Lara Abrams Communications

Carbon Sciences Builds A Compelling Case for Carbon Transformation - - Now.

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I have to admit that I’m not convinced that carbon trading is that compelling to me. Perhaps there’s something I’m just not getting about the whole thing. But neither am I convinced that the geological sequestration of carbon is ideal, either. That just doesn’t make much sense in my book. It all seems like we’re trying to complicate what should otherwise have a fairly simple, elegant way to get pretty ‘carbon negative’ to combat global warming, and actually measure the results. We are, however, in need of a very immediate solution to not only reduce, but to capture, at the point of emission, CO2 that’s heading upwards, and do something productive with it. I just heard on the radio while driving the other day that CO2 emission aren’t going down. They’re heading up up up…despite what’s been done so far. Obviously, something needs to be done ASAP.

The options are so far as follows: alternative energies – wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, I guess, and water-generated. But these aren’t likely going to have the kind of ‘immediate’ fire-fighting effect that we need to see, where we need to see it, which is at the point of capture. And at the point of capture, the two top contenders for disposing of CO2 emissions are CO2 storage and CO2 transformation. And storing CO2 under the seabed or under rocks somehow just doesn’t conjure up a very comforting picture to me, somehow, so my curiosity was piqued when I learned of Carbon Sciences, a Santa Barbara-based company working on a way to reduce CO2 emissions AND turn CO2 into usable mineral material, (“carbon mineralization”) carbonates specifically – bricks, toothpaste, cosmetics, drywall, and chalk, and more. And from what I can tell, Carbon Sciences seems to be the kind of company that could be just the type of game-changing model we need to get CO2 emissions under control. Manufacturers, take note.

I will admit that when I recently had the opportunity to talk with Carbon Sciences’ CEO Derek McLeish, I found myself wondering why this wasn’t already being done in the industrialized world. I mean – doing this sort of thing just can’t be that complicated, right? One would think. All you need is a little high pressure, a little chemical reaction, and voila! Carbon dioxide the gas becomes mineralized carbon. And that can go into just about any kind of product. The fact is, though, energy costs alone have dissuaded more than a few parties from pursuit of the idea of carbon mineralization on a large scale. But not Carbon Sciences. As McLeish told me, the area not only has potential for growth – it’s ripe with growth opportunities.

The market for Carbon Sciences’ Green Carbon Technology
Just imagine: there are 64 different grades of calcium carbonates available on the market – and the stuff is in everything from toothpaste to yogurt. If you have enough feedstock to work with, and you can scale operations effectively enough, this whole concept starts to sound really interesting. And the US has about 120 years worth of potential carbon feedstocks available to work with, according to McLeish.

Then think about the following: there are mines upon mines upon mines in the US where the mine processing is about taking the under-burden – processing the rock - and creating from slime, then tailings, a slurry dam. There are millions of dollars spent in doing this, creating this mix of slime, tailing, and slurry. Carbon Sciences has identified roughly 1500 areas where they could find the ‘right’ mix of lime/slime/slurry to do what they are trying to do (turn the gas, CO2, into a solid).

With these numbers in hand, you can start to get a sense of the size of the market opportunity we’re talking about. The company’s technology converts CO2 into a usable form of Calcium Carbonate, which the company calls GreenCarbonate. The end product has extensive commercial uses, including agriculture, the manufacture of paper, coatings, plastics, glass, ceramics, chalk, dental care, cosmetic products, fertilizers, construction and architectural applications and as a natural buffer used in pollution filters.

The benefits? The final product from the conversion of CO2 gas produces mineral carbonates that are inert, safe for the environment, with no storage risk, and the commercial value of the product offsets the costs of traditional carbon capture and sequestration systems. Transforming CO2 into commercially useful carbon products would help create environmentally friendly products, industries, and offers the possibility of creating real, actual reductions in CO2 emissions for heavy industry especially. And here’s a solution that will capture CO2 at the point of emission.

Making the case for carbon transformation
There’s no question that transforming CO2 takes energy. But McLeish’s goal is to make it unappealing for anyone to consider geological sequestration.

