https://www.econologie.com/carburant-par ... -4234.html
CO2 soon the recycled fuel with a biocatalyst?
Carbon dioxide, long identified as the main culprit of global warming, could make a new virtue if a small American company succeeded his bet to turn it into gasoline.
At first sight, the company seems as crazy as that of the medieval alchemist Nicolas Flamel, except that it is no longer a question of transforming lead into gold, but the polluting agent into clean energy.
While the Obama administration has made the fight against global warming and clean energy research a priority, the Carbon Sciences company, which has patented its findings, hopes to ride on the mobilization of policies and opinion for become the first to succeed this bet.
The small company in Santa Barbara, Calif., Says it is ready to build a first pilot plant on an operational scale that could start producing next-generation biofuel by the end of 2010.
Its operational director Byron Elton explained that he only had to find a partner to launch the project.
"Our partner can be anyone who produces a lot of CO2: a coal plant, a cement plant, a refinery ..." he said during a meeting in New York.
If a partnership were sealed within nine months, this new type of biofuel could start being produced by the end of 2010, says Elton, while acknowledging that the timeline "could be a bit ambitious." The technology developed by Carbon Sciences uses microorganisms, which it calls "bio-catalysts". (Note from econologie.com: would it be micro algae?)
First of all, it is necessary to "destabilize" the carbon dioxide by mixing it with water. Then the microorganisms, protected by specially developed polymer shells, are responsible for recomposing hydrogen and carbon to produce hydrocarbons.
The mechanism is the same as that implemented in nature, during the genesis of hydrocarbons. But in the Carbon Sciences process, "the biocatalysts are protected and reused, so gasoline can be produced at a" very, very competitive "cost price.
Other companies are on this ground
Carbon Sciences, a publicly traded company employing only 8, claims to be the most advanced in this research, but it is not the only one exploring this track.
Investor-researcher Craig Venter, whose team was the first to announce having successfully decoded the human genome in 2000, announced in February 2008 that he thought he would succeed in producing biofuel within 18 months " fourth generation ", that is to say not on an agricultural basis like ethanol, but based on carbon dioxide.
Today the J. Craig Venter Institute boasts mostly advances using algae to break down and recompose CO2 into hydrocarbons.
These initiatives are generating great interest among US officials. They are particularly popular in the United States as the country derives half of its electricity from coal plants, huge emitters of carbon dioxide, whose ecological cost is in this respect disparaged.
"The question is not whether we use coal, but how we use it," influential Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan said earlier this month.
He had specified that 3,4 billion dollars had been budgeted for this purpose in the economic stimulus plan voted at the beginning of the year. A windfall that Carbon Sciences would like to enjoy, according to Byron Elton.
Source: http://www.tsr.ch/tsr/index.html?siteSe ... d=10727079
Official website: http://www.carbonsciences.com/