United States Patent Application: 0080023338
As we have previously reported, the United States Department of Energy, in it's wisdom, has farmed out management of our vital National Energy Technology Laboratories to consortiums of public and private corporations.
In addition to getting paid, with our tax money, to manage the labs, built with our tax money, those corporations are also authorized to assume at least partial ownership of the patent rights to the technologies that are developed in those laboratories by scientists whose salaries are paid with our tax money.
Thus, the patent rights to inventions arising from our Idaho National Laboratory, or INL, for one instance, are assigned to the INL's corporate managers: Battelle Energy Alliance.
Without further delving into who belongs to that "alliance", we remind you of an earlier report we made, as in:
Idaho Recycles CO2 | Research & Development | News;
wherein we offered some details of the "Syntrolysis" technology, under development at the Idaho National Laboratory, in which water solutions of Carbon Dioxide - as, we suggest, might exist in the effluent of Coal power plant exhaust gas scrubbers - are electrolyzed and made thereby to form a synthesis gas, consisting of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide, which would be suitable in composition for catalytic condensation into liquid hydrocarbons.
Herein, via the initial link in this dispatch, we see that Battelle Energy Alliance has formally applied for a United States Patent on that Syntrolysis Carbon Dioxide-recycling technology, which, again, was invented by scientists in our employ, on our payroll, at a laboratory we own.
Comment, with some caveats concerning energy sources, follows excerpts from the initial link in this dispatch to:
"United States Patent Application 20080023338 - Electrolysis for Syngas Production
Date: January, 2008
Inventors: Carl Stoots, et. al., Idaho
Assignee: Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC, Idaho
Abstract: Syngas components hydrogen and carbon monoxide may be formed by the decomposition of carbon dioxide and water or steam by a solid-oxide electrolysis cell to form carbon monoxide and hydrogen, a portion of which may be reacted with (even more) carbon dioxide to form carbon monoxide.
Government Interests: The United States Government has certain rights in this invention pursuant to Contract No. DE-AC07-05-ID14517 between the US Department of Energy and Battelle Energy Alliance, LLC.
Claims: A method for producing at least one syngas component, comprising:providing a nuclear power source; exposing water to heat from the nuclear power source to produce steam; feeding the steam to at least one solid-oxide electrolysis cell; and decomposing the steam with the solid-oxide electrolysis cell to produce hydrogen.
(And) routing the hydrogen to a synfuel production process.
(A) method ... further comprising:feeding carbon dioxide to the ... solid-oxide electrolysis cell; and reacting at least a portion of the hydrogen with the carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide.
(Plain H2O should be the by-product of that reaction; and, it can be recycled to the electrolysis cell.)
(And) routing the carbon monoxide to a synfuel production process.
Background and Field: Embodiments of the invention relate to the production of hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO) and in particular to the production of hydrogen and carbon monoxide from water or steam and carbon dioxide; the hydrogen and carbon monoxide may be used in fuel production."
---------------
In the full Disclosure, as you will see, certain vested corporate interests, we submit, rear their ugly heads just as they do in the Cap & Trade and Geologic Sequestration CO2 "management" proposals.
In this case, their wont is made known through repeated and exclusive insistence on the use of nuclear power to provide the needed energy.
We say nuts to more Three Mile Island's.
As the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, in their "Green Freedom" concept, as we've documented, propose, environmental energy can be harnessed to the task of breaking Water and Carbon Dioxide down into the basic components of hydrocarbon synthesis gas, which, as above, can then "be used in fuel production".
And, we do have plenty of wind and running water in US Coal Country, if not a generous amount of sun.
Far past time we did get some sunlight shining in on all of this, though.