Expert Q&As

We spoke with Frank Pringle, President/Chairman/CEO of Global Resource Corporation, about the Hawk Recycler which extracts oil and gas from waste like tires.

The microwave technology that you've developed can be used to turn old tires into fuel oil. Can you briefly describe what microwave technology is and how it works?
The microwave you have in your home heats up things like food and coffee. That's a water frequency; its target is water. Several years ago, I found frequencies that target hydrocarbons, way up the scale of microwave frequencies. The total microwave frequency range, from stem to stern, is about 10,000,000 frequencies. That's how many frequencies there are that we know of. I've found about 18,000 frequencies that excite hydrocarbons of various denominations. When I excite those hydrocarbons, I release energy in the form of combustible gases and petroleum products.

So that's where the tires come in?
Well, that's where plastics come in. Tires are a form of plastic. Every day in the U.S., according to National Geographic's 2004 story "No More Cheap Oil," we bury 5 million barrels of plastic in various configurations, from sneakers to TV cabinets to plastic chairs-it all goes to the landfill. We consume 21 million barrels of oil a day, so approximately 24 percent is made into plastics that we discard. All of those plastics are hydrocarbons which can be harvested and brought back to energy in the form of gases and/or oils. I bet you 10 to 15 years from now, this microwave technology will be used for harvesting landfills.

So, you take old tires, and you use this microwave technology to get fuel out of them—are there any waste products left over from the conversion process?
When we do anything, we do it in a vacuum. Therefore, oxygen is removed from the area. There is no CO or CO2 that we create, other than what might be in the subject material. So we're environmentally friendly when we gasify, when we expose the hydrocarbons turn to gases. As an example, let's take a 14-inch tire that's been spent-it’s been used, it goes to the trash. One 14-inch tire weighs about 20 pounds. We put about 50 cents worth of energy into that tire, and we get $5 worth of byproducts out of it. We get 1.2 gallons of diesel fuel, 50 cubic feet of very hot gases BTU-wise, and we get about 7.5 pounds of carbon black. We also get steel. The steel can be separated from the carbon black to go back to recycling. The carbon black has two potential end uses. One of them is that if we harvest all of the energy, that carbon black still retains some BTU value—it can go to a power company. If not, it can be used to make rubber again, or to make pigmentation or plastics. So, on the low side, from putting 50 cents worth of energy into a used tire, we get $5 worth of byproducts.

That's a pretty big return. The process to recycle these items sounds like it has a minimum impact on the environment. It also has the potential to clean up plastic trash from landfills. But aren't you still just feeding into the ultimate problem of emissions by burning fossil fuels, or are these oils different in any way?
No. Diesel fuel is diesel fuel. But, if they take the diesel fuel and use it for electricity, they have scrubbers [devices used to remove dirt, foreign matter, water, or unwanted liquids from the gas flowstream in order to recover valuable liquids from gas], so that it will not be of CO or CO2, and the same thing is true with the gas. What we’re doing is taking the energy that’s just going to sit somewhere and be of no value and creating energy to offset the 21 million barrels of oil a day that the U.S. is bringing in. But it is what it is. If you burn diesel fuel, you will have CO2 and CO emissions.

• Green Technology | 1 comment • Email Article