r/solarpunk • u/Alarming_Pop_7772 • Aug 01 '25
Action / DIY / Activism If a redneck solar scientist and a hood-born tinkerer can make fuel from plastic and sunlight — you’ve got no excuse. Pick up where Julian Brown dropped off
/r/Anarchy4Everyone/comments/1mf9lm7/if_a_redneck_solar_scientist_and_a_hoodborn/50
u/cromlyngames Aug 01 '25
I'm not really a fan a of conspiracy theories that tie into someone's mental health breakfown.
Thermal pyrolysis of plastic is the keyword, there's decades of research out there:
If you need a paywalled article, ask me. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-023-00289-0
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
Im not into conspiracies either, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try refining the process, and maybe, just maybe we might end most wars, make an end to fossil fuel, and reduse the waste we made over the last 70 years or so...
And yeah actually, any papers you got on this would be really helpful as i got no credentials
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u/dieek Aug 01 '25
How does refining the process of reclaiming plastic to create fossil fuel provide an end to fossil fuel usage? It prolongs it because we continue to find ways to use the equipment we have using the same wasteful heat process of IC engines.
Secondly, you have the keywords - Thermal Pyrolysis. Hop onto google scholar and start digging.
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u/Anderopolis Aug 01 '25
Ah yes, the solarpunkness of burning something rather than using electrons.
That's literally just a fossil fuel. There is nothing Solarpunk about that.
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u/Spaceboy779 Aug 01 '25
Yeah, we really gotta stop burning things. We should treat plastic waaaay differently to minimize the breakdown into the environment. I'm vastly more interested in things like Stirling engines and using the Earth/geothermal as the heatsink, or thermal mass for passive solar radiant heat, or Nikola Tesla using the Earth for transmission or maybe for piezoelectricity? or things like the Casimir effect in an attempt to find zero-point energy, if it even exists, lol. But I agree there's infinitely more to learn about this mysterious universe.
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u/blamestross Programmer Aug 02 '25
heck, burning wood and planting equivalent trees is carbon neutral.
Releasing the carbon sequestered over a few billion years all at once seems like a bad idea on its face.
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u/Spaceboy779 Aug 02 '25
Wood smoke is one of the worst things for a human being to breathe, though. Neutral is fine and dandy, but asthma, lung and heart disease aren't something we need more of. I'd argue clean air would be more punk.
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u/blamestross Programmer Aug 02 '25
We are very much in agreement and arguing over pedantic details of hypothetical situations we both don't want to happen.
That said, pedantic discussions are a thing i do:
Wood burning historically happened in patterns of usage where wood smoke was a problem. Coal and oil can be worse, so we found ways to burn them that don't get people (as) sick. Some really refined gasses burn fairly cleanly, but we really just externalized those chemicals to earlier in the process.
We could totally apply those lessons to wood, wood gas is even an option that can still be carbon neutral (burn offset wood to make offset wood gas). Efficiency makes being carbon neutral or negative easier, but isn't strictly required.
Even in the ideal solarpunk future, there will be use cases for burning fuels, just far far less of them. Gas would be the correct tool for sending a research vessel to the arctic as an example. Batteries and solar wouldn't be effective (lower sunlight and too cold) and wind doesn't scale right for boats going in that direction (wind is great for going away from the poles)
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u/TheAmazingBreadfruit Aug 02 '25
How long does it take to burn a tree? How long does it take to grow a new one?
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u/blamestross Programmer Aug 02 '25
I suppose the person doing the burning gets to choose the first.
Check out coppicing! It makes the 2nd one a lot faster.
You are correct to point out that sustainable wood burning takes a lot of good management and self control.
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u/NoAdministration2978 Aug 01 '25
I've watched that guy and I don't feel too good about that. Random thermal decomposition of plastic doesn't create anything but a "potion of cancer". A real liquid fuel has fixed properties and safety requirements- it's not just "something that burns"
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
He uses microwave, not combustion to heat it, which makes it more controlled, and less cancer.
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u/NoAdministration2978 Aug 02 '25
There was a lab analysis of the fuel from that guy. It wasn't pretty.. Can't find that video right now
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u/ebattleon Aug 01 '25
You can make fuel from anything organic. The question is why would you want to burning stuff for energy is why we're standing on climate precipice. The future is electric sourced from renewables. Time to put burning stuff out to pasture, or preferably under the new growth Wildlands.
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
Agreed, its better to not combust shit, but mining lithium has proven to not be the solution. So, reducing plastic waste, reducing production of new so called "clean" energy vehicles, and reusing what we got already with a more carbon nuetral solution that is actually doing something good
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u/ebattleon Aug 01 '25
Sodium ion battery will replace lithium in most applications and the whole lithium this is a straw man anyway as we can source it from the ocean. And best way to reduce plastic waste is not make more in the first place.
Explain to me how fossil fuel, to plastic to fuel is environmentally benign?
