I'm tempted to mentally file this under "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", if only for the visual of a future where an insatiable appetite for meat-derived hydrocarbons is satisfied by minmaxing factory farming sans any constraint that the outputs need to be suitable for human consumption.
Hopefully algae is the most efficient way to this.
It's definitely one of the more unsettling titles I've read recently, but this quote makes it a little less dystopian:
"The CWT-TP process is designed to handle almost any imaginable waste, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged sediment, old computers, municipal sewage sludge, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, and oil-refinery residues".
As a complete layman, it seems to me like a really neat way to handle waste and oil dependence in one go. I'm sure there's lots of reasons why it wouldn't be practical though.
I do love the idea of technologies that make resources (and waste streams) more fungible. Though the level of dystopos then is where we draw the line on "resources" and "waste streams".
"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people."
Still, technology that excites the imagination is always itself exciting.
Hopefully algae is the most efficient way to this.