While it’s important that we all take responsibility for climate change and reducing our carbon footprint by making small changes most of us know we need big innovations to address the issue.
Carbon Sciences recently announced a technological breakthrough that is capable of transforming CO2 emissions into fuel. The development utilizes a highly scalable bio-catalytic process to economically convert one of the most omnipresent causes of global warming, CO2, into the basic building blocks of most fuels used to drive transportation and industry today. This new technology could make a tremendous impact upon the 28 billion metric tons of CO2 released into the atmosphere each year by closing the carbon loop and recycling emissions into useful forms of energy.
"We are very excited about this breakthrough," stated Derek McLeish, the company's CEO. "By innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering disciplines, we are developing a highly scalable biocatalytic process to meet the fuel needs of the world. With over 28 billion tons of CO2 emitted each year, there is an abundant supply of raw material available to produce renewable and sustainable fuels for global consumption."
“The key to our CO2-to-Fuel approach lies in a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process. Instead of using expensive inorganic catalysts . . . the Carbon Sciences process uses inexpensive, renewable biomolecules to catalyze certain chemical reactions required to transform CO2 into basic hydrocarbon building blocks.”
Since the process occurs at low temperature and low pressure, it stands to be highly energy-efficient, and Carbon Sciences has developed plans for a CO2-Fuel transformation plant that takes CO2 from a large emitter, such as a power plant, and produces usable fuels as the output.
If the claims are true this might offer the potential to increase energy-efficiency while closing the loop on carbon emissions and preventing their release into the atmosphere. However only time will tell if this is a viable approach. If your interested finding out more about this technology check out their website Carbon Sciencesand let us know your thoughts.
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