CO2 in Water Chemistry

    

      Only 1.45 grams of carbon dioxide dissolve in 1000 grams of water at 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) at one atmosphere of pressure forming carbonic acid, H2CO3, an unstable substance.  Ions, shock, heat, or sunlight cause  H2CO3 molecules to break apart and carbon dioxide leaves the solution violently.  Carbonated soft drink and wine bottles, which have higher pressures, have exploded in hand with serious injuries resulting as the small space in the neck of the bottle traps all the gas produced. Pressure in the neck space rises to a point greater than the strength of the glass and then it fails catastrophically.

          Carbon dioxide injected into wet earth dissolves into soil moisture easily because the soil is still, cold, dark and under  pressure.  Soil water pressure rises just over one pound per square inch for every foot of soil depth.  Thus, carbon dioxide is increasingly soluble in soil more deeply is it injected.  

        At one atmosphere 1.45 grams of CO2 dissolve in one liter (1,000g) of water which sounds like very little, but it is 2952 times as much CO2 per unit volume as air.

        Carbonated water is absorbed readily by plant roots. It will stay at rest until found by plant roots.  A more perfect container, storage and delivery system could not be made for carbon dioxide. This is the key to Sequestered Carbon Amendment and Fertilization, the SCAF, system.

A Genetic Engineering Opportunity

We have shown green plants prefer soil carbon sourcing. This points the way to the genetic engineering of green plants that will use 1/25th the water of today’s plants! We need only to find the genetic codes sizing and placing stomata, substitute them with those of cactus or bromeliad stomata DNA code segments to reduce irrigation to that of fields of cacti as long as we feed the plants subsoil CO2.

Genetic engineering is possible because we are all from the same source.  There must have been one original cell from which all living matter came.  As a result finding a genetic code that causes a codfish to make a natural non-toxic anti-freeze meant that code could be put into tomatoes and produce a more substantial and economically viable product that could be left on the vine longer, into the first freezes.  The market was killed for this product with ignorant fear fueled by reckless journalists.  The enemy to progress is more often what people don't know rather than what they do know.  However, this defines for authors of new technology and invention the task of educating the consumers.  Given our era of panic power politics, propaganda and news management our work is clearly defined and monumental.

The opposition to modified plants is ignorance run amok.  The kinds of experiments we do on plants happen continually in nature.  We are part of nature.  We are the part with brains, opposable digits and language so we can manipulate, communicate across time with documents, have a long enough life span that we can learn and even better, transmit what we have learned to subsequent generations.

The enormous advantage that we have over plants is that we live for long times and extend our lives intellectually by documenting our work and passing it on to new generations.  With plants it is all over in one season.  For thousands of years we have done genetic engineering with a single tool: selection.  The native farmers of ancient Mexico not only discovered the improvement carbon made in their soil, but routinely picked the plants more to their liking to use for seed. 

        With a new generation every year, and thousands of years, we can understand how modern corn came from a grass.  Go to any international airport and see how many kinds of arms, legs, torsos, heads and hairs you see.  Mother nature never quits experimenting.   By nothing more complicated than selection we have come from the "Lucy" of the Leakeys to blond Scandinavians, Eskimos, Negroes and more now divided into five official races.

        As surely as the sun rises every morning we will develop plants that have the stomata of cacti and use small amounts of water.  These plants will produce our food, fiber and fuel in greater abundance than ever with only 4% of the water used by today's plants.  They will depend on us and our machines, but they will live, survive and thrive as we seek our combined destiny.  The world is ever changing.

New Carbon Sequestering  

Carbon is chemically bound in plants by photosynthesis and kept until it is burned, eaten or decays.  It is as sequestered as anything can be.  Every stick of wood is 44% sequestered carbon and possibly forever.  There are carvings and furniture from the antiquity of both the old and new worlds.  In fact wood is not forever, but with so much of the newer wood and laminated materials in use and recycled once captured as wood the carbon is pretty well fixed for a long time. 

What Will Be

Where carbon sequestration is now called for by environmentalists, treaties and soon laws, carbon sequestration will be a popular and mandated business, but one doing a right thing for a wrong reason in our opinion. But, by the time the error is known the benefits of SCAF will be undeniable and the policies continued for tax revenues.  The economy will have expanded such that our elected class may take a vacation from runaway greed.   Taxes are forever according to the great American philosophers Mark Twain, H.L. Menken and Will Rogers.  They have yet to be seen wrong.

Perhaps the running gun battle between business and government will settle down to a mature arguing stage.  The natural relationship between the economy and government has been known since antiquity when in Genesis 12 it was said the Pharaoh should take “one in five” of the harvest in order to support the public good, protect the people and keep the peace.  This ratio was redetermined in Europe of the Dark Ages.  Europe was then one little duchy after another.  The ones that overtaxed the people, taking more than 20% fell to internal greed and corruption.  Those taxing less than 20% did not have enough to defend themselves from external invaders.

