Carbon Dioxide Becomes A Resource, Not A Risk

Posted on 30. Apr, 2010 by Ross in Cement, Bricks & Ceramics, Heavy Industry, Manufacturing, New Technologies

In the future, chemistry teachers will regale their pupils with stories of how people used to think that the biggest threat to civilisation was carbon dioxide, and that it was once thought of as a pollutant. About how nations dithered and delayed in their actions to deal with the threat, and how developing countries fought for their right to pollute the environment whilst endangering their very existence.

Why will this seem strange to the children of the future? Because the next part of the lesson will focus on how carbon dioxide is a resource powering chemical processes, and how technology focused on ways to turn the danger into a desirable feedstock.

Sound too good to be true right now? Maybe, but work is currently afoot to lead a revolution in chemical engineering, recycling waste gases such as carbon dioxide into useful products. Whilst algae biofuels and artificial photosynthesis are perhaps still too far ahead in the future to seem tangible right now, one American company is about to set up a demonstration plant which could start to replace the concept of carbon capture and storage (CCS) with Carbon Capture and Utilisation instead.

Skyonic is about to build a commercial plant which not only scrubs mercury, heavy metals, and sulphurous and nitrogenous oxides from industrial plant exhausts, but which also converts carbon dioxide into sodium bicarbonate. Their Skymine ‘carbon mineralisation’ demonstration facility is already up and running, but the commercial scale facility at Capitol Aggregates - one of Texas’s largest cement plants - will remove 75,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the exhaust gas flue of the cement plant.

The real beauty of the Skymine process, however, is that it is able to make sodium bicarbonate at a far lower energy cost than conventional manufacture (the Solvay process). This is in contrast to most other ‘green’ processes which end up costing more to use then original processes, and means that the Skymine facility will indirectly save a further 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide compared to an equivalent level of sodium bicarbonate manufacture.

Sodium bicarbonate is used in a wide range of products: predominantly glass manufacture, but also food, cleaning products, toothpaste, building materials and animal feed. It also has implications for parallel carbon capture and utilisation projects such as algal biofuels, where it would be used as a growth catalyst.

As well as producing sodium bicarbonate, the Skymine facility also produces hydrogen and chlorine gases, which also would otherwise be produced from energy-intensive processes. The only inputs into the system along with the flue gases are water, salt and electricity.

With both the developed and developing world still pursuing coal power stations, this kind of carbon capture and utilisation system will make more sense to environmentalists than risky and unproven CCS systems and CCU systems which simply make hydrocarbon fuels for transport. Skyonic’s Skymine is likely to just be the first in a invasion of new technologies which treat carbon dioxide as a resource and have immediate commercial viability.

The gloom pervading the talk of carbon emissions just got a little brighter.

Image by Hoppo Bumpo @ Flickr