NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Molecular Sieve Traps Carbon Dioxide

A big piece of reducing carbon emissions is separating the carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the emissions of fossil fuels and storing it, or using it in making other chemicals. A "molecular sieve" is a common method for getting CO₂ out of a mix of chemicals; it's a kind of ultra-fine filter. Unfortunately such sieves usually need more filtering to get the CO₂ out -– they aren’t always specific.

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At the University of Melbourne Professor Paul Webley and his team have come up with a kind of molecular sieve that pulls out CO₂ only. It's a chemical called a chabazite, which has a lattice-like molecular structure. Chabazite is in a class of chemicals called zeolites, which are common in lots of industrial settings and even used in kitty litter and swimming pool filters.

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The chabazite consists of a kind of ring of atoms of silicon, aluminum and oxygen, with a cesium atom in the center. The cesium atom acts like a trap door, letting carbon dioxide pass but blocking other chemicals. Webley and his team tested the chabazite in a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane -– natural gas. They also found that it worked in separating other gases such as nitrogen.

Different gases were allowed through the trapdoor at different temperatures, so it's possible to use that property to get even better selection of the carbon dioxide.

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One of the more immediate applications might be getting the carbon dioxide out of natural gas deposits. Often, when drilling for natural gas, there is a lot of carbon dioxide present that has to be taken out before the natural gas can be compressed and liquefied. The chabazite could also improve the scrubbers used to take CO₂ from emissions.

The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Via University of Melbourne

Photo: A naturally-occurring crystal of chabazite. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Blanket Is CO2 Absorber, Fertilizer and Kiln

Hikers in some areas know them well, and so does anyone with intense yard work experience: the slash pile. A new high-tech blanket developed promises to transform these awkward plant scrap mountains into several useful green products.

Since the piles contain stumps and other woody chunks, sawmills and paper mills have little use for them. Hauling the material offsite to be processed into fuel would be cost-prohibitive. Usually the slash piles that are especially common in the Pacific Northwest are either left to rot or subject to controlled burning in order to prevent forest fires. Can you say "excess CO2 emissions?"

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To prevent that, University of Washington chemical engineering professor Daniel Schwartz, along with students that included forestry resources PhD candidate Jenny Knoth, looked for a way to make fuel from slash piles without having to move them. They came up with what they're calling a "pyrolysis blanket" that wraps around the pile, causing the waste to smolder into a charcoal-like substance.

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The blanket is made from a heat-resistant laminate that's also impermeable to air. Adjustable vents in the material allow for the airflow to be controlled depending on the desired effect, according to Mara Grunbaum of Ecomagination.com. When a slash pile is burned under the blanket, the lack of oxygen creates a form of solid carbon known as "biochar."

Knoth, along with fellow students Ken Faires, Derek Churchill, Nate Dorin and John Tovey III, created a startup now known as Carbon Cultures to further develop the blanket. Last year they received a $50,000 National Science Foundation grant for support.

Readers familiar with biochar know the stuff as a potential geoengineering approach because making it prevents CO2 formation. When added to soil, biochar boosts agricultural yields so farmers, landscapers and gardeners love and value it. Biochar can also be burned as a greener alternative to mined coal.

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The Carbon Cultures team says its blanket can process small slash piles into biochar within a day, and they call the low-cost technology easy for forestry crews to use. This summer the students plan to test their blanket on large slash piles and make adjustments to reduce soot and emissions further from the process, Grunbaum reported. Just in time for outdoor grilling season.

Photo: Slash piles like this one at Taylor Mountain in Washington could be transformed into fuel with a new blanket in development. Credit: Monty VanderBilt

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Carbon-freeze Yourself a la Han Solo

If you wept Wookie tears like Chewie did when Han Solo was put into carbon-freeze in "The Empire Strikes Back," you know what a memorable moment it was in the Star Wars franchise.

Now guests attending Star Wars Weekends at "The Happiest Place on Earth" will have a chance to make their own memorable moment by freezing themselves in carbonite, compliments of The Dark Side Walt Disney World.

