmail.com
Independent member, WV Senator Manchin’s "Project Weirton" task force
https://www.facebook.com/CHERPPs
http://www.facebook.com/NationalEmploymentRecoveryAct
My professional profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/11/75/829