What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The Disappearance of Julian Brown

Was Julian Brown targeted by the fossil fuel industry?

There’s no way to know for sure whether Big Oil or another nefarious group was, is, or will be harassing Brown to bury plastoline, but it seems farfetched. Even if we ignore the moral, ethical, and legal challenges of stalking a private citizen, backyard plastic-to-fuel conversion operations aren’t a threat to energy companies—the entire concept of plastic-to-fuel conversion isn’t a threat to big energy. They actually love it. Here’s why: 

• It’s way too expensive to be viable. The kind of large plants you need to process a useful amount of fuel from plastics are very expensive. The Brightmark commercial-scale plastics-to-fuel facility in Indiana cost around $260 million to build—not the kind of money you can kickstart.

• All plastic waste isn’t suitable for pyrolysis. Only about half of the plastic we produce could be turned into fuel.

• It wouldn’t matter anyway. In an ideal scenario, in which a GoFundMe raised $500–900 billion to construct enough Brightmark-style plants to convert literally every piece of viable plastic waste on earth into fuel, and there was some way to actually collect and transport all that plastic, and the legal and regulatory issues this would create didn’t exist, the net gain would be around 140–160 million tons of oil per year.  So the best possible ballpark blue-sky everything-worked-perfectly result would be about 3% of our annual oil demand satisfied with plastic-oil. This is not keeping the head of Exxon up at night.

But probably the main reason Big Energy isn’t trying to shut down backyard pyrolysis labs is that major oil companies are investing in plastic pyrolysis themselves. It’s for creepy reasons—oil companies sell the petrochemicals used to make plastics, and their “recycling programs” are a PR move and a to say, “Plastic is fine! We recycle it/turn it back into fuel anyway!” Big Oil loves when people focus on recycling, because the alternative is not using so much plastic. 

The myth of the “backyard inventor” 

No one can say for sure whether or not Julian Brown made some world-changing discovery—none of his work has been examined by experts—but it seems extremely unlikely. First, there isn’t that much to discover when it comes to pyrolysis. We know exactly how it works, and improving it is a matter of scaling through engineering and logistics—not the kind of thing you can do on your own. But even if Brown did invent something novel, one of the many well-funded pyrolysis companies would be better served by licensing Brown’s technology than doing … whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing to him.

Julian Brown’s story fits a familiar script: A lone genius with little formal education is on the verge of a world-shaking discovery when he’s beset by shadowy forces protecting their empire. It’s good drama, but it rarely plays out like that in real life. Stanley Meyer’s dune buggy couldn’t really run on water, and he died of a brain aneurysm. Tom Ogle’s miracle carburetor didn’t work either, and he died of a drug overdose, not from a GM-sponsored hitman. Also: Cars don’t have carburetors any more.

We just don’t live in the time of Thomas Edison’s folksy lab anymore. Scientific progress is measured in tiny steps, achieved through decades-long, organized slogs where thousands of middle managers stare at spreadsheets and go to meetings that could have been emails. It’s not exciting—in fact, you can tell it’s the truth because of how boring it is.