Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine — a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup —

turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate
me,” Pringle says without sarcasm. The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum
and gas hidden inside everyday objects. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of
auto waste — tires, plastic, vinyl — into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will
use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running). Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after
he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw
bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what
looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the
unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil. Or rather, he had extracted it. Petroleum is composed of
strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When microwaves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and
break it into its component parts: carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which
can be burned or condensed into liquid fuel. If the process worked on tires, he thought, it should work
on anything with hydrocarbons. The trick was in finding the optimum microwave frequency for each
material. In 2004 he teamed up with engineer pal Hawk Hogan to take the machine commercial. Their
first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It’s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of
small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New York. Oil companies are
looking to the machines to gasify petroleum trapped in shale.

Gerald Rowley keeps his dreams in his garage. There ... he stores an aging Mazda 626 sedan [specially
outfitted with a] one-gallon steel box in the trunk connected to fuel lines leading to a gasoline vaporizing
device under the hood. The steel box holds one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. The device beneath
the hood is called the VFS, Vaporizing Fuel System. I came here to drive Rowley's VFS-equipped car. For
years, I had spurned the invitations of homespun inventors worldwide to travel to distant points to
witness first-hand machines that could deliver 100 miles per gallon or 200 miles per gallon. The claims
sounded too incredible to believe -- ridiculous, in fact. If such devices really worked, really did what their
inventors said they did, why would they still be sitting on shelves in anonymous workshops -- ignored by
the driving public and all of the vehicle manufacturers who serve them? What automobile
manufacturer in its right mind, especially with rising concerns about future oil availability and with
gasoline prices escalating worldwide, would not jump at the opportunity to acquire a device that
delivered 100 miles per gallon? Rowley's patented device is nothing new. It's just the latest iteration of
an idea already developed by others -- the notion that you could get more miles per gallon out of a
traditional gasoline engine if you pre-heated the fuel to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, thus turning it
into a vapor before it enters the combustion chamber. Vaporized fuel, when properly mixed with air,
burns more efficiently, saves fuel and emits fewer tailpipe pollutants than traditional fuel-air mixtures in
which gasoline is sprayed into a combustion chamber in tiny droplets and then mixed with air before
burning. All car companies know this.