Carbon recycling may be the answer to the CO2 problem
A lot of money and manpower is going into future carbon sequestration programs and demonstration projects. The projects won’t be functional for one or two decades. Meanwhile CO2 will continue to build in the atmosphere. A new method for dealing with carbon dioxide has been developed that would recycle CO2 into marketable materials.
Mantra Venture Group has acquired “technology developed by the University of British Columbia’s Clean Energy Research Center, entitled the Electroreduction of Carbon Dioxide (ERC).” ERC uses electricity to combine carbon dioxide and water to create a number of valuable substances “including: formic acid, formate salts, oxalic acid, and methanol.”
While carbon capture and storage (CCS), also known as carbon sequestration, demonstration projects aren’t expected to be up and running until 2015, Mantra has already completed an ERC demonstration program. A complete large scale reactor is expected in 2010, at least five years before the first of the CCS demonstration projects will be ready.
The great thing about ERC is that it can be both a cost effective and money making proposition for utilities and businesses that produce a lot of CO2. With global warming such a worldwide issue, countries are expected to require carbon emitting factories to install carbon capture equipment. The cost for that equipment could increase building costs by $1.3 billion.
ERC on the other hand could provide a net revenue of up to $700 per ton of CO2 recycled. Mantra is able to install demonstration ERC units on utility and Industrial plants within one year and commercial ERC units within two years. The electricity for the ERC process can be generated from clean technologies like wind, solar, hydro and wave energy.
Two of the main products from ERC are Sodium Formate and Formic Acid which have multiple uses in everything from baking soda to animal feed.
Using ERC in a steel plant could cut costs by replacing Hydrochloric Acid with Formic Acid generated by recycling the CO2 created in the production of steel.
Just as Mantra has acquired carbon dioxide recycling technology in the form of ERC, other CO2 recycling methods are being explored at Universities and research centers across the U.S. and in other countries.
Carbon dioxide recycling looks like it will be a quicker and more profitable method of handling CO2 than CCS. That being said, lets see how quickly this technology is embraced and used.
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August 12th, 2009
This is really good to hear. Governments are talking about burying carbon from their coal fired power plants. This looks like a far better (not to mention cost effective) solution.
October 24th, 2009
This won’t actually sequester net co2 if the resulting formic acid is used in a way that releases the co2 or if nonrenewable electricity is used to run the erc process