by Byron Elton, President and Chief Operating Officer, Carbon Sciences Inc.
In the 1970s the late Dr. Lewis Thomas published an influential essay that has become a scientific classic. In it, he described three types of medical technologies - non-technologies, which are caring and supportive; halfway technologies, which are expensive, risky and not especially effective; and decisive technologies, which are inexpensive, easy to deliver and solve the underlying problem
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A “halfway” technology for polio, for instance, was the iron lung; a cylindrical steel chamber that allowed patients whose respiratory muscles had been paralyzed by the disease to breathe, while a “decisive” technology was the polio vaccine.
UPDATEReuters ProVestor Plus Company Report 10 December 2010 Reveals CABN now has 14 patents.
Making Gasoline without Crude Oil!
Catalyst is Key to Demonstrating the Commercial Feasibility of the Company’s Breakthrough CO2 Based Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) Technology
Santa Barbara, CA - August 9, 2010 - Carbon Sciences, Inc. (CABN), the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform greenhouse gases into gasoline and other portable fuels, today announced the successful synthesis of a proprietary raw catalyst, an essential step toward demonstrating commercial feasibility of the technology.
“In June of this year, we filed a landmark patent application for our breakthrough CO2 based Gas-to-Liquids technology,” said CEO Byron Elton. “The production of this catalyst is the actual laboratory scale implementation of the catalyst formulation and its synthesis process disclosed in the patent. It is a major step forward for us,” he added.
The major challenge in CO2 based GTL reactions is the activation of stable carbon dioxide and methane molecules. This company’s novel and proprietary catalyst provides a simpler and cleaner route by activating these stable molecules and converting them to gasoline. Gas-to-liquid reactions are regulated through temperature, concentration, pressure and contact time. This catalyst accelerates these reactions, enabling them to be carried out under the most favorable thermodynamic regime and at much lower temperature and pressure. “Our catalyst, in conjunction with an optimized reactor and total plant design, will be the key factors in reducing both the capital and operating costs of our next generation GTL technology”, Elton said.
“A fully active and stable catalyst will be the key to our success,” said Dr. Naveed Aslam, inventor of the technology. “Synthesizing our proprietary raw catalyst is a vital step in a multi-stage catalyst synthesis and activation process,” he added.
Gas-to-liquids (GTL) is a complimentary refinery processes that converts natural gas and other gaseous hydrocarbons into longer chain hydrocarbons such as gasoline. Carbon Sciences estimates that they can produce 138 billion gallons of gasoline a year (the annual amount used in the U.S.) with 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 586 million tons of CO2 without using crude oil or competing with current natural gas consumption.
About Carbon Sciences, Inc.
Carbon Sciences Inc. is developing a breakthrough CO2 based gas-to-liquids technology to transform greenhouse gases into liquid portable fuels, such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Innovating at the forefront of chemical engineering, we are developing highly scalable clean-tech processes to produce liquid fuels from naturally occurring or human-made greenhouse gas emissions. From sources such as natural gas fields, refinery flare gas, landfill gas, municipal waste, algae and other biomass, there is an abundant supply of inexpensive feedstock available to produce large and sustainable quantities of liquid fuel to replace petroleum for global consumption, thereby eliminating our dependence on petroleum.
Editors note:Carbon Sciences Inc (CABN-OTC) is developing a new breed of "Nano-Reactor" that should revolutionize the nascent carbon capture and conversion industry allowing for the commercialization of converting carbon emissions (from coal and oil fired industries and from natural gas ie: from landfills) directly into usable gasoline, "without" using high energy heat.
The company has already demonstrated it's technology works, and expects to have a working reactor by the end of Q3 2010. The sector is now referred to as Gas to Liquids or "GTL" and it is growing. The company's president, Byron Elton, was recently interviewed by Ally Velchie on CNN Business and that interview can be found at: http://www.carbonsciences.com/01/youtubeplayer.html
News Release:
A Breakthrough Reactor Configuration Improves Conversion Yield and Economics of Company’s CO2 based Gas to Liquids Technology
Santa Barbara, CA - July 1, 2010 - Carbon Sciences, Inc. (CABN), the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform greenhouse gases into gasoline and other portable fuels, today announced the filing of a patent application for a breakthrough reactor configuration. This is the second of a series of patent applications for the company’s highly scalable, clean-tech CO2 based Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) fuel technology for transforming a combination of natural gas and carbon dioxide (CO2) directly into gasoline.