If you examine the entire history of the United States in terms of tax rates and economic expansion you will see that the optimum rate has been 18.3%.  In those years our economy expanded up to 30%.  Coincidentally, these were years of significant new inventions and innovations like SCAF.

With 2.26 million acres in the United States:  33% in forest, 26% in grasslands and 20% in crops we will need a lot of carbon and carbon dioxide for SCAF.    
   
          If SCAF only recovers 75% of the dry grasslands for agriculture it will have doubled crops in cultivation.  With this technology we think 100% of all dry grassland and much desert land will be converted to cropland. 

          Without SCAF global warming sequestration would glut the carbon dioxide market and be looking for places to put excess gas.  With captured CO2, as gas or carbonates, we can recover lands poisoned by years of irrigation that left salt residues insufficiently leached for lack of water.  The gas converts heavy metal alkali to insoluble carbonates while carbonizing subsoil may give us encapsulated lighter alkali ions in Bucky Balls.  This will much improve soils lacking humus to recover them for agriculture.

$100 Per Ton?

 The Department of Energy now estimates carbon sequestration cost at $100 per ton.  We think this is a low figure, but an increase should not harm the economics.  As pollution carbon dioxide will certainly be taxed at a higher rate to force sequestration.  Substantial tax credits will have to be granted for capturing elemental carbon and chemically binding carbon dioxide.  These tax credits will be salable as the Carbon Dioxide Company, CO2Co™, or Carbon Dioxide Exchange, CO2Ex™.  There is no end to the games that can be played with legally defined garbage.

This is where SCAF technology completely changes the equation and our economy.  We have a lot of soil in cultivation and even more that can be recovered with elemtal carbon, the allotropes Bucky Balls and CO2 gas.

Where the course of events will probably be that CO2 sequestration is mandated the SCAF people will be able to charge for taking it away.  That will change as soon as agricultural people see the effectiveness and economic advantages of using carbon dioxide gas on their crops as well the special plants adapted for it.  When the opportunity comes to sell off their water rights for many millions of dollars the market and future of SCAF will be assured.

There will be some multiple of $15 billion in new taxes and credits to be managed annually by the government where we generate 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year.  This is more than enough to well carbonate every acre in cultivation in the US, recover lands lost to alkali accumulation, farm new lands and have an exportable CO2 surplus.  History shows the tax total is likely to be between $300 billion and $1 trillion when Congress fixes it.

           The automobile, power plants and stationary internal combustion engines output a major portion of our CO2.  For them we have invented what we call NatroX™ systems.  They are very simple, but based on sophisticated ideas of the formation of carbonate crystals.  The system uses nuclear waste products to generate alpha particles that ionize the air immediate to the NatroX™ casting.  This increases the efficiency of the carbonate formation and carbon dioxide capture rate thereby simplifying the scrubber greatly.

The NatroX™ System

Sodium Hydroxide-Carbonate Cycle System

It is difficult to know how serious lawmakers will be about sequester-ing carbon.  The big problem will be the automobile.  It is a very popular, well-lobbied for offender that is difficult to deal with as it must be light in weight.  To date the engineering solution for efficiency has been to make cars with electric motors and expensive batteries, but not address the CO2 problem directly. Electric cars and "hybrids" are not a good answer. They add more problems and inefficiencies. Therefore, we propose some-thing that not only solves the CO2 capture and sequestration problem, but the nuclear waste problem as well.  To wit:

           A small, one liter turbocharged Diesel engine, burning virtually any hydrocarbon can provide performance of the kind automobile buyers want and need to feel safe in traffic if the car is very light in weight.  The Geo-Metro four seater, which did not crash well, but built with a tubular cage frame of chrome-molybdenum steel and carbon-fiber body panels could be much lighter, safer and crash resistant.   

            The carbon sequestering unit is a simple box loaded with proprietary lightly radioactive sodium hydroxide "X" castings.  Diluted nuclear waste inclusion encourages the formation of sodium carbonate dendrite branches as it emits gamma rays on the surface of the "X" castings of NatroX™  ionizing the immediate air which encourages ionization of the CO2 molecules to form carbonates.

        
         Seen here from the side the scrubber is a simple sheet metal box with perforated tubes fed from a top box reservoir loaded with NatroX™ "X" castings by a filler pipe leading to a cap on the vehicle exterior.  The perforated tubes are placed so exhaust gas has to pass through pellets.  The bottom has a receiving box to hold the tiny carbonate crystals that form on the "X" castings in the tubes.   Carbonate crystals grow as tiny feather-like dendrites. 

 They break off from vibration and fall through the perforated tube bottoms into the lower box for temporary holding to be dumped to a receiving system at a fueling station.  The hydroxide to carbonate chemical reaction reduces the volume of the gas as much as compressing it with 555 atmospheres or 8,159 pounds/square inch pressure with no energy required for compression!  