“It takes energy…there’s no question it takes energy, McLeish notes. “We’ve got some good kinetics on what happens when you build in the CO2…and once we have a stream of compressed CO2, my target is to get to 10 dollars a ton, in terms of the cost of transforming CO2.” By doing this, McLeish knows the company can make it unappealing, as well as uneconomical, for anyone to consider geological sequestration. “It won’t make sense to do that if they’re going to pay only our target of 10 dollars a ton to turn it into something useful,” he says.

McLeish envisions smaller scale plants with higher quality calcium carbonates where, as he puts it, “we might not even worry about the costs, because we’d be creating enough material value…though in the short run, I can’t guarantee that income because who knows when that 4 cents a ton or $150 a ton ever gets funneled back to someone who’s really doing something.”

I asked McLeish about the amount of water required in Carbon Sciences’ process, as well as what kind of information they’ve gleaned from observing the kinetics of the reaction they’re generating, and McLeish told me they’re able to use almost any kind of water, fresh or salt, and that the the ability to manage various water volumes is not really a big issue for the company.
“The one that normally makes people wonder is the ability to handle such large masses of rock (which we’re able to do with water),” McLeish told me. “The rock’s extremely dense. Once you put it in the slurry, the rock can move through large, big scale pumps, through the process, through the reactor — and then you can evaporate off the water at the end, and you are left with the calcium carbonates. The issue with us on the water side is that it requires transportation (to create carbolic acid, which can then attack the mineral slime, and become bound to that), and one of the key tenants in our technology is that you can’t spend a lot of money in these scale-up processes with catalysts – other than with CO2 and the mineral slimes.”

Now and Future Thinking
Just to give you, the reader, and me, the writer, an idea of where all this is going, I asked McLeish to take me to the future – far into the future - so I could get a sense of size, scenario, etc.

McLeish paused for a moment, and then said, “Ok, let’s say we’re at 2050…and at that time what we’re as big as a coal fired plant, and the Carbon Sciences transformation plant is about the size of scrubbers – normal scrubbers of today…now that’s wayyyyyy out there. Reeling it in a little earlier, today this is more of an enabler of a manufacturing plant that’s going to be moved out of town because it’s emitting so much CO2.” [see http://www.frtr.gov/matrix2/section4/4-60.html for more info on scrubbers, btw.] Ding, ding! The lightbulb went off in my head.

So who would be ideal clients, I asked?

“We’re much better off working with a natural gas plant, and then burning natural gas for energy, because we don’t have to go back to the grid…like an ethanol plant, they are huge CO2 emitters,” said McLeish. “As one example, we’ve been approached by a plant where 360 000 tonnes of CO2 will be emitted on a yearly basis. And coal would be the huge home run…the ability to do coal – there you’re talking about a multi-billion dollar plant.”

On the competition
If you want to educate yourself and do a little further reading, competitors are carbon sequestration plays, as well as to some extent, transformers, and companies focused on CO2 capture like Ingersoll Rand. “You can consider the algae guys as CO2 sequestration guys…same as Planktos…but you couldn’t tell really what was being captured with Planktos’ model,” says McLeish. “The biggest issue for them was how do they know what they’ve captured and what are all the secondary effects on the ocean ecology, and we know. You give us a thousand tons of CO2, it becomes 3000 tons of rock and you can go in there and look at it.” (To put it in a more comprehensible ‘size’, consider that a cubic foot of wallboard weighs about 38 pounds. 1/3 by weight captures 100 cubic feet of CO2.)

What’s next
Carbon Sciences is head down in R&D as this blog goes to press, studying what amounts of energy scaling up will require, residence times, conversion factors, feedstock variability, pressure coefficients and more. The company’s developed a mobile demo just to demonstrate the chemical reaction they’re working with in a manner that people can visualize easily. Key success factors for Carbon Sciences’ technology are going to be proximity to water, mines slimes and tailings, and energy. Mcleish says the company is looking for strategic partners in the mining and CO2 emissions area to get Carbon Sciences off the ground - fast.

More on Carbon Sciences here.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

^ back to top

 

Contact Lara Abrams

To contact Lara, please email her at lara@laraabrams.com or call 415 613 1704.