Company developing process to turn carbon dioxide into fuel

October 6, 2008

BY Ron Kotrba

Web exclusive posted Oct. 8, 2008 at 10:11 a.m. CST

Carbon Sciences Inc. is developing a breakthrough biocatalytic technology to convert carbon dioxide into "the basic fuel building blocks" for fuels -C1, C2 and C3. Carbon is abundantly found all around us, but mostly in compounds with other elements. According to Carbon Sciences, it plans to produce systems to utilize some of the more than 28 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a very stable compound, emitted globally every year for downstream fuel production.

"By innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering, we have discovered a low energy and highly scalable process to transform large quantities of carbon dioxide into gaseous and liquid fuels," the company stated. "The key to our CO2-to-Fuel approach lies in a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process. Instead of using expensive inorganic catalysts, such as zinc, gold or zeolite, with traditional catalytic chemical processes, the Carbon Sciences process uses inexpensive, renewable biomolecules to catalyze certain chemical reactions required to transform CO2 into basic hydrocarbon building blocks. Of greatest significance, our process occurs at low temperature and low pressure, thereby requiring far less energy than other approaches."

According to Carbon Sciences, its process involves a "complete plant level process" for positioning at a large carbon dioxide emissions source such as a coal-fired power plant. It consists of a carbon dioxide flue gas processor, where crude purification of the emissions stream removes heavy particulates; a biocatalyst unit that regenerates biocatalysts for the transformation process; the biocatalytic reactor matrix, which Carbon Sciences states is the "primary and largest part of the plant where mass quantities of biocatalysts work in a matrix of liquid reaction chambers, performing the multi-stage breakdown of CO2 and its transformation to basic gas and liquid hydrocarbons. These reactors are inexpensive, low temperature and low pressure vessels. Then the liquid solutions are filtered through membrane units to extract liquid fuels and gaseous fuels are extracted through condensers; the final step of conversion/polishing, the output from which contains "low hydrocarbon fuels - e.g., C1-C3. These hydrocarbons can easily be processed into higher fuels, such as gasoline and jet fuel, through commercially available catalytic converters," Carbon Sciences states.

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