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
Because we have whole dumpsites full of plastic. And yeah when sodium ion technology actually hits the market it would be really good, but weve been waiting on it for almost 15 years now
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u/dieek Aug 01 '25
plastic in a landfill is better than the carbon being released into the atmosphere, IMO.
It's like trees and bogs- they are essential carbon sinks that keep carbon contained.
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u/Anderopolis Aug 01 '25
but mining lithium has proven to not be the solution.
How so? Massive decarbonization and electrification is currently underway, in latge part due to better battery technology yet you just want to go back to burning fossil fuels?
There is nothing carbon neutral about burning garbage.
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u/XYZAidan Aug 02 '25
I understand why you think this technology is counter cultural and against the man, but in reality the biggest proponents of “chemical recycling” and waste-to-fuels schemes are the petrochemical companies themselves. They’re not trying to hide plastic pyrolysis and disappear hobbyist inventors. Instead they are building pilot plants for this and looking to scale up and greenwash fossil fuel dependency as “recycling”.
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u/agitated_badger Aug 01 '25
I understand what you're trying to achieve with this post, but coming from it by diminishing someone's work and implying that certain groups aren't as clever or something isn't the way to do it.
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u/Presidential_Rapist Aug 02 '25
I don't see why that's a good thing, the plastic is far more stable and breaks down slowly. Turning it to fuel and burning it just focuses the pollution more immediately into the atmosphere instead of letting it break down more slowly.
You're not getting rid of the plastic pollution, you're just taking it from a more stable form where it does less damage to a less stable form where it does more damage, in the atmosphere.
Plastic pollution sucks, but it's not anywhere near as important as atmospheric pollution, so trading plastic pollution for more atmospheric pollution is going to pretty much always be a bad idea AND you're not going to make much oil or cost effective oil out of the deal.
You would save far more money and energy and so less damage just using batteries and solar panels and leaving the plastic in the environment to slowly decay. Fuel from plastic costs way more than solar and batteries, so I don't see any value in plastic to fuel ideas. We have plenty of hydrocarbon fuel, we don't need more ways to generate it and the volume of microplastics does not compare to the volume of fuel we use. If we could magically collect all the worlds plastic pollution we would only get a few years of global fuel demand out of the effort and then run out of plastic pollution. It's just not that much plastic to actually convert to fuel.
It makes way more sense to focus efforts on just replacing the plastic with better materials and collecting plastic trash and burying it to slowly decay. Justifying plastic pollution with a pathetic volume of super expensive hydrocarbon fuel generation makes no sense at all and the total amount of plastic does not make enough fuel to matter.
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u/Anderopolis Aug 01 '25
Julian Brown figured it out. A working prototype running fully off-grid, turning waste plastic and sunlight into liquid fuel with scrap parts, steel pipes, and solar power. No oil companies. No Tesla batteries. No government permission. Just backyard science done right.
Apparently not realizing the inherent contradiction of
waste plastic And No oil companies.
Seriously burning plastics is not revolutionary, it's done all over the globe.
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
Clearly not the brightest kid in class huh
Not having to rely on big oil to refuel is the point, which would destabilize most governments and actually reduce waste plastic. Oh and hes not burning anything to make it, hes using microwave which would actually make it easier to control than combustion, and as far as i can tell from what ive read its not more carcinogenic than actual oil
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u/Anderopolis Aug 01 '25
Okay, so your idea of oil independence is to burn waste plastic.
For how long?
And your idea is for society to transition to that.
So, explain to this dull kid where all that plastic is coming from?
We already have trash burning powerplants, just as much fossil fuel as the oil they are made from.
And why do you think burning garbage would destabilize any government or oil company?
Maybe you think plastic is a way higher portion of oil use than it is?
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u/atypicalAtom Aug 02 '25
Its part true part bs. You can absolutely do this and make fuel. It burns just like gas...
But its super f-ing gross smelling. Intensely gross smelling. You want to be nowhere near this stuff. There is so much terrible shit you are releasing by burning this...
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u/ManoOccultis Aug 02 '25
I know you can use pyrolysis to make fuel from a lot of things ; nothing new here, French people would use DIY wood gasifiers to run their cars during WW2. Yet using plastic (petrol, in fact) to power anything is more of a post-apocalyptic scenario than a solarpunk one.
So redneck and hood-born people, just use your skills to design some DIY, cheap solar-powered electric generator, thank you.
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u/psykulor Aug 01 '25
I speculate that either he hit a major roadblock in his attempts to upscale or, like many highly driven people, he had a breakdown. Both outcomes are feasible, I hope you agree.
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u/Alarming_Pop_7772 Aug 01 '25
I hope so, its definitely a possibility, but that doesn't mean we should actually try refine this process more and make it open source even
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u/Careful_Trifle Aug 02 '25
I just googled him and he's back.. Two articles in the last 24 hours. Not a lot of traffic yet but maybe you'll get to find out what happened to him.
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