Alright, Steady_on, I'm game. Let's see if you can continue a conversation that you yourself started or if you take flight at some point.
To your numbers I'm going to assume that Mr. Bordynuik has to pay market prices for the plastic he's allowed to use, HDPE, PP, PE, and that he doesn't have any logical way of beating or circumventing that market. Let's face it, if he could get those plastic for free or could get paid to take it in any useful quantities like he has said in the past in his 'forward-looking' statements, he could make shareholders rich just by getting "waste" plastic for free and then reselling it on the scrap market.
So we look up scrap prices:
worldscrap.com  is one such site. We'll pick the very cheapest option that fits which, at $0.35 for colored, post-consumer HDPE, is the cheapest by far and we'll assume we can make diesel at 80% efficiency (10% off-gas, 10% carbon and other unusable materials).
Hypothetical ssumptions:
80% efficiency (10% for off-gas, 10% for carbon and other unusable materials.
$0.35/lb or $700/ton.
Cost of pyrolyzing, including catalyst, capital costs and labor: $3 per bbl or $0.07/gallon (just an arbitrary number less than $10/bbl).
Output is pure diesel for this exercise.
Transportation of plastic is free for this exercise.
At 80%, each ton produces 1,600 lbs of fabled diesel at 7 lb/gal or 228.6 gallons.
Cost per gallon: $700/228.6gal + $0.07/gal or $3.13/gallon. ($131.63 to produce each bbl)
Current diesel spot price: $3.003 ( ycharts.com ). Note that spot prices do not include taxes or any retail markup you typically see at the pump.
So looking at those numbers, it makes more sense to recycle the plastics even if that plastic could be converted to diesel. |
