What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Julian Brown’s Disappearance

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 has supposedly uncovered a secret an oil company doesn’t want us to know. According to this X post (and many others like it), Brown has figured out how to turn plastic into gasoline. Right in his own backyard.

But things weren’t going so smoothly for Brown. On June 25, the young inventor posted a video with a grim prognosis: “I know I’m not going to live long,” he muttered, before describing black helicopters flying overhead at night. Then, on July 9, Brown posted a video to his more than 2 million Instagram followers , saying, “Listen, everyone. I can’t go into detail, but there’s some really, really weird stuff going on. I’m definitely being attacked in a lot of ways right now… be on guard.”

Then he disappeared — complete silence on the internet, leaving his followers to ask questions and jump to conclusions. The theory is that Brown was targeted by Big Oil. This X post puts it better than I can:

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It seems this isn’t the first time that evil forces have targeted inventors who threaten the status quo. There was Stanley Meyer, the guy who invented a water-powered car and was later found dead, and Tom Ogle, who died under mysterious circumstances before his 100-mpg carburetor hit the market.

Brown’s story has it all: a brave hero standing up to a corrupt system that controls the fate of the world; a smart guy who could save the world if only “they” would let him. The only problem is, it’s not true.

Julian Brown is missing?

Despite the rumors, Julian Brown never disappeared. He just stopped posting.

Brown stopped updating his feeds in July, but despite numerous posts and articles on social media discussing his supposed disappearance, no missing persons report has ever been filed with authorities. According to Brown’s mother, he has been home the entire time. However, he began posting again a few days ago, blaming “hackers” for his inactivity: “A hacker got into my iCloud and was basically able to remotely monitor everything that was going on on my phone,” Brown said in an Instagram video .

What did Julian Brown actually invent?

Julian Brown didn’t invent a way to turn plastic into fuel. Plastics are turned into fuel through pyrolysis: the thermal breakdown of materials at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. We’ve known about this for ages; it’s how people have been turning wood into charcoal for thousands of years. Pyrolysis to turn plastic into fuel has been used since the 1970s, a number of commercial plastic-to-fuel plants have been operating in Europe and Asia since the early 2000s, and there are hugely wealthy companies operating such plants in the US.

To be fair, Brown has never said or implied that he has invented a process for turning plastic into fuel. That’s up to his followers. Brown is focused on creating a solar-powered microwave pyrolysis reactor that can produce “‘free’ alternatives to gasoline and diesel from plastic waste,” according to his GoFundMe listing . He calls it “plastolin.” He seems like a great guy I’d like to hang out with, but anything more is questionable.

Was Julian Brown the target of attacks from the fossil fuel industry?

It’s impossible to say for sure whether Brown was, is, or will be targeted by Big Oil or another criminal group, but it seems unlikely. Even setting aside the moral, ethical, and legal complexities of targeting a private citizen, artisanal plastic-to-fuel operations pose no threat to energy companies — the concept of plastic-to-fuel is no threat to big energy companies. They even like it. Here’s why:

• It’s too expensive to be viable. The large plants needed to turn plastic into fuel are very expensive. Brightmark’s industrial plastic-to-fuel plant in Indiana cost about $260 million to build — not the kind of money you can raise up front.

• Not all plastic waste is suitable for pyrolysis. Only about half of the plastic we produce can be converted into fuel.

• In any case, it wouldn’t matter . In a perfect scenario, if GoFundMe raised $500–900 billion to build enough Brightmark-type plants to turn literally every usable plastic waste on the planet into fuel, and there was a way to collect and transport all that plastic, and the legal and regulatory issues that would create didn’t exist, the net gain would be about 140–160 million tons of oil per year. So the best possible outcome, if everything worked perfectly, would be about 3% of our annual oil demand being met by plastic oil. That’s not something Exxon executives would worry about.

But perhaps the main reason why big energy companies aren’t trying to shut down backyard pyrolysis labs is that big oil companies are investing in plastic pyrolysis themselves . The reasons for this are pretty scary: oil companies sell the petrochemicals used to make plastic, and their “recycling programs” are just PR stunts and a way to say, “Plastic is good ! We’re recycling it/turning it back into fuel anyway!” Big Oil loves it 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 Julian Brown has made any breakthrough discoveries—none of his work has been peer-reviewed—but it seems highly unlikely. For one thing, there’s not much to break into about pyrolysis. We know exactly how it works, and improving it is a matter of scaling it up through engineering and logistics—not something a single person can do. But even if Brown had actually invented something new, it would be more profitable for one of the many well-funded pyrolysis companies to license his technology than to do… whatever they’re supposed to do with it.

Julian Brown’s story fits a familiar pattern: a lone genius with little formal education is on the verge of a world-shattering discovery while surrounded by secret forces protecting his empire. It’s good drama, but it rarely happens in real life. Stanley Meyer’s buggy couldn’t run on water properly , and he died of a brain aneurysm . Tom Ogle’s miracle carburetor didn’t work either , and he died of a drug overdose rather than at the hands of a GM-funded hitman. And then there’s this: Cars don’t have carburetors anymore.

We simply don’t live in the days of Thomas Edison’s people’s laboratory anymore. Scientific progress is measured in tiny steps achieved over decades of organized and tedious work, with thousands of middle managers slaving over spreadsheets and attending meetings that could just be emails. It’s not exciting—in fact, you can tell by how boring it is.

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