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Well, not really. While you won't end up frozen in real carbonite and hung like a trophy on Jabba the Hutt's wall, beginning May 18 you'll get to have a likeness of yourself frozen in fake carbonite that you can display on your mantle.

Once the theme song to "It's a Small World" gets so stuck in your head you want to hurl yourself into the gator-infested swamps of South Florida, head on over to the "Carbon Freezing Chamber." Here you can have your face 3-D scanned by multiple cameras to create an 8-inch replica of yourself frozen in carbonite. And because -- why the heck not? -- you'll get a light-up wristband.

Trust me, when you can't rid your brain of "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears," you'll be wishing that, besides temporary blindness, carbon freezing also caused temporary deafness, so at least you could pretend the process is real. After all, Disney does encourage you to journey into your imagination.

Also, your carbonite hibernation will be a good exercise in patience, because your souvenir is going to take four weeks to finish and ship. But I'm sure die-hard Star Wars fans would be willing to wait a lot longer for such an iconic piece of memorabilia.

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Better hurry, though. Reservations are required and Disney reps say they're likely to be fully booked within a few days. Have your wallets ready, too. Your "carbonite" figurine is going to set you back $99.95 plus shipping and handling. You're also going to need to fork over $85 for general admission to Disney's Hollywood Studios Theme Park.

If you think Disney is fleecing you, don't worry. I've got Boba Fett's cell phone number; he'll take care of it. He's my preferred bounty hunter and has never let me down. Who do you think tracked Han to Cloud City, where he was captured and then frozen? Indeed, it's a small world after all.

via Inside the Magic

Credit: Inside the Magic

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Liquid Salt Extracts Oil from Sand

A more eco-friendly method for extracting oil and tar from sand has been developed by a group of researchers at Penn State University. Utilizing ionic liquids to separate heavy viscous oil from sand, the team's technique could help reduce toxic waste from surface-minded oil sands and aid clean-up efforts after oil spills.

Tar sands, also know as bituminous sands or oil sands, constitute approximately two-thirds of the world's estimated oil reserves. Canada is the world's major producer of the unconventional petroleum from tar sands, and the United States imports more than 1 million barrels of oil per day from Canada, nearly twice as much as from Saudi Arabia. An estimated 32 billion barrels of oil could potentially exist in Utah's tar sands.

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Extraction and separation of these deposits are often expensive and harmful to the environment because of they contain complex mixtures of sand, clay, water and bitumen, a "heavy" or highly viscous oil. Processing this mixture to fuel requires significant amounts of water and energy and generates contaminated waste water that is stored in open air ponds. Toxic to aquatic life, this waste water can seep into groundwater, polluting rivers and lakes. Additionally, local fresh water supplies can be depleted as this process requires large amounts of water.

However, the new method developed by the Penn State research team uses very little energy and water, and all solvents are recycled and reused.

Paul Painter, professor of polymer science in the department of materials science and engineering, and his team spent the last 18 months developing this new method using ionic liquids (salt in a liquid state) to facilitate the separation. No waste process water is generated since the separation takes place at room temperature.

"Essentially all of the bitumen is recovered in a very clean form, with no detectable mineral fines, which interact preferentially with the ionic liquid, and no contamination from the ionic liquid," explains Painter on his department's website.

The bitumen, solvents and sand/clay mixtures separate into three distinct parts. They can be removed separately and solvents can be reused.

This method can also be used to extract oil from beach sand after oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez disasters. Using sand polluted by the BP oil spill in one experiment, the team was able to separate hydrocarbons from the sand within seconds. After a small amount of water was used to clean remaining ionic liquids, the sand was so clean could be returned to the beach, instead of landfills.

The ionic liquids researchers work with are based on 1-alkyl-3-methylimidazolium cations, a positively charged material with high chemical and thermal stability, a low degree of flammability, and almost negligible vapor pressure, which makes recovering the ionic liquid relatively easy.

The team has built a functioning bench top model system and is currently reducing their discovery to practice for patenting.

