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"Think Green. Think Investment. Think Opportunity."
Mantra has acquired the intellectual property (patent-applied-for process) for a process developed at the University of British Columbia that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into useful products. This process, named ERC (electro-reduction of carbon dioxide), takes carbon dioxide and water, combined with electricity, to produce fuels and chemicals such as formic acid, formates and oxygen.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and a main contributor to climate change . Today one quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions are released from the burning of Fossil Fuels in stationary coal-fired power plants. As of yet, large scale applications have not been able to make the shift to renewable energy as fossil fuels remain the most cost effective option energy source available. Scientists and innovators are therefore looking at methods to deal with the CO2 released so that it doesn’t enter our atmosphere. These methods currently include capturing the gas and injecting it underground for storage in a process called carbon sequestration. However, as of yet, a full carbon capture and storage system for large-scale power plants is also not a cost effective option.
The ERC process offers an innovative alternative to carbon sequestration with many potential advantages. The first advantage is that the ERC, instead of addressing carbon dioxide as the problem, harnesses its chemical properties as part of the solution. Capitalizing on the abundance of carbon dioxide being released from fossil fuel combustion the ERC converts CO2 to useful, financially profitable products. The second advantage is that the process is driven by electric energy that can be taken from an electric power grid supplied by hydro, wind, solar, tidal or nuclear energy. Lastly, there is potential for this technology to be applied in a closed-loop fuel cell cycle, whereby carbon dioxide is converted into a fuel that is then used in a fuel cell to generate energy. Our company sees the potential of the ERC as a step towards mitigating climate change.
The value of the carbon dioxide market is currently in the US$ billions annually. The state of this evolving market is indicated by the large industry participants (including British Petroleum and General Electric) who are building energy production gasification plants aimed to capture and sequester over 400 million tons of carbon dioxide in a single year, while Carbon Credits are traded at values up to US$30 per ton of CO2.
Read More...R.Socolow, “Can we bury global warming?”
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 The ERC process offers an innovative alternative to carbon sequestration with many potential advantages.
 Electro-Reduction of Carbons (ERC) in the lab. |
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