Follow up to July 25 Tech Talk Segment with Byron Elton, CEO, Carbon Sciences, Inc.

Submitted: August 7, 2009

As regulations to meet international greenhouse gas reduction targets emerge, large carbon-emitting plants in the U.S. and around the world are faced with tough decisions on what to do with their greenhouse gas emissions.

Conventional wisdom remains that CO2 will be captured and sequestered underground (CSS). But the questions sequestration raises are just as numerous as the number of companies emerging to potentially provide this service: Whose land will it be buried in? Is it safe? Is it cost-efficient? And, when will the technology be available? Many experts say not for decades.

While the current administration has undoubtedly taken an aggressive stance toward advancing conversation on this issue, many of options being considered to curb the amount of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere are on a slow timeline. And the private sector has taken notice. The complex, but potentially lucrative, problem of how to curb dangerous emissions like CO2 has spawned a burgeoning industry of mitigation technologies.

Working within the industrial waste stream of places like coal-fired plants to convert CO2 to fuel, an emerging sector is called “carbon recycling” and it’s quickly advancing to become a viable alternative to burying the gas underground.

Carbon Sciences, a Santa Barbara, CA based company has developed a breakthrough technology which recycles Carbon dioxide emissions into useable fuel building blocks such as jet fuel, diesel fuel, and additional mobile fuels.

While it’s been proven that CO2 can be converted into liquid fuel, the massive amounts of energy required simply drives the cost up too high to be effective. Carbon Sciences bypasses the inherent energy intensive and time consuming tasks of growing and processing biomass into fuel. Its breakthrough CO2-to-Fuel technology is based on the direct molecular transformation of CO2 and water into fuel molecules through a novel, elegant, and energy efficient biocatalytic process. The resulting fuels are molecularly identical to fuels that we use today such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. The difference between fuels produced by its technology and petroleum is that ours are renewable -- made from CO2 emissions and not dug up from the Earth. Unlike biofuels, they can be used as-is in today's infrastructure, supply chain and vehicles.

If successful, companies like Carbon Sciences could help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Large carbon emitters would not only be able to use their waste steams as a source of income but would be displacing new oil, substantially reducing carbon emissions. In contrast to ethanol, these CO2-to-fuel methods would produce infrastructure-ready fuels, like diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, that could be used without engine conversions or adaptations.

As the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its primary cosponsors, seeks to employ an administrative approach in an attempt to control pollution by providing economic incentives – and penalties – to reduce pollutant emissions. Often referred to as “cap and trade,” these regulations will have immense implications for the plant, as well as utilities, oil refineries and other large carbon-emitting plants. If targets are not met, not only will companies will be heavily fined but eventually the damage to the planet’s ecosystems will be irreversible.

With a forecast of over 43 billion tons of annual CO2 emissions by 2030, there is an abundant supply of raw material available to produce renewable liquid fuels for global consumption and reduce our dependence on petroleum. Not only does Carbon Sciences’ recycling technology provide an efficient approach to produce renewable fuels and mitigate CO2 emissions and curb demand for imported oil, enabling energy independence, but it can provides the most direct pat the produce renewable fuels utilizing existing infrastructure, including supply chain and vehicles, to ensure cost-effective and non-disruptive deployment.