Image: Jupiterimages

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Dress Helps Purify the Air

A collaboration between London College of Fashion, University of Sheffield, and the University of Ulster, “Herself” is a prototypical dress sprayed with a concrete mixture that purportedly absorbs pollutants in nearby air. The details of the process remain a little hazy, although pollutant-absorbing concrete does actually exist -- in fact the same Italian company that made this “transparent” cement (as some readers pointed out, this should have been concrete, which is actually the mixture of cement plus gravel and sand) has already built some air-friendly structures in Europe with it. Using sunlight as a catalyst, titanium dioxide on the surface of the material reacts with pollutants in the air, reportedly decreasing nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide in the surrounding area by up to 65 percent. I suspect the concrete spray in Herself works similarly.

Though right now the dress exists as a fabric sculpture in a box, the team hopes that it will one day be more than art. They predict that forty people wearing such clothing could purify two meters of airspace in just one minute– if they were all standing in one meter of pavement. While I at first want to say this might only be appealing at an asthma convention, city life could prove me wrong. Subway platforms and the interior of busses or trains seem like obvious places where an air-purifying dress/skirt/hat/face mask would be more than welcome.

Herself is just the first prototype in a larger project between the three universities called Catalytic Clothing. According to the Helen Storey Foundation, a London-based nonprofit that aims to bring fashion and science together and helped originally conceive of the project, Catalytic Clothing “will investigate how clothing technology can be used to engage the public in the science behind the impact that pollution has on our health.” The splotchy design on the dress, reminiscent of a butterfly or maybe Rorschach ink blots, is certainly artistic, but I'm waiting for a little more proof of the science before I send my measurements.

Photo: Catalytic Clothing

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Making Plastic from CO2

Scientists are already working on making plastic from human waste, algae and milk, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that one company is working on making it from carbon dioxide. Massachusetts-based Novomer has gotten attention for nabbing investments, but its technology is finally getting close to hitting the market.

Peter Shepard, Novomer's executive vice president of polymers explained, explained the company's process to me. Novomer takes a petrochemical material, adds carbon dioxide and an innovative catalyst developed by Cornell University professor Geoffrey Coates to grow a polymer. Using this process, Novomer can control the length of the molecular chain for different types of materials.

The CO2 comes from a number of sources. One of their best sources is actually ethanol processing, Shepard says. While power plants like the one in the photo are large sources of CO2, their carbon often has other impurities mixed in. Novomer prioritizes carbon sources based on purity and concentration of CO2.

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"If we take CO2, we replace half the petroleum component in the material," Shepard says. "It’s a much lower cost than any petrochemical materials." The challenge then becomes making materials that meet expectations for their applications. They're exploring foams, coatings, and thermoplastics. Shepard says that materials from one resin they produce are probably six months to a year from being ready for commercialization.

Recyclability and compostability are still question marks, but Shepard says the company is working on understanding the biodegradability of its materials. Not that I'd ever suggest landfilling, but in Novomer's case doing so would sequester some CO2.

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Treehugger criticized Novomer for not replacing all of the fossil fuel in plastic and questioned whether it was a step in the right direction. However, after spending time with bioplastic industry reps recently at the Biopolymers Symposium in Denver, I've come to realize that the challenges to making 100 percent renewable, compostable plastic are enormous.

Nobody wants sustainable plastic more than the people who gathered in Denver. Some of them even openly referred to the petroleum-based part of the industry as "the dark side." I'm sure Novomer would love to replace all the petroleum, but transforming an industry so large that several million tons constitutes a drop in the bucket is no simple proposition.

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For the industry to adopt petroleum alternatives, the material needs to work on existing machinery, stand up to extensive performance testing, be affordable, and have an end-of-life strategy that jives with large-scale recycling and composting processes.

"You’re used to a trash bag that holds your trash and doesn’t fall apart," Shepard says. "If the plastic we make doesn’t meet those performance standards, nobody is going to buy it."

