Taken from CNN.com, but originally published by Popular Science. By Megan Miller.
In recent months, PopSci has covered various scientists' plans to curb global warming through carbon sequestration, mainly by feeding it to algae to make biofuel, or burying it underground.
Skymine uses the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks to make baking soda.
Today, a company called Skyonic announced a novel new system, Skymine, which uses the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks to make baking soda. According to Skyonic CEO Joe David Jones, the system will be powered by waste heat from factories, and will produce food-grade baking soda.
Last year, the utility company Luminant installed a pilot version of the system at its Big Brown Steam Electric Station in Fairfield, Texas.
There's still quite a bit of work to be done to make the current system viable on a large scale, but the baking soda idea offers solutions to some of the economic problems posed by other carbon sequestration methods.
For starters, according to Jones, the stuff can be sold for home or industrial use or buried harmlessly in landfills or abandoned mines.
Jones apparently got the idea for the SkyMine system while watching a Discovery Channel show with his kids. He pulled out an old college science textbook and immediately turned to a passage about converting C02 to baking soda. He'd found it interesting years ago and highlighted it for future reference.
4 comments:
Or you could build a mechanical tree to suck CO2 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16827763&ft=1&f=1001)
Keep 'em coming, this is fun...
Question: are you in favor of cap-and-trade? I've been trying to get my mind around the Lieberman-Warner bill...
that's interesting....they should start to investigate more options for grocery items and open a store called green goods, which could produce smokestack cookies.
adam- the link got cut off. but i was able to put "mechanical tree" in NPRs website and was able to listen to the 8 min. audio about it.
this tree idea is linking to the old idea of pumping CO2 underground in the oil wells, yes?
i have an intrinsic problem with trading credits for pollution, but what i've heard is that this works better and cheaper than pure regulation. have you heard of Baumol's book on theory of environmental policy? looks interesting.
Is your intrinsic problem e-mail length?
Yes, I think the market forces behind cap-and-trade make it more effective than a simple tax, though you have to hire smokestack checkers. Supporters point out the cap on sulfur emissions at coal plants that slashed acid rain in the midwest / northeast for about 1/4 of the estimated cost. Of course, global warming is much more complicated and broad. But I wonder if the price increase alarms from energy companies will turn out to be just as much hot air? I hope. Very tough because poor folk already struggle with energy bills...
Have not heard of Baumol. Maybe I'm ready to give economists another try after my libertarian brain-washing at IWU.
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