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CoalTL Technology Converts Wate Plastic

 
Although coal isn't the focus of this release about the University of Kentucky's work in converting waste plastic into liquid fuels, coal-to-liquid conversion technology is at the heart of the research this article describes. And, it is noted in the report that waste plastics can be liquefied with coal..
 
Explanatory note follows the excerpt:

"Waste plastic yields high-quality fuel oil.

Ironically, after all the trouble of reclaiming plastic waste from gooey trash, recycled products often cost more and look worse than virgin plastics -- a situation that displeases consumers.

But fuel chemists M. Mehdi Taghiei and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington report a new, efficient way of converting plastic waste into high-quality, saturated fuel oil.

"It's good oil, too--much like imported crude oil," Taghiei said this week in Chicago at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. "This oil is even lighter and easier to refine into high-octane fuel than imported oil. It has no sulfur and fewer impurities." Similarly, the chemists found they could liquefy plastic with coal, also producing high-quality fuel.

The researchers mixed various types of plastic with zeolite catalysts, including HZSM-5 and tetralin

Furthermore, oil yields proved high: Milk jugs generated 86 percent oil, soda bottles, 93 percent. Polyethylene, another common soft plastic, eked out 88 percent. When liquefied with coal in a roughly half-and-half mixture, the plastics turned into even better oil.

"In terms of the economics of this process, we have done some estimates," says Kentucky chemist Gerald P. Huffman, a coauthor of the report. "To convert coal and plastic simultaneously into oil right now costs about $27 or $28 per barrel, compared with $18 to $20 per barrel for imported oil. But we're quite confident that we can drive the cost of converted oil down to roughly the cost of imported oil. This process may be commercially viable within five to 10 years."

The reporter, we believe, seems to inadvertently and erroneously identify "tetralin", above, as a zeolite catalyst. It is not. It is, however, as we understand it, a Hydrogen-donor solvent employed by West Virginia University in their "West Virginia Process" for converting coal into liquid fuels and chemicals. The "HZSM-5" is, though, a zeolite, and likely to be the same one used by Exxon-Mobil in their "MTG" (r) process for converting methanol, derived from coal and other sources, into gasoline.

In any case, this research confirms that coal and some types of waste plastic can be converted together into liquid fuels. Coal can lead us to domestic liquid fuel self-sufficiency, and help us to clean up the environment, by enabling the profitable recycling of waste plastic, while it does so.