After hearing executives from DuPont and BASF talk about making changes to mascara bottles and shrink wrap, even the optimist in me knows we're years away from pervasive eco-plastic. Until then, I'm comfortable giving props to companies like Novomer. At least they're giving this a go.

Photo: Smoke stacks in California. Novomer is working to transform CO2 into plastic, reducing the reliance on petroleum. Credit: Devra.

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Mining the Air for Carbon Dioxide

When I tell molecular biophysicist Deane Little that I'm extremely skeptical about carbon capture and sequestration, he looks up from the solar-powered chemical reactor he's just set up in the window and responds, "We are, too."

For Little and his colleagues at New Sky Energy, successfully capturing carbon from the air doesn't involve a giant fake tree or pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the ground. Instead, they've developed a chemical system that elegantly turns CO2 and salt solution into valuable products.

Little, who is New Sky's CEO and chief scientific officer, walks me through their technological process in a sunny conference room in downtown Boulder, Colo., where the company is based. He explains that he first learned how to capture carbon using sodium hydroxide, also known as caustic soda, when he was working on the biodegradation of chlorinated solvents at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Caustic soda, a major industrial chemical, can fix an impressive amount of CO2. It's broadly used in industrial manufacturing, including paper, soaps and detergents.

Unfortunately, producing sodium hydroxide is both energy intensive and creates chlorine gas as a byproduct. You might know this highly toxic, volatile stuff from its use as a poison during World War I. Yeah. Bad. Little decided to search for an alternative sustainable process and, with less than $50 worth of materials from a local hardware store, he built a prototype reactor that could take water, a salt solution, as well as atmospheric CO2 and, with an electric charge, turn it into an acid, a base, hydrogen and oxygen. Then, in a second step, base reacts with CO2 to form safe carbonates such as baking soda or limestone.

"No one else can do what we propose to do," says New Sky's executive vice president for business development Mark Ashford. Anyone else using conventional chemistry would have to make nearly a ton of chlorine gas every time they convert a ton of CO2.

Unlike chlorine gas, the carbonate byproducts from their system are extremely valuable. We not only eat baking soda, but calcium carbonate can also be used in building materials. The need to mine salt for this could pose a problem, except that new desalination efforts mean opportunities to collect and use unwanted salt. The electrical charges will come from solar panels or other renewable energy sources.

"We're moving up in prototypes," chief technical officer Joe Kosmoski adds, showing me one of them, which looks like two 12-inch square tiles in a sandwich. Now the plan is to scale the reactors up physically and then out, he says, similar to the way batteries are scaled by stacking electrodes.

"Not to sound like a jerk," I say to the guys, "but why hasn't anyone else done this before?" Little chuckles and tells me I'm definitely not the first person to ask. Knowledgeable scientists realized that one could use base to capture CO2, he says, but the nasty chlorine remained a hurdle and dealing with that is difficult and expensive. In addition, Kosmoski points out, there was less pressure to reduce CO2 in the past and not much incentive to switch from the established production methods.

Currently New Sky is setting up a large pilot project in the Fresno area. The project is funded by a water agency that sells irrigation water to farms and one of the partners is a desalination plant. Using a reactor that could fill a tractor trailer, New Sky aims to prove that their system can desalinate water, precipitate the sodium sulfate salt, and end up with clean water and useful products that are worth more than the water's value. In five or six years, the company would like to be forming partnerships to make brand new products with the carbonates, such bricks.

I watch as Little hooks the reactor to a solar panel. Sure enough, the salt solution flowing from a glass vase through the reactor comes out into brightly colored acid and base in a matter of moments. Closing the carbon loop never looked so bright.

Photo: New Sky Energy's reactor produces acid and base using a charge from the solar panel at left. Credit: Deane Little.

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Turning CO2 Back into Fuel

"What to do with all that CO2?" It's a question that's always vexed me, especially when I'm stuck in traffic behind five semis, two SUVs, and we're all doing 85MPH while passing a plant like the one pictured here. Ugh. Seriously...what to do with the CO2? Well, some scientists in Britain have a cunning plan. They're working on research into using some serious chemistry and nanoscience to capture CO2 from the air, and transform it into something useful, like maybe plastics, or even ethanol.

