United States Patent Application: 0070244208
We remind you that we have already reported the development, by the small nation of Iceland, with some help from more or less private parties in the United States, of technologies that are in the process of being reduced to commercial practice, wherein Iceland's abundant natural Carbon Dioxide, which arises from volcanic sources, can, and will, be harvested, and then be converted into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
A recent example would be: Iceland Seeks CO2 Recycling World Patent | Research & Development | News; wherein we learn that a team of Icelandic and US scientists have applied for an international patent, via "World Patent Application Number: PCT/IS2007/000007", on a technology entitled: "Process For Producing Liquid Fuel From Carbon Dioxide And Water".
Herein, via the initial link in this dispatch, we learn that the same team of inventors, which includes scientists from both Iceland and the USA, has made application for an individual and separate United States Patent on that very same Carbon Dioxide recycling technology.
Comment follows brief excerpts from the initial link in this dispatch to:
"United States Patent Application: 20070244208 - Liquid Fuels From Carbon Dioxide And Water
Date: October, 2007
Inventors: Arthur Shulenberger, et. al., Iceland and California
Abstract: A process for producing high octane fuel from carbon dioxide and water is disclosed. The feedstock for the production line is industrial carbon dioxide and water, which may be of lower quality. The end product can be high octane gasoline, high cetane diesel or other liquid hydrocarbon mixtures suitable for driving conventional combustion engines or hydrocarbons suitable for further industrial processing or commercial use.
Products, such as dimethyl ether or methanol may also be withdrawn from the production line. The process is emission free and reprocesses all hydrocarbons not suitable for liquid fuel to form high octane products. The heat generated by exothermic reactions in the process is fully utilized, as is the heat produced in the reprocessing of hydrocarbons not suitable for liquid fuel.
Claims: A process for production of liquid fuel from carbon dioxide and water using electricity ... .
(And) where heat from the liquid fuel synthesis ... is utilized to drive the production of carbon monoxide ... .
Background and Field: The present invention is broadly within the field of energy conversion and relates to processes for producing hydrogen by electrolysis of water, processes for reacting hydrogen with carbon dioxide for producing methanol and/or producing syngas and processes for synthetic liquid fuel production.
It is ... very important to develop processes that allow utilization of alternative energy sources to provide fuel that can immediately substitute the currently used gasoline and diesel distilled from petroleum oil. Such fuel which is compatible with combustion engines as they are today will render the need for major, time consuming, technical developments and infrastructural changes unnecessary.
Currently, two processes have been used on industrial scale to produce synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuel. One is the SASOL process which is based on classic Fisher-Tropsch chemistry and converts coal to syngas, which is converted to a variety of hydrocarbons via the Fisher-Tropsch synthesis.
The other is the Mobil Methanol-to-Gasoline process (MTG), which was utilized on large scale in New Zealand to convert natural gas (i.e., Methane) to high octane gasoline fuel.
Syngas or synthesis gas is a term used for gases of varying composition that are generated in coal gasification, steam reforming of natural gas and some types of waste-to-energy facilities. The name comes from their use in creating synthetic petroleum for use as a fuel or lubricant via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
The Fisher Tropsch process was developed by the German researchers Franz Fisher and Hans Tropsch in the 1920s. It is a well documented process that has been used on industrial scale for production of diesel and other synthetic petroleum products for decades. This process is used by a number of companies today to produced low-sulfur diesel and other petroleum products on large scale. For example, SASOL has implemented this process since 1955 to produce petroleum fuel (from Coal).
It is ... an important challenge to develop a process that allows recycling carbon dioxide to a valuable product such as liquid fuel.
It is even more beneficial to develop a process to recycle carbon dioxide to a liquid fuel that is equivalent or even superior to the currently used gasoline and diesel, and can substitute these without any need for technical or infrastructural changes.
The present invention seeks to address this ... by a novel combination of several processes for conversion of electrical energy to chemical energy in the form of synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels that can readily replace conventional liquid fuels from natural oil reserves.
Summary: The present invention provides a integrated, emission-free process for conversion of carbon dioxide and water to liquid fuel, such as high octane gasoline or diesel, suitable to drive combustion engines.
The process may also be used to produce other hydrocarbons or hydrocarbon mixtures suitable for driving conventional combustion engines or hydrocarbons suitable for further industrial processing or other commercial use.
Intermediate products such as methanol or dimethyl ether may also be generated by the production process of the invention.
The overall process comprises in a preferred embodiment the conversion of water and carbon dioxide to C5+ hydrocarbons (i.e., with five or more carbon atoms), preferably C5-C10 hydrocarbons. The overall process may also encompass the conversion of water and carbon dioxide to high cetane diesel or other liquid hydrocarbon mixtures suitable for driving conventional diesel combustion engines."
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So, we can, it seems, either tax, through Cap & Trade legislation, our vital Coal-use industries, and the US citizens who depend upon them, into impoverishment; or enslave, through mandated Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide in leaky old oil wells for secondary petroleum recovery, them all into the service of Big Oil.
Or, we can, by reclaiming and recycling, as taught herein, the CO2 that is generated in very small way, relative to natural sources of emission, such as volcanoes, from our varied and productive uses of Coal, in the manufacture of "liquid fuel, such as high octane gasoline or diesel, suitable to drive combustion engines", plant a 36-inch economic Louisville Slugger square on the top of OPEC's head.
Why doesn't every genuinely patriotic US citizen, in US Coal Country, take just a few moments to, one convenient way or another, let their federal and local elected representatives, and the editors of their Coal Country newspapers, know just what their preference might be?