Carbon Sciences, Inc. (CABN), the developer of a breakthrough technology to recycle carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into gasoline and other portable fuels, announced the development of certain process technologies that will allow for the production of gasoline, shorten the time to commercialization and reduce the system and operating costs of its CO2-to-Fuel technology.

The company’s current approach is an enzyme-based process used to transform CO2 into low-level fuels, such as methanol. Dr. Naveed Aslam, chief technology officer of Carbon Sciences, has now discovered a new and more cost efficient process to produce gasoline, a high-level fuel, from CO2. The key features of this breakthrough includes (1) the of use flue emissions directly from coal-fired power plants or industrial factories, eliminating the need for “clean” CO2, (2) the use of brackish water, eliminating the need for distilled freshwater as the source of hydrogen and reaction medium, (3) mild operating conditions, eliminating the need for capital intensive stainless steel equipment, and (4) a highly scalable system to transform large quantities of CO2 into gasoline for use in the existing transportation infrastructure.

Elaborating on the business implications of this new breakthrough, Byron Elton, CEO of Carbon Sciences, said, “We always wanted to produce high-level fuels, such as gasoline, but knew that additional steps would be required to reach this goal. Now, we have the way to go directly to gasoline.” Mr. Elton commented further, “The United Nations’ IPCC estimates that the cost of simply capturing CO2 for applications, such as underground sequestration or transformation into products, can range from $45 to $73 per ton of CO2. This cost is perhaps the single biggest economic barrier to any large-scale CO2 applications, such as carbon sequestration. However, by being able to use a raw CO2 flue gas stream in our CO2-to-Fuel technology, we are no longer dependent on the success or commercial availability of carbon capture systems. In addition, unlike biofuels based on growing plants to absorb CO2 from the air, our CO2-to-Fuel process is an industrial process that can produce fuel in minutes to hours, not months to years, to meet the demands of the world. These breakthroughs demonstrate why we continue to believe that Carbon Sciences is developing the most powerful and sustainable fuel technology in the world.”

Commenting on the development roadmap, Dr. Aslam stated, “We are very excited about these new processes. Our end-to-end CO2 to fuel system will have several modules. We have determined that one of these modules can function as a standalone system for use by a sizable part of the energy industry for the production of gasoline. Inquiries from potential strategic partners have further validated our decision to focus on this module. We are anticipating a shorter than normal development cycle for this module and are hoping to achieve commercialization in less than one year.”

www.carbonsciences.com

MENLO PARK, California (December 14, 2009) – Silicon Valley venture capitalist Elton Sherwin in his new book, Addicted to Energy, claims that reducing soot and smog are key to affordably protecting the planet from rapid warming and vital for reaching an agreement with China. Drawing on research from U.C. Berkeley, Stanford and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Sherwin says that reducing non-CO2 greenhouse agents is faster and cheaper than reducing CO2.  “We still need to dramatically reduce CO2 in the U.S. and China, but reducing soot and smog is a quick, affordable way to work together and lessen the likelihood of crossing a major climate threshold or tipping point.”

“By lowering soot and smog emissions, the Chinese can make a major positive contribution,” says Sherwin. “There is reluctance to discuss this because it might slow progress on CO2.  But the impact of soot and smog are so great they cannot be ignored.  They are comparatively less expensive to mitigate and they provide an opportunity for the Chinese to meet or exceed western reductions without having to slow their economic growth.”

Smog contains several potent greenhouse agents. Soot contains large amounts of black carbon. One U.S. House of Representatives report says that reducing black carbon alone “will immediately slow global warming.”*

A recent article published in Foreign Affairs, co-authored by one of the world’s leading climate scientists, says, “Fully applying existing emissions-control technologies could cut black carbon emissions by about 50 percent. And that would be enough to offset the warming effects of one to two decades’ worth of carbon dioxide emissions.”**

Sherwin uses an intriguing analogy:

“Image you inherit a home and discover the attic packed full of dynamite, blasting caps and fuses. What does the local bomb squad do?  They remove the fuses and blasting caps first, and then the dynamite.”

In Sherwin’s analogy, CO2 is the dynamite, but soot and smog are the fuses and blasting caps – the first priorities.

Continuing the analogy Sherwin says, “The house is a metaphor for our planet and we are living in one room and the Chinese are living in another room. We can argue with the Chinese about who is most responsible for the mess in the attic for another decade or two and pass the problem to our children.  But by then it may be too late. We need to clean up the attic now.”

Sherwin says that the U.S. and China should jointly lead a worldwide crash program to reduce soot and tropospheric ozone (one of the key components in smog) while simultaneously reducing CO2 emissions. He says, “Filters that trap soot should be an immediate priority. This is too big an opportunity to ignore.”

