More On Microwaving Waste Tires Into Oil

I wrote about John Dobozy and his method for microwaving scrap tires into oil last year. Checking up on him again, he's got a lovely website up under the Molectra name, although the "About" page indicates he still hasn't been able to scale up his project to a fully-functional plant as of yet.

It turns out there's some precedent. At least two companies -- Environmental Waste International of Canada, and Carbon Recovery Corporation -- have tried to make similar processes work. The latter was more recently acquired by an outfit known as RECOV Energy Corp, who in turn changed their name to General Metals Corporation, primarily a gold and silver mining company operating out of Nevada, as of January 26, 2006. So maybe there isn't a pot of gold at the end of this particular rainbow after all.

What's even more interesting to me is this 1987 Rand Corp. report on using microwaves to process oil shale, which would seem to predate all of these attempts to make this technology work on tires by at least a decade. This might be a good idea, but the lack of commercial progress on this front is discouraging.