Extract from a resource newsletter
How the Microwave Oven (and a Tyre Fire) Led to One of the Biggest Energy Breakthroughs in Decades
You might already be familiar with how microwave technology was discovered in the first place. But let me refresh your memory.
One day, shortly after World War II, a scientist at Raytheon working on radar technology noticed a candy bar starting to melt in his pocket. He quickly realized the radar was giving off microwaves at a frequency that heated up the chocolate. That was the jumping-off point for the development of the microwave oven that's a fixture of every modern kitchen.
And it's also what makes the "Oil Vacuum" work.
Here's the thing: Microwaves are like radio waves. They operate across a wide spectrum of frequencies — more than 10 million. Your kitchen microwave operates within a very narrow spectrum of those frequencies to heat up a cold cup of coffee.
Find just the right frequency among those 10 million, and you can heat up just about anything under the sun.
Including things made of oil that have outlived their usefulness. They can actually be turned back into oil!
That's what dawned on a scientist in New Jersey one day in 1996 as he turned on the local news. He saw a giant tyre fire at an illegal dump, belching acrid smoke for miles around.
What if, he wondered, instead of loading up our landfills with old tires, you could blast a tyre with just the right microwave frequency to break it down into the materials it's made of — including oil?
This was the beginning of the "Oil Vacuum."
So he set to work — experimenting with different frequencies and seeing what would happen.
One thing that happened was something you've noticed if you ever accidentally put a fork or spoon into a microwave oven — metal reacts with microwaves very badly. Tyres have metal inside... and the early experiments caused a couple of small explosions!
It's oxygen that causes that. So the scientist quickly developed a way to put the whole microwaving process inside a vacuum.
Bingo.
How the "Oil Vacuum" Transforms Trash Into Fuel
After some additional refinements, he perfected a machine about the size of a phone booth that in minutes can transform a 14-inch tire into...
- 1.2 gallons of diesel fuel
- 50 cubic feet of combustible gas
- 7.5 pounds of carbon black (useful for making everything from ink to athletic gear)
- 2 pounds of high-strength steel.
And it's not just the tyres from a junked car that the "Oil Vacuum" can transform into oil.
There are metal, plastics, rubber, foam... adding up to about 10% of the car's weight... all of which can be run through the "Oil Vacuum" and transformed into 80% combustible gases — and 20% oil. With no emissions. And no pollution. The amount of waste that goes to a landfill is cut by 65%.
Now, I can hear you saying, "Wait a minute. There's a catch here. This microwaving process has to eat up nearly as much energy as it actually produces, right?"
Nope. In one hour, the "Oil Vacuum" can take 10 tons of automobile waste and generate enough energy to heat an average-sized house for more than 20 days. That's better than a 17-to-1 ratio of energy produced to energy consumed!
Or if you want to look at it strictly in dollars and cents... the "Oil Vacuum" uses 50 cents of electricity to produce $5 worth of fuel and other products.
The "Oil Vacuum" isn't some vague concept that's still years away. The tiny company whose scientist developed it has signed contracts for its machines to go into use this year.
In fact, an auto recycler in New York State will be using it onsite no later than May 31. And a California firm will build a brand-new tire recycling plant in Arizona this year, built exclusively around the "Oil Vacuum." It'll process 60,000 pounds of tires every day.
And if automotive scrap can be transformed into oil, so can lots of other things.
That's why the U.S. military is thinking about using the "Oil Vacuum" in Iraq — transforming water bottles and food containers into useable fuel. For a military that burns through 1,700,000 gallons of fuel every day in Iraq, every little drop counts — especially if it means that fuel doesn't have to be trucked in from Kuwait or flown in from even farther away.
But let's say, for argument's sake, that the military doesn't bite. Let's just say that the "Oil Vacuum" is never used for anything other than recycling tyres and other automotive waste. (That's nearly impossible, as I'll show you in a bit... but I want to make conservative projections here.)
Every year in this country, we throw away 290 million tyres. With 1.2 gallons of oil inside each tyre, and 42 gallons in a barrel of oil, that's 8.29 million barrels of oil.
With oil priced at $101.22 per barrel, that's $839.5 million worth of oil getting thrown away this year.
The company's current net worth is $61.8 million. (I told you it was a tiny company.)
If it could book the oil profits from just half of the tires that get thrown away each year... it would be set to return you 679%.
How many times have you booked a gain of 679%?
But stay with me here. As I'm about to show you... there are two other ways the "Oil Vacuum" can be put to work that could prove to be even more lucrative
Millions upon millions of barrels of oil lie stranded beneath existing oil wells in the continental United States. Current drilling technology just can't reach it.
But the microwave technology that the "Oil Vacuum" uses to recover oil from old tires can also harness the power of worn-out wells. They lie all over the country, and they've been written off for decades. By themselves, they could potentially add several hundred years to America's oil supply.
Before I go any further, I'd better explain something.
When an oil well runs dry, it's not as if all the oil under the drilling rig has been sucked out.
In the early years of oil field development, a well might have run dry... but up to 90% of the oil was still down there. The drill just couldn't get to it. So it was abandoned.
Over the decades, the technology's become more sophisticated. (The geologist and stock-picker I told you about earlier worked hands-on with that technology.) So drilling rigs have been able to recover progressively more oil. But still... the U.S. Department of Energy says even the most advanced techniques leave behind as much as 70% of the "original oil in place." Even with oil prices at record highs, it's just not economically viable to squeeze any more out of these abandoned wells.
The 70% of Oil "Left Behind"
But what if even more advanced technology came along that could tap into this "stranded" oil reserve beneath our feet?
Enter the "Oil Vacuum."
The device is dropped down that abandoned well... and then the microwaves go to work. They heat up the oil to a temperature at which it can be easily extracted from the surrounding rock... in a way that no technology that came before could pull off.
And here's a bonus... The microwaving process actually changes the chemical structure of the oil so that it's transformed into useable fuel right at the wellhead.
Think of it as on-the-spot refining!
