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:
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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