Recycling Excess Carbon Dioxide

Recycling Excess Carbon Dioxide - Popular Mechanics

  

The linked article was published in the popular media in 2003, and we're surprised the ideas haven't since then received broader public dissemination. We've already introduced the concept of Carbon Dioxide recycling, as opposed to expensive taxation schemes like Cap and Trade - which is nothing more than a tax on the coal industry in the ugly disguise of a shell game; and, the wasteful concept of Geologic Sequestration - which nothing more, at best, than the coal industry's enforced subsidization of the oil industry's scraping of dry soup pots; or, at worst, the costly stuffing of rat holes with a potentially-valuable raw material resource. But, this is one of the few magazine rack examples we've located, and we're submitting it now as an introduction to other, perhaps more credible, references we intend to forward.

 

The excerpt(s):

 

"The name Nakamichi Yamasaki won't ring any bells unless you are a specialist in the arcane branch of chemistry called solvothermal reactions. Yamasaki, a research scientist at Tohoku University in Japan, detailed his experiments at last summer's International Conference on Solvothermal Reactions, organized by Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Yamasaki reported that his team had successfully combined carbon from CO22 problem because it would consume more energy than there would be in the resulting fuel. and hydrogen from hydrochloric acid to produce a hydrocarbon gas that included methane, ethane, ethylene, propane, propylene and butane. Chemists have known that this type of reaction was possible. But it had been ruled out as a potential solution to the CO

Yamasaki solved this problem by using an iron powder and magnetite catalyst. The catalyst reduces the reaction temperature to the point at which the necessary process heat could be obtained by using the waste heat from power plants."

(We've noted the use of Iron-group metals and minerals as syngas liquefaction catalysts in coal-to-liquid processes. Note here the use of hydrochloric acid as the Hydrogen donor, which might reduce the cost of obtaining the needed Hydrogen ions relative to the electrolysis of water; or, it might be a more effective and simpler way to carry free Hydrogen into the synthesis reaction. And, note the additional synergy of using waste heat from a coal-fired power plant to attain the needed reaction temperature. - JtM)

"Changing Nature
J. Craig Venter is a scientist whose name does ring bells. Venter is a former government scientist who became a multimillionaire when he persuaded investors to back his private effort to decode the genetic map contained in human DNA. Last spring he used some of that fortune to create the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA). "The IBEA staff will use microbes, microbial genomics, microbial pathways and plants as potential solutions to carbon sequestration and clean energy production," explains lab spokesperson Heather Kowalski."

We've reported Venter's work previously, in connection with the potentials for the biological extraction of liquid values from both coal and coal mine wastes.

In any case, the potential for recovering and recycling the valuable Carbon Dioxide by-product of our coal use is quite real, and we will provide further documentation of that fact.