Breakthrough: Microwaves Make Oil Plentiful
CEO Frank Pringle with
Lead Engineer
Hawk Hogan of G.R.C.
The Green River Deposit
There is a deposit of oil under the Green River in Colorado which holds EIGHT TIMES more oil than ALL of Saudi Arabia’s oil fields combined. What’s the catch? The deposit is in the form of oil SHALE.
If you add up the estimated yield from all U.S. oil shale deposits, you are looking at 2 TRILLION barrels of oil. Now THAT would hold us for 270+ years, if we could only get at it.
The Harvesting Problem
The problem, until now, has been extracting the oil from the shale. We just didn’t have an efficient technology for extraction. Enter High-Frequency Attenuated Wave Kinetics (H.A.W.K.) by Global Resources Corp. This technology won the 2007 Popular Science Best of What’s New award.
In 1996, while researching the use of microwaves to separate glass from ceramics, a scientist by the name of Frank Pringle discovered with proper tuning, those microwaves could be used to breakdown the hydrocarbon chains that make up plastic, rubber, and other substances…
Frank discovered that for each different substance, a certain frequency would break down the molecules of that substance into simpler forms. Just as the magnetron in your microwave oven is tuned to excite water molecules (2450Mhz), there are other frequencies ideal for breaking down rubber and plastic (even non-recyclable plastics!) into oil.
The same process is used to gassify the oil in the shale. The gas comes out of the microwave reactor, into a condenser that separates out the natural gas (methane), and directly yields liquid diesel fuel. What’s left in the reactor vessel is pure activated carbon, which is the primary ingredient in water filters and other types of filters. It is also used as a pigment in inks and toners.
One exciting result of HAWK is that nearly 100% of the product can be recovered/recycled into useful prodcucts. The process is exactly the same for oil shale and tires, so let’s use a 20-lb car tire as an example. This is one of 290 million tires recycled every year.
| Product | Weight (lbs) | Annual Yield |
|---|---|---|
Oil |
8.5 |
348 million gallons |
Gas 50cf, 3000 BTUs |
2.0 |
14.5 billion cf |
Steel |
2.0 |
290,000 tons |
Carbon Black |
7.5 |
1,087,501 tons |
Total |
20 lbs |
. |
As you can see, 20lbs go in, and 20lbs come out. Another beautiful thing about this technology is that it is very energy efficient. The energy required to break the oil free from the hydrocarbon chains is a mere fraction (5.6%) of the energy available in the gas and oil the process recovers; and of course, miniscule compared to the energy required for conventional (pyrolitic) “cracking” of these hydrocarbons.
Capabilities of the HAWK reactor
- Shale into diesel fuel
- Coal into methane and hydrogen gas
- Extracting heavy oil from capped-off oil wells
- Old tires into diesel fuel and gas fuel
- Plastics into gas fuel
- Many other carbon-based substances into fuels without CO or CO2 emissions
When do the production HAWK reactors become available?
Their first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It’s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New York. An exact time frame for delivery is unavailable.
Production Volume
Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste — tires, plastic, vinyl — into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running).
How ’bout some videos?
The following links open in a new window. They are good-quality videos demonstrating the HAWK technology. Note that the process is exactly the same for all substances, though the microwave frequencies do vary by substance. If you watch a tire being processed, it’s going to look exactly like the process for oil shale and for plastics.
My thoughts
This technology fills me with optimism. It is legitimate, verifiable, timely, and seems to be the critical missing link in the transition from oil to alternative energy infrastructures. Please post a comment and let us know what you think.
– E.J. Wilson
Popularity: 33% [?]
Loading ...
UriShare - Breakthrough microwaves make oil plentiful said:
[…] Breakthrough microwaves make oil plentiful There is a deposit of oil under the Green River in Colorado which holds EIGHT TIMES more oil than ALL of Saudi Arabiaâ??s oil fields combined. Whatâ??s the catch? The deposit is in the form of oil SHALE. Submitted: 1 minute ago Category: Science Submitter: RssFeed Website: carbonphallusy.com Report this link: Click here to report Comments: 0 […]
HAROLD PAUL SANDERS(CRAZY HARRY) said:
Hey! I know that this will make a lot of the small people happy.
