For the past few weeks, the internet has been obsessed with the strange case of Julian Brown—a 21-year-old inventor from Georgia who supposedly unlocked a secret Big Oil doesn’t want us to know. According to this post on X (and many others like it), Brown figured out how to turn plastic into gasoline. In his backyard.
But things didn’t go smoothly for Brown. On June 25, the young inventor posted a video offering a dire prediction: “I know I’m not going to live long,” he intoned, before describing the black helicopters that fly over him at night. Then, on July 9, Brown posted a video to his over 2 million Instagram followers, where he said, “Listen, everybody. I can’t go into too much detail, but there is some very, very odd stuff going on. I’m certainly under attack right now in many different ways … be on the lookout.”
Then he was gone—complete internet silence, leaving his followers asking questions and jumping to conclusions. Brown, the theory goes, was targeted by Big Oil. This X post lays out the theory better than I could:
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This isn’t the first time nefarious forces have seemed to target inventors who threatened the status quo. There was Stanley Meyer, that guy who invented a car that runs on water, then turned up dead, and Tom Ogle, who died a mysterious death before his 100mpg carburetor could hit the market.
Brown’s story has everything: a dashing protagonist courageously facing down a corrupt system with the fate of the entire world hanging in the balance; a clever kid who could save the world if only “they” would let him. The only problem is that it’s not true.
Is Julian Brown missing?
Despite the rumors, Julian Brown was never missing. He just stopped posting
Brown stopped updating his feeds in July, but despite the many social media posts and articles discussing his supposed disappearance, no missing person report was ever filed with authorities. According to Brown’s mom, he was home the whole time. Anyway, he started posting again a few days ago, blaming “hackers” for his social absence: “Hacker got into my iCloud and they were basically able to remotely watch and view my entire phone,” Brown said in a video on Instagram.
What did Julian Brown actually invent?
Julian Brown did not invent a way to turn plastics into fuel. Plastics are converted into fuel through pyrolysis: thermal decomposition of materials at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. We’ve known about it forever; it’s how people have been turning wood into charcoal for thousands of years. Using pyrolysis to turn plastics into fuel has been around since the 1970s, a number of commercial plastic-to-fuel plants have been in operation in Europe and Asia since the early 2000s, and there are firms backed with huge money operating plants in the U.S.
To be fair, Brown never said or implied he’d invented the process of turning plastics into fuel. That’s on his followers. Brown’s focus is on building a solar-powered, microwave pyrolysis reactor that can create “‘free’ gasoline and diesel alternatives from plastic waste,” according to his GoFundMe. He calls it “plastoline.” He seems like an amazing person I’d like to hang out with, but anything beyond that is iffy.
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.
