Turning CO2 Into An Assethttps://www.greenerdesign.com/feature/2008/10/20/carbon-dioxide-turns-useful
Carbon Dioxide Turns Useful - As Feedstock For Variety Of Chemicals
Novomer, a materials company based in Ithaca, New York, is one of the most highly publicized players in this emerging field. The 4-year-old company, led by president Charles Hamilton, is developing a line of high-performance, biodegradable plastics, polymers and other chemicals using carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The company was built around technology developed at Cornell to use CO2 as a building block for chemicals to produce plastics.
“We can currently make materials that are 50 percent CO2 by weight,” says Hamilton, who notes that most plastics are made with 100 percent fossil fuel, and that nine percent of the world's fossil fuels are used to make plastic. “With this process, we cut that use of fossil fuels in half.”
After years of trial and error, Novomer has found a chemical that works as an effective catalyst with a mixture of liquid epoxide and raw CO2. “We think of it as zinc-based pixie dust,” he says. “You take a bit of the catalyst and sprinkle it on mixture and the reaction is like a pressure cooker.”
The catalyst zips the epoxide and the CO2 together, forming a polymer with the consistency of honey. What's impressive about Novomer's process is that it only requires 150 psi to convert the mix to a polymer, which means it is more easily scalable because it requires less energy, and thus less cost.
Now the company is looking for reliable sources of CO2 and epoxide to scale up their production.
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Calera Corporation in Los Gatos, California, for example, has developed a nature-mimicking process that converts CO2 into cement - which is a product known for producing high levels of CO2. By removing CO2 from the atmosphere in the process of making a product that usually produces a lot of CO2 using other methods, the company is in a position to help reverse human-caused global warming and ocean acidification.
The company's founder, Brent Constantz, has stated that its able to sequester half a ton of CO2 in every ton of cement it makes.It's All About the Chemistry
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Carbon Sciences is another company gaining a lot of media attention for its process of turning CO2 waste into carbonate, and eventually into fuels. The company, led by CEO Derek McLeish, is focusing on two applications for its technologies. In the near term, says McLeish, the company is working on a CO2-to-carbonate technology that combines CO2 with industrial waste minerals and transforms them into calcium carbonate, a high value chemical compound used in paper production, pharmaceuticals and plastics.
“In your everyday life, you touch many products that either contain calcium carbonates or use them during production,” he says. Carbon Sciences' technology is capable of capturing 440 kilograms of CO2 for every ton of precipitated calcium carbonate.
“This technology offers two benefits: it lowers the cost of production and it is carbon neutral,” he says, noting that it would enable paper plants to transform their own CO2 emissions into precipitated calcium carbonate for use in paper production. “It turns the paper industry into a neutral CO2 emitter instead of a gross CO2 emitter.”
The company is currently demoing the process and scaling up a pilot plant to showcase its applications. McLeish expects to be in full production within three to four years.