Carbon Recycling: An Alternative To Carbon Capture And Storage | CleanTechBrief
The enclosed article is about yet another entrepreneurial start-up focused on the use of, actually not-so-new technology to reclaim Carbon Dioxide and recycle it into useful substances.
The transmutation of CO2 into formic acid and formates, as below, is, apparently, well-known and understood as there seem to be more than just this one enterprise now starting up with that goal as their focus.
Formic acid, and it's salts, might not seem too exciting, but the compounds do have industrial applications and, as noted in the excerpt, can be used in fuel cells in a variety of ways. Just another way coal and it's by-products can help with the transportation fuel crisis, we suggest.
The excerpts:.
""The market (for CO2 recycling and resultant products - JtM) is open for innovation," states Larry Kristof, CEO of Mantra Energy, a company gaining international recognition in the field of carbon recycling. "It is likely that governments will soon legally mandate carbon capture from industrial plants and there needs to be a cost-effective way to implement it," says Kristof."
"Mantra's technology, named the electro-reduction of carbon dioxide (ERC), aims to take CO2 directly from industrial waste gases and convert it to formate salts and/or formic acid, both valuable chemicals used in a variety of industrial applications. Formic acid also has the potential to play a leading role in fuel cell development, both as a direct fuel and as a fuel storage material for on-demand release of hydrogen."
(We have previously described the process of Carbon Dioxide reduction, and noted that it can be accomplished via several processes - electrolytic, enzymatic, photolytic. Reducing CO2 into the very useful and reactive CO and pure, life-sustaining O2 is a well-known and understood chemical transaction.. - JtM)
"The ERC technology could provide a net revenue of up to US$700 per tonne of CO2 recycled, with an ROI previously forecast at 20% per year, depending on local costs."
(Worth doing, it would seem. - JtM)
"Carbon recycling options being developed globally vary considerably. The range includes the biochemical conversion of CO2 into algal biofuel, the thermochemical conversion into methanol and the biocatalytic or solar photocatalytic conversion of CO2 to fuels."
There are, plainly, a lot of options for dealing with our CO2 "problem", and dealing with it profitably. The problem, in fact, is beginning to sound to us like a huge opportunity - an opportunity to capitalize on our vast coal resources to solve all of our energy need, via full employment of coal and all of it's valuable by-products, and to lead us into an entirely new era of economic stability and environmental renewal.