Yep, from your gas tank, to your car exhaust, through the electro-chemical ringer, and then back to your tank.

Now, there are already other efforts to do this, but those methods rely on separate technologies to capture and then convert the CO2. The British team (researchers from the University of Bristol, the University of Bath, and the University of West England) want to combine it all into one, more efficient process. 

Imagine if those chimneys above were lined with a special polymer that would not only scrub out the CO2, but actually turn it into something else.

David Fermin from the chemical engineering department at the University of Bristol told me: "We're trying to design porous metal organic frameworks that can absorb the carbon dioxide, and then transform it into useful materials."

Fermin admits it's not an easy process. The biggest challenge Fermin says is that "CO2 is very dilute in the air, only .01 to .04 percent." And so it's hard to concentrate the gas into a form that can then be worked into something useful.

Still, Fermin is hopeful that within the next 18 months the combined team will have a clearer roadmap of how to get there. They're employing everything from nanotechnology, to electro-chemistry, to micro-robotics to try to do it. 

One interesting wrinkle: the process itself might actually generate more CO2 than is absorbed and reclaimed for use.

"We want a process that will be carbon neutral," Fermin says. "For example, we're looking at solar energy and other renewables as the energy sources that would drive our system."

Well, that's got me breathing a bit easier...

(Photo from iStock photo)

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Engineering an Earth Airbag

If global warming causes all hell to break loose on our home planet, I'd feel better knowing humanity has a plan. A new geoengineering institute in the United Kingdom could help figure out one that doesn't give us all the willies.

The Oxford Geoengineering Institute recently launched with a board of eminent academia and industry folks, including knighted scientist David King. Director Tim Kruger founded Cquestrate, an open-source project looking at adding lime to the oceans to absorb carbon and reverse acidification. Shell is funding it, but this is no sinister plot. The project came out of an innovation competition and the company won't get any intellectual property. Kruger says scientists who studied the concept are preparing to publish in academic journals.

He's quick to clarify that the new institute will be looking at an array of ideas. "We need to start investigating whether we can produce an airbag for climate change," Kruger says. "You never really want to use an airbag, and if you do it’s a pretty uncomfortable experience, but it’s better than no airbag at all." And the institute isn't advocating geoengineering--just the need for a holistic, interdisciplinary evaluation that looks not just at the technical side but also ethics, social impact, governance, and economic feasibility.

"People are scared of geoengineering, and rightly so," Kruger told me, pointing out that this is why we need rigorous and clear-headed evaluations. As freaky as Earth-scale action sounds, I'll sleep better at night if we have an airbag.

Image: Compilation of Earth images. Credit: The Living Earth.

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The Air Scrubber: Better Than Trees?

Oooh Canada! First they introduce us to Mounties, Hockey Night, and Dan Aykroyd. Now they bring us a giant machine that promises to get sneaky carbon dioxide out of the air. You might be thinking, "Hey, isn't that called a tree?" Sadly, we're beyond trees. Fortunately, University of Calgary professor David Keith and his fellow researchers are on the case.

The machine is fairly simple, using a system that captures CO2 with sodium hydroxide, better known as lye. The CO2 can then be extracted and from there, stored--an approach that isn't without its problems--but it's a start. Capturing carbon dioxide from the air is crucial because that's where the majority of greenhouse gases produced from transportation sources end up. Keith's machine isn't the only one in development, but it was tested successfully.

Keith says that the tower captured 20 tons of CO2 on a square meter of the scrubbing material during the course of a year, which is about how much an American produces in the same amount of time. The machine is also necessarily energy-efficient. For more on Keith's work, check out the Discovery Channel's Project Earth series, which features the project. The researchers emphasize that they're still working on the machine, although I'm not sure the Asthma Alley where I live can wait much longer for the commercial version.

Image: "Hey CO2, need a ride?" David Keith with the 2008 air scrubber tower. Credit: David Keith's homepage.