CO2-to-Fuel Technology

Carbon Sciences is developing a breakthrough technology to transform CO2 emissions into the basic fuel building blocks required to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other fuels. Innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering disciplines, we are developing a highly scalable biocatalytic process to meet the fuel needs of the world.

The fuels we use today, such as gasoline and jet fuel, are made up of chains of hydrogen and carbon atoms aptly called hydrocarbons. In general, the greater the number of carbon atoms there are in a hydrocarbon molecule, the greater the energy content of that fuel. For example, gasoline has hydrocarbons with 7 to 10 carbon atoms and jet fuel has 10 to 16 carbon atoms. Hydrocarbons are naturally occurring in fuel sources such as petroleum and natural gas. To create fuel, hydrogen and carbon atoms must be bonded together to create hydrocarbon molecules. These molecules can then be used as basic building blocks to produce various gaseous and liquid fuels.

Due to its high reactivity, carbon atoms do not usually exist in a pure form, but as parts of other molecules. CO2 is one of the most prevalent and basic sources of carbon atoms. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most stable molecules. This means that it may require a great deal of energy to break apart CO2 and extract carbon atoms for making new hydrocarbons. This high energy requirement has made CO2 to fuel transformation technologies uneconomical in the past. However, Carbon Sciences is developing a proprietary process that requires significantly less energy than other approaches that have been tried. Also, with the global demand for fuel and price of oil projected to rise continuously in the foreseeable future, the economics have changed in favor of certain innovative lower energy approaches, such as Carbon Sciences' breakthrough technology.

Breakthrough Biocatalytic Process

Some of the known approaches for CO2 to fuel transformation include (1) direct photolysis which uses intense light energy to break off the oxygen atoms in CO2, and (2) chemically reacting carbon dioxide gas (CO2) with hydrogen gas (H2) to create methane or methanol. Both of these conventional engineering approaches require immense energy due to high pressure and high temperature chemical processes. For certain applications such as military and space, the high cost of these technologies may be justifiable. However, we do not believe these approaches will be economically viable in creating transportation fuels for global consumption.

By innovating at the intersection of chemical engineering and bio-engineering, we have discovered a low energy and highly scalable process to transform large quantities of CO2 into gaseous and liquid fuels using organic biocatalysts. The key to our CO2-to-Fuel approach lies in a proprietary multi-step biocatalytic process. Instead of using expensive inorganic catalysts, such as zinc, gold or zeolite, with traditional high energy catalytic chemical processes, our process uses inexpensive, renewable biomolecules to catalyze certain chemical reactions required to transform CO2 into basic hydrocarbon building blocks. Of greatest significance, our process occurs at low temperature and low pressure, thereby requiring far less energy than other approaches.

The energy efficient biocatalytic processes we are exploiting in our technology actually occur in all living organisms where carbon atoms, extracted from CO2, and hydrogen atoms, extracted from H2O, are combined to create hydrocarbon molecules. Our breakthrough technology allows these processes to operate on a very large industrial scale through advance nano-engineering of the biocatalysts and highly efficient process design.

The biocatalysts employed in each step of the process serve to create intermediate hydrogen and carbon compounds that can be acted on by the next step with less energy. At the end of the process, these compounds are assembled into basic hydrocarbons - such as C1 (one carbon atom fuel - e.g. methane), C2 (two carbon atom fuel - e.g. ethane) and C3 (three carbon atom fuel - e.g. propane).

Highly Scalable CO2-to-Fuel Transformation Plant

The Carbon Sciences CO2-to-Fuel technology includes a complete plant level process that takes CO2 from a large emitter, such as a power plant, and produces usable fuels as the output.

1. CO2 Flue Gas Processor - Crude purification of CO2 stream to remove heavy particulates. The Carbon Science process does not require high purity CO2, hence low cost CO2 capture and processing.
   
   
2. Biocatalyst Unit - Regeneration of biocatalysts for the CO2 transformation process.
   
   
3. Biocatalytic Reactor Matrix - The primary and largest part of the plant where mass quantities of biocatalysts work in a matrix of liquid reaction chambers, performing the multi-stage breakdown of CO2 and its transformation to basic gas and liquid hydrocarbons. These reactors are inexpensive low temperature and low pressure vessels. The number of reactors determines the size and output capacity of the plant.
   
   
4. Filtration - The liquid solutions are filtered through membrane units to extract liquid fuels. Gaseous fuels are extracted through condensers.
   
   
5. Conversion and Polishing - The output of the Filtration stage contains low hydrocarbon fuels - e.g. C1-C3. These hydrocarbons can be easily processed into higher fuels, such as gasoline and jet fuel, through commercially available catalytic converters.