Tyres

Turning Old Tyres Into Hydrogen

turning old tyres into hydrogen

Australian tyre recycler Green Distillation Technologies, reckons its technology for turning old tyres into hydrogen can commercially and economically turn end-of-life tyres (ELTs) into high value, oil, carbon and steel, plus it can now take the carbon raw material and turn it into hydrogen.

Technical Director Denis Randall said that although their tyre recycling technology is already a commercial reality the further post process development of their products has shown it has much further to go than just the destruction of tyres.

“Once you have a carbon source at negative cost, through the destruction of a difficult to dispose of waste, such as tyres, many reduction technologies become commercial including secondary water gas reactions to produce hydrogen for subsequent use in efficient hydrogen cell electricity production,” said Denis.

Green Distillation Technologies started in the small country town of Warren in Western New South Wales in 2009 when Denis started his first experiments to prove his theories. Two other partners, Craig Dunn and Trevor Bayley, who brought the essential skills of finance and management to the mix, backed him. This team is still the essential core of the operation.

From that original research and development operation in a shed at the local racecourse in Warren GDT has now moved to their production facility on a 21-hectare site north of the town, where the company is working on the technology for turning old tyres into hydrogen

They are currently working to expand the facility to full capacity where it will be able to process an impressive 19,300 tonnes of mixed ELTs per year to generate 7,160,000 litres of high-quality oil, 9,032 tonnes of carbon and 3,760 tonnes of recovered steel. GDT has expanded the technology to include oversized tyres used in mining with a single dump truck tyre yielding 1,570 litres of oil, 1.7 tonnes of carbon and 0.76 tonnes of steel.

There is no shortage of raw material as there are 1.5 billion tyres discarded globally each year with Australia generating around 25 million ELTs a year while the USA currently discards more than 250 million.

turning old tyres into hydrogen

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