“This novel reactor configuration speaks directly to the commercial feasibility of our technology and its environmentally friendly approach,” stated Byron Elton, CEO, Carbon Sciences. “Current GTL processes rely on energy intensive downstream processing to separate fuel from raw product mixture, which produce and emit significant amounts of CO2. In contrast, our process uses CO2 as a feedstock which mitigates enormous quantities of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere,” added Elton.
Gas-to-liquids is a refinery process that converts natural gas and other gaseous hydrocarbons into longer chain hydrocarbons such as gasoline. Carbon Sciences estimates that they can produce 138 billion gallons of gasoline a year (the annual amount used in the U.S.) with 23 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 586 million tons of CO2 without competing with current natural gas consumption.
“This novel catalytic membrane reactor combines reaction and separation in a single unit operation, increasing per pass product yields beyond equilibrium limitations and reducing plant investment costs through process intensification,” added Dr. Naveed Aslam, Chief Technology Officer for Carbon Sciences.
Carbon Sciences, Inc. is developing a breakthrough CO2 based gas-to-liquids technology to transform greenhouse gases into liquid portable fuels, such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Innovating at the forefront of chemical engineering, we are developing highly scalable clean-tech processes to produce liquid fuels from naturally occurring or human-made greenhouse gas emissions. From sources such as natural gas fields, refinery flare gas, landfill gas, municipal waste, algae and other biomass, there is an abundant supply of inexpensive feedstock available to produce large and sustainable quantities of liquid fuel to replace petroleum for global consumption, thereby eliminating our dependence on petroleum. To learn more about the Company, please visit our website at http://www.carbonsciences.com.
"Carbon Sciences is the furthest along in the CO2 to fuel business"USA Today
Editors note:Carbon Sciences Inc (CABN-OTC) is developing a new breed of "Nano-Reactor" that should revolutionize the nascent carbon capture and conversion industry allowing for the commercialization of converting carbon emissions (from coal and oil fired industries and from natural gas ie: from landfills) directly into usable gasoline, "without" using high energy heat.
The company has already demonstrated it's technology works, and expects to have a working reactor by the end of Q3 2010. The sector is now referred to as Gas to Liquids or "GTL" and it is growing. The company's president, Byron Elton, was recently interviewed by Ally Velchie on CNN Business and that interview can be found at: http://www.carbonsciences.com/01/youtubeplayer.html
Article:
Until now, Carbon capture, and storage has been the high fruit for a number of new companies rushing to get even a small piece of the growing, multibillion dollar industry of cleaning up our coal, oil and natural gaspower plants, as well as the millions of businesses who dump carbon into the atmosphere every day. But what if you could not only capture that carbon, but turn it into a usable product with an immediate market?
A small California company, Carbon Sciences Inc. has announced a truly ground breaking technology that, not only utilizes the carbon being released from these entities, but actually turns it into usable fuel, much like mother nature does over a million years, but doing it a lot quicker. Actually, within hours of the carbon capture. Basically, they say they can convert dirty air and dirty water, into an immediately usable fuel such as methanol, gasoline, jet fuel or diesel, doing what mother nature does, only a million times faster.
Needless to say, I was very intrigued by the market potential of such a process. Multi-Billion dollar markets in renewable energy and carbon reduction, heretofore two separate markets, could bring this small company immense wealth in the coming years, if the technology allows commercial application on a large scale, so I dug a little further.
Carbon Sciences recently announced it had invented a nano-scale reactor that functions like a highly efficient artificial microorganism that contains a proprietary enzyme process and serves a single purpose – to absorb CO2 molecules and excrete fuel molecules.
This nano reactor, called Smart Particle, is the key to achieving a fast reaction time and industrial scale up of the company’s CO2-to-Fuel process. The patent application for Smart Particle Technology contains the detailed design of Smart Particles as well as a proprietary manufacturing process where they self-assemble in solution without any external nano-manufacturing.
What I found most interesting is that, other companies racing to perfect similar processes, are utilizing immense heat to produce the same result. Up until now, high heat was necessary to do this. What Carbon Sciences appears to have is a ground breaking process that completely eliminates the need for generating high heat to complete the process and thereby eliminating the need for energy to produce energy. It is truly a novel idea with huge potential around the world. Carbon Sciences will be targeting the markets in the USA and China in it's initial push for a share of this market.
Click on this graphic for an enlarged (readable) version.
For a video, explaining the process, the Bio-Catalytic conversion and the Nano Reactor, click on: video
The CEO of Carbon Sciences Inc., Byron Elton, explains his company's focus, and the new process in this interview.
