Joe David Jones, the founder and CEO of Skyonic, wants to compress carbon dioxide and store it in underground caves to cut down on greenhouse gases. He plans to undertake an industrial process called Skymine that captures 90 percent of the carbon dioxide coming out of smoke stacks and when mixed with sodium hydroxide makes sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda. The energy required for the reaction to turn the chemicals into baking soda comes from the waste heat from the factory. The baking soda idea offers solutions to some of the economic problems posed by other carbon sequestration methods.
Unfortunately, a lot of the proposed solutions for sequestration involve large amounts of capital and risk. If you bury carbon dioxide underground, it could always leak out. Other ideas include pumping it into underground saline aquifers or porous rock formations. If you can use the waste heat, it strikes as a potentially feasible approach. Otherwise the byproducts of the different reactions – chlorine, baking soda, hydrogen and chlorine can be sold to industrial users. In all likelihood, the chlorine and hydrogen will have a higher market value than the baking soda, but baking soda does have its buyers. It is often used as an industrial abrasive, and mining baking soda is an expensive process.
via: Popscitypepad