He continues, “The Chinese produce so much soot and ozone, they could meet virtually any treaty obligation if these two powerful agents of climate change were included.”

Sherwin adds one word of caution, “The Chinese also release vast quantities of reflective particles into the atmosphere mixed together with their soot. Today, these reflective particles protect the earth, and it is critically important that they continue this practice while filtering out the black carbon.” Sherwin adds, “It is imperative that we accurately account for all these particles and take actions that really protect the climate.”

Source : energyhousepublishing.com

* Google “Hearing Examines Black Carbon and Global Warming.”  From the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives.

** “The Other Climate Changers: Why Black Carbon and Ozone Also Matter,” Jessica Seddon Wallack and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2009 Issue.

Converting corn to ethanol in Iowa not only leads to clearing more of the Amazonian rainforest, researchers report in a pair of new studies in Science, but also would do little to slow global warming—and often make it worse.

“Prior analyses made an accounting error,” says one study’s lead author, Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University. “There is a huge imbalance between the carbon lost by plowing up a hectare [2.47 acres] of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels.”

Growing plants store carbon in their roots, shoots and leaves. As a result, the world’s plants and the soil in which they grow contain nearly three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere. “I know when I look at a tree that half the dry weight of it is carbon,” says ecologist David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, coauthor of the other study which examined the “carbon debt” embedded in any biofuel. “That’s going to end up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when you cut it down.”[...]

Full article – Via : ©sciam.com

Carbon dioxide derived from burning fossil fuels totaled 1.218 billion tons in the year ended March 30, according to the report. Carbon produced by burning fuels accounts for about 90 percent of Japan’s total emissions of global-warming gases, including methane, the Nikkei said.[...]

Full article >>> – Via : ©bloomberg.com

If current upward trends in fossil fuel emissions continue, global average ozone levels will rise 50% by 2100. The resulting damage to agriculture could reduce global crop production by at least 10%, according to a study in the November issue of Energy Policy.

Previous studies have evaluated the effects of human-induced climate change and rising CO₂ levels on vegetation and have suggested that the changes will prolong growing seasons at higher latitudes and boost photosynthesis in some plant species. John M. Reilly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and colleagues have now added the concomitant changes in tropospheric (ground-level) ozone to the mix. The team investigated the impacts of all three stressors on crops, pastures, and forests with the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, which incorporates economic, climate, and agricultural models.[...]

Full Article – Source : ©pubs.acs.org

More than 50 cows trudge single file into this big, new building. There’s a bright white tile floor and lots of light. The animals are herded into individual metal stalls. The gates close over their heads, kind of like how the bar comes over you’re head when you get on a rollercoaster. At the other end of the cow, workers insert its udders into suction cups – and the milking starts:

“They’re milked three times a day – then they go back to the free-stall barn, so we’re currently milking 1,000 cows.”

That’s Mark van de Heijning. He runs this dairy along with his family. They moved here from Belgium. And they started milking their cows last year. They just built another facility – and soon they’ll have 1,500 cows. van de Heijning says back home in Belgium they had a small dairy farm, but wanted to expand:

“But in Belgium the land is expensive and there was a quota system so its expensive to expand there, and there are already a lot of people so that’s why we moved over here.”

It’s a fairly common story. Farmers from Belgium and the Netherlands move here to build huge livestock operations – operations that would be too costly to run in Europe.

Full Article – Source : ©EnvironmentReport.org

Your credit card can help save the planet. That’s the message companies are pitching to consumers as they roll out new credit cards designed to cash in on people’s worries about global warming.

These “green” cards allow users to channel a percentage of their spending toward efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. General Electric Co.’s Earth Rewards MasterCard, launched in July by the company’s GE Money unit, targets as much as 1% of total spending on the card toward emission-reduction projects.Bank of America Corp. followed in November with its own green card, Brighter Planet Visa, which matches every dollar spent with one point that can be accumulated and traded in for “carbon offsets.” Carbon offsets are meant to reduce the impact of emissions made somewhere else — such as by planting trees. Additionally, Storm Lake, Iowa, savings bank MetaBank, a unit of Meta Financial Group Inc., in August launched its GreenPay MasterCard, which also allows users to accumulate carbon offsets with each purchase.[...]

Full article – Via : ©online.wsj.com

Its task is elegantly direct. The 9-foot-tall device, encased in see-through plastic, scrapes the chief global warming gas — carbon dioxide — right out of the atmosphere. As air wafts through, CO₂ sticks to large chemically coated panels while oxygen and other innocuous gases breeze by. The carbon inhaler’s developer, Global Research Technologies, is among hundreds of U.S. companies scouring for ways to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and cash in on federal requirements anticipated by 2010 to combat global warming.[...]

Full article – Via : ©usatoday.com