WV Coal Member Meeting 2024 1240x200 1 1

CO2 + Iceland = New Kuwait

 
Among the people who have told, and who have been telling, us the truth about the resource potential of Carbon Dioxide are two Nobel Prize winners, Paul Sabatier and George Olah.
 
Though Sabatier won his Nobel for CO2 recycling early in the last century, George Olah is still very much alive and kicking, and at work on recycling Carbon Dioxide out of the University of Southern California's Loker Hydrocarbon Institute. 
 
We have reported to the West Virginia Coal Association on both men's achievements, and the implications of those achievements for West Virginia, and for coal-producing states like her, relative to what we contend to be a disinformation campaign regarding the putative dangers of the CO2 raw material resource that arises, relative to natural sources such as volcanoes, in a very small way from our varied industrial uses of coal. 
 
In another, unrelated, report, we quoted an official with the US Defense Department who, speaking of the very real potentials for converting coal into liquid fuels, referred to West Virginia as the "New Kuwait".
 
Even if West Virginians, and US citizens in general, are able to clear the air, so to speak, regarding what we contend to be Big Oil's disinformation smoke screen, deepened by their, perhaps unwitting, environmentalist group proxies' smog, and start converting abundant Appalachian coal, cleanly and efficiently, as we have documented beyond argument to be feasible and practical, into liquid fuels, West Virginia might now have competition for the title of "New Kuwait".
 
We earlier presented hard data on the measured amounts of CO2 emitted by volcanoes in Hawaii, and compared those numbers to the recorded CO2 generated by coal-fired power plants. Our little ole' coal industry was like a pygmy in a giant's nudist camp, in terms of embarrassing things that might be offensive to some.
 
Tropical Hawaii, as it happens, isn't the only volcanic ocean island, and isn't even the most active.
 
In the cold North Atlantic, the small nation of Iceland, roughly the size of Kuwait, might well be.
 
And, as a result of the still-active volcanism that formed it, Iceland has an abundance of two things: Geothermal energy and Carbon Dioxide.
 
We introduce, via the link enclosed above, a company founded to take advantage of those resources: Carbon Recycling International (CRI).
 
Some very brief, very pertinent excerpts from that link to their web site:

"Founded in 2006, Carbon Recycling International, Ehf, captures carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and converts carbon dioxide to renewable fuel, including renewable methanol and renewable Di-Methyl-Ether (DME). Other fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, can be derived from these feed stocks.

CRI is a venture-backed Icelandic American company with headquarters in Iceland and operations in Iceland."

And, they post a list of officers and "Advisors". Among them, we find:

"Advisors

  • George Olah, Ph.D.: Nobel Prize Laureate, Chemistry, USC, USA".
Should any of our readers need a reintroduction to the Nobel-winning Dr. Olah, we submit, following, yet another, quite recent, citation attesting to his Carbon Dioxide expertise:
 
 
 
 
"Chemical Recycling of Carbon Dioxide to Methanol and Dimethyl Ether: From Greenhouse Gas to Renewable, Environmentally Carbon Neutral Fuels and Synthetic Hydrocarbons
 
George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert and G. K. Surya Prakash
[Unable to display image]Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute and Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California, University Park, Los Angeles, California 90089-1661
Journal of Organic Chemistry,2009, 74 (2), pp 487–498
Publication Date (Web): December 8, 2008
Copyright 2008 American Chemical Society

Nature’s photosynthesis uses the sun’s energy with chlorophyll in plants as a catalyst to recycle carbon dioxide and water into new plant life. Only given sufficient geological time can new fossil fuels be formed naturally. In contrast, chemical recycling of carbon dioxide from natural and industrial sources as well as varied human activities or even from the air itself to methanol or dimethyl ether (DME) and their varied products can be achieved via its capture and subsequent reductive hydrogenative conversion. The present Perspective reviews this new approach and our research in the field over the last 15 years. Carbon recycling represents a significant aspect of our proposed Methanol Economy. Any available energy source (alternative energies such as solar, wind, geothermal, and atomic energy) can be used for the production of needed hydrogen and chemical conversion of CO2. Improved new methods for the efficient reductive conversion of CO2 to methanol and/or DME that we have developed include bireforming with methane and ways of catalytic or electrochemical conversions. Liquid methanol is preferable to highly volatile and potentially explosive hydrogen for energy storage and transportation. Together with the derived DME, they are excellent transportation fuels for internal combustion engines (ICE) and fuel cells as well as convenient starting materials for synthetic hydrocarbons and their varied products. Carbon dioxide thus can be chemically transformed from a detrimental greenhouse gas causing global warming into a valuable, renewable and inexhaustible carbon source of the future allowing environmentally neutral use of carbon fuels and derived hydrocarbon products."

We emphasize: "Chemical recycling of carbon dioxide from natural and industrial sources as well as varied human activities or even from the air itself to methanol or dimethyl ether (DME) and their varied products can be achieved." 

Note how both CRI's corporate web site and Olah's very recent American Chemical Society report echo with similar words, phrases, meanings and implications. And then consider, in light of the fact that coal liquefaction technology, as well as a method for Carbon Dioxide recycling, as we've documented, both won Nobel Prizes in the first half of the last century; that we are, somehow, "short" of liquid petroleum-type fuels; and, that our coal industries are being legislated and politicized into an impotent insignificance directed towards extinction.

Aren't we increasingly-poor citizens of Coal Country tired, yet, of having the wool pulled over our eyes and our shorts yanked up over our heads, while Big Oil and his unwitting environmentalist stooges pick our pockets and split the take with Oil Sheiks lounging under palm trees in the desert?