14 DAY TRIAL // A company from California, Carbon Sciences, has managed to effectively turn CO2 emissions into chemical compounds that could be reused in fuels or other such useful industrial products. It seems that the recent successful technological discovery concerning the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is not a goal in itself for scientists, since the researchers from Carbon Sciences in Santa Barbara have taken the CO2 issue one step further.
They devised a special technique that would allow them to turn the CO2 back into useful products, such as fuel. Their biocatalysis process will transform carbon dioxide into a recyclable item, including it in the same category as paper, glass or plastic.
Biocatalysis decomposes CO2 into basic hydrocarbons like methane (C1), ethane (C2) and Propane (C3), all of these being usable for high-grade fuels such as jet fuel or even gasoline. Their approach yields better results than previous attempts, concerning the efficiency ratio of the obtained energy.
"We don't use high temperatures or high pressures, which is a huge advantage in terms of scaling the project up," said Derek McLeish, president and CEO of Carbon Sciences. He hopes to place recycling facilities right next to the big CO2 sources like coal plants or oil refineries, since obtaining it directly from the atmosphere wouldn't yield enough of the material to work with: "The beauty of this system is the whole infrastructure to distribute, to market and to use it is already in place."
Besides Carbon Sciences, there are other companies and individuals looking into the alchemy of CO2 issue, hoping, like the UK professor of Organic Chemistry from Newcastle University, Michael North, to obtain cyclic carbonates that could be used in industry. "People don't seem to realize that ten percent of everything that comes out of an oil well doesn't go to the fuel industry, it drives the chemical industry. So not only are we facing a fuel crisis but the entire chemical industry is likely to cease to exist. So we desperately need to find ways of making basic chemical materials out of CO2 to keep the chemical industries ticking over," he says. Professor North believes Carbon Sciences' project sounds promising and viable.
The company predicts that a pilot project will be undergoing by 2009. Of course, besides providing a cheap, key element to chemical-based industries, this attempt will also help clean our polluted planet in the process.