US Patent 11492456 Recovering heavy hydrocarbons from plastic materials and geoformation

Sometimes, a problem is obvious, everyone sees it, but nothing happens until someone decides to do something useful about it. Methods are herein provided for recovering heavy hydrocarbons from plastic materials and/or geo-formation. In one solution set, PVC waste materials are emulsified by an amine solvent in an aqueous phase, thereby extracting heavier hydrocarbons from the primary structure of PVC into the amine aqueous phase; followed by de-emulsifying the extracted heavier hydrocarbons by separating and recovering the amine solvent, and then separating the de-emulsified heavier hydrocarbons from the aqueous phase by a hydrophobic membrane.