BUT Big companys (oil) and maybe many others wil do what they can to eather make it expensive or try to shut it down by taking it over. AS in the past. But I hope and wish these people can fight back so the small guy can benafit too. GO FOR IT BABBY!!!!
TC said:
Interesting technology. It makes me want to grab an old microwave oven and start retuning it:) You article at least made me go look up to find exactly what Shale is.
Things like this could do wonders to free us from middle eastern oil. It wouldn’t make the global warming alarmist happy, though. It’s just so hard to get away from the evil carbon. Maybe it’s because we live in a universe filled with carbon based lifeforms?
zehaas said:
If we are going to bow to the God of Carbon, at least lets bow to him on our own soil so we don’t have to tithe everything we have to OPEC. — ejw
TC said:
I agree whole heartedly:)
SWarren said:
This technology could save the US. I find it exciting, logical and exactly what our economy needs to bring us back on top. This is efficent, beneficial to our environment and a miracle breakthrough! I can’t rave enough about the possibilities. I encourage others to do as I have and write to your states representatives and push them to take a good look at the H.A.W.K. reactor. If those units could be mobilized, think of the good that would bring our country. I would love to bring the price of oil back to $30 a barrel and fuel down to a buck or so a gallon! You guys rock! I would love to hear about any advancements you’ve made, where your at with moving forward on it, how can I be more informed? Thanks for any help you give, I will continue sharing your website and doing all I can to promote this.
Great Job!!
zehaas said:
Thank you, SWarren, for your kind words. It means a lot to us journalists out here doing the research and trying to get the word out. Showing people the article is the best way to do so, and we sincerely appreciate your help with that.
The best way to stay informed is to check the blogs, just like you are doing. TC posts a new article every Monday, and I try to get mine in each Thursday.
Stay tuned, there is exciting stuff that we will both be writing about in the weeks and months to come, that you have to see to appreciate. Also, we have more journalists who will be joining us and they will bring their own styles, skills, and perspectives to the blog.
If you know how to do RSS, this site supports it. (see link near top right of this page), and it will advise you when we update the site with a new article.
– E.J. Wilson (Zehaas)
Chris S said:
Try telling all this to the arrogant conservative morons of Mitch\’s Chemistry forums.It sort of reminds me of the old Chinese proverb: \"Don\’t tell me I can\’t do what I\’m already doing!\" There are countless pharmaceutical companies and others who are already doing all kinds of chemistry with radio waves.Yet these idiots tell me that thinking outside the box is nothing but B.S.?
This guy who goes by \"borek\" is a complete jerk and total ass.He tells me it\’s just ordinary pyrolysis.He even got arrogant and nasty enough to boot me out of their forums to where I\’m not allowed to post anymore(quite frankly,he did me a favor ! ! !).
And these other arrogant morons in Mitch\’s Chemical forums feed me this narrow-minded dogma about formula E=hv and the threshold energy of individual photons.The overall microwave energy for chemical reactions renders formula E=hv completely irrelevant.I would really like to thank some of these arrogant conservative idiots who pretend to be real physicists for informing me that I\’ve got a micro-PHOTON oven in my kitchen instead of a micro-WAVE oven in my kitchen.
Another sarcastic moron who goes by \"enahs\"in these chemical forums told me that I couldn\’t possibly be any more wrong……for saying that the old-fashioned Newtonian model fits man-made radio waves better than the quantum model of individual discrete photons.If that be the case,then how come I\’m not the only one in the physics community who says this?
It\’s pretty sad and unfortunate……that the mainstream science community has been taken over these days……by narrow-minded dogma,dim-wits and total CRACKPOTS who want to treat everybody else like one.
I did however,propose to username \"billnotgatez\" that he might be able to solve an energy efficient chemical conversion problem of ethanol to butanol by way of H20 dehydration assisted by microwave catalysis.He seemed to be the only one who respected my attempts to be helpful in this matter.
GRC keep-up the cutting-edge scientific withcraft and total heresy ! ! !
Aubrey Calabro said:
This is a great site. The content is very informative.