Applying Carbon Sciences' patent-pending technology in a laboratory scale prototype last year, the company successfully transformed a stream of CO2 gas into methanol fuel. The demonstration prototype uses Carbon Sciences’ innovative bio-catalytic process to break down CO2 and water, then combines the carbon and hydrogen to form methanol, a low level liquid fuel. The resulting methanol is directly usable as a fuel, or it can be used to build higher-level fuels such as gasoline, butanol and jet fuel. In January the company announced that is now able to produce gasoline directly from their process.
After successfully completing technology design and simulations, Carbon Sciences submitted a patent application, “A Bio-catalytic Process and System to Transform Carbon Dioxide into Methanol” to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on February 17, 2009.
According to Beacon Equity Research [.pdf], Carbon Sciences is developing a breakthrough technology for transforming harmful carbon dioxide emissions into the basic fuel building blocks required to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other portable fuels. Carbon Sciences program plan is to use CO2 as a feedstock for producing portable fuels and simultaneously address the world’s energy and environmental challenges. The firm’s technology takes CO2 from coal-fired power plants and other large CO2 emitters and transforms it into portable fuels.
From the companies officers:
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.
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 bio fuels 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.
—Byron Elton, CEO of Carbon Sciences
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.
—Dr. Naveed Aslam, Chief Technology Officer
Carbon Sciences hopes to develop a commercially-attractive package by the third quarter of 2010 and are exploring a "strategic partnership" to take the process--and the company--to the next phase. They have also applied for DOE technology funding under the category of "Innovative Concepts for Beneficial Uses of CO2".
Disclosure: I bought some Carbon Sciences Stock on Friday, as it spiked while the markets were in full fear mode. I thought I'd get in before the rush. Sure, it's a penny stock, but so was RIMM at one time. If it only goes to .50 our profit will be 500% in a very short time frame.
No it's not drastic, but it is far and away more than any previous administration in the United States have ever committed to. A 17% reduction in CO2 levels by 2020, below the 2005 level. It's not Kyoto, but it is a solid commitment, and when the USA leads, everyone else is bound to follow. Even China, who has taken over the title as worlds biggest polluter this year (from the USA) is catching the drift with some promises of Carbon reducing policies of it's own.
Canada's Prime Minister as well as many other world leaders will also be in attendance at Copenhagen. Now you must ask yourself, what affect will this have on my Retirefund?
In a nutshell, it is a complete game changer and will have a huge affect on investments all over the world. If these leaders come to an agreement, no matter how small, on reducing their carbon footprint on this planet, it is the beginning of the end for some companies and industries and it is the beginning of great wealth and prosperity for other companies who embrace the Green Energy revolution that is just beginning. The COP15 summit is the catalyst which puts this revolution into overdrive. That's how much of a game changer it is.
At this writing, California is legislating that fully 20% of all energy produced in the State beginning in 2010, must come from renewable resources. Federally in the U.S., there is a strong movement to legislate a similar law for the entire Country of 15% of total energy being produced by renewable resources beyond 2010. Billions of dollars are in play. Wind and Solar companies are springing up like the oil derricks of the 1890's. The "hydrogen highway" is being built in California. Hydrogen fuel cells burning, at first, natural gas and eventually pure hydrogen, will eventually play the major part in the greening of our planet. This is no time to be a wallflower. If you are not invested in the green revolution, you will merely be a spectator in the game, which will be the greatest wealth building era since the industrial revolution.
Make no mistake (as President Obama likes to say) This is a game changer. If you are invested in coal energy, you should probably get out now! If you are invested in pure oil plays you still have some time. If you are piling your money into Wind and Solar companies, you should maybe take a double check on that. They will eventually only be bit players in this great game but they will gain significantly in the short to medium term. Hydrogen is the future of energy, no matter how you look at it, and Natural gas is a great store of hydrogen for fuel cells, which have the greatest potential to produce the most wealth. PEM fuel cells can be stacked and therefore, can produce energy at the back up generator level, and at the giant energy plant level. They have the capacity to actually replace large oil fired, coal fired, and even nuclear power plants.
There will be flashes in the pan, so to speak, of ideas that, at first seem like solutions, but that will peter out like a late night camp fire. Clean coal (an oxymoron - as there is no such thing as clean coal) is the obvious one. Corn ethanol is another. It produces at least the same or even more carbon in it's production, than it saves by it's use as a gasoline additive.
"Could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century." - Venture Capital Firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers
Do your homework and do it well before you invest, but don't sit on the sidelines of this great race. As Wayne Gretzky once said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"!
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