NatroX™

“Put X in your scrubber.”

With a trade name derived from the Latin “Natrium” for metallic sodium and a clipped  hydroxide, “oX,” sodium hydroxide can be cast into forms with much greater surface area than the spheres normally formed when fused (melted) sodium hydroxide is poured into cold air for the manufacture of Lye.  NaOH fuses at 318 Celsius degrees.  Small “X” figures with a cross section of 8 mm with 3 mm long legs of 2 mm diameter will have a mass of 1.2 grams.  They will loosely pack in ways with channels through which air can pass and contact the hydroxide surface.  The “X’s” have four times the surface area per unit mass as spheres and work that much better at scrubbing CO2 compared to spherical pellets.  

Nuclear Waste to the Rescue.

The hydroxide includes nuclear fuel waste that accomplishes two things:  It identifies the product and the source of manufacture as the isotopic formula can be varied to become an identification code.   Alpha and gamma emissions excite carbonate dendrite formation through particle precipitation as they ionize air near the surface of the hydroxide.  This works well as a place for nuclear waste use as it spreads the materials so widely so they are not a radioactive hazard in any one place, but promote carbon sequestration instead.  Of course our dealing with nuclear waste will be another large revenue source from the nuclear power industry in getting rid of their problem.  And, where we know the location of all the waste it could be recovered quickly if needed.

This filter/scrubber would be substantially lighter and cheaper than the battery in any electric car or hybrid as the scrubber is little more than a sheet metal box with ten pounds of NatroX™ pellets held in perforated tubes.  Hybrid car batteries weigh several hundred pounds, cost $10,000 installed and last only a few years.

Where the US has a 700 year supply of oil shale and a greater amount of coal we can make Diesel fuel abundantly.  The Rentech Co. has updated the WWII German Fischer-Tropsch process to make Diesel fuel from coal for 86 cents per gallon we expect automobile design to go to small Diesel engines ideal for this system as their exhaust has much CO2.  The other immediately accessible fuel source is butanol, a product of the Clostridium acetobutylicum bacteria consuming wood, sawdust, corn or grass stalks, while leaving a mash that cattle and vegetarians will eat.

     Corn produces four as much mass of roots, stalk and leaves (stover) as grain.  If an acre of corn produces 130 bushels of corn, 7280 pounds and 29,120 pounds of stover that will be fed to the Clostridium acetobutylicum bacteria to produce about 35% butanol, 12,740 lbs or 2123 gallons of fuel that is less volatile or dangerous as gasoline, is transmittable by pipeline, which ethanol is not, gives about 10% more energy per pound than gasoline then it would appear our fuel problems are over. 

     In a one liter turbo-Diesel powered steel-bodied car in the Geo Metro style, 10 pounds of NatroX™ sodium hydroxide pellets could scrub the CO2 from four gallons of fuel getting 50 miles per gallon and a range of 200 miles.  Every refueling would require dumping 13.25 pounds of sodium carbonate formed in the apparatus and replace it with 10 pounds of fresh NatroX™, but the car would emit far less CO2 than a comparable hybrid, sell for one-fourth the price and have much lower maintenance costs.  The system can be scaled up to any size vehicle or stationary engine installation.  We believe that with a properly designed and built chrome-moly/carbon fiber lightweight car the mileage figure could approach 100 miles per gallon.

     The sodium hydroxide and carbon dioxide are recovered by wetting the carbonate with water in a sealed container.  Water equal to one-third the mass of the carbonate is required in the reaction.  The mix is heated to decompose the carbonate to hydroxide, recapturing the CO2 gas.  The process develops very high pressure as the volume change from solid carbonate to gas approaching the fusing temperature of sodium hydroxide is 1:1200, enough to create up to 17,661 pounds per square inch gas pressure when the salt is heated with water to 318 Celsius degrees.  The recovery units can be made in any size from a pint on up.  They are very simple and output great quantities of carbon dioxide with each charge.   

The final recovery operation consists of heating the oxide with some water to drive out any CO2 missed in field units and make hydroxide.  Continued heating with the gray Calrod™ heater, per above figure, to dry and melt the hydroxide will permit it to flow onto the iron roller into which "X" patterns have been cut to reform the charging material.  For new material we add a radioactive tag substance. Every batch of nuclear waste will have a unique nuclear profile from the several forms of nuclear material incorporated thereby making a unique label for the batch.

 The cylinder to the lower right, seen on end, is machined iron dotted with small “X” cuts such that the melted salt coming from the nozzle flows into the carvings where it freezes and then shrinks to become loose in the molds.  It falls out when the mold turns to face down.  The wheel is turned with a stepper motor to facilitate filling the molds and dumping the castings as the projected melt freezes.  The optimum cycle is to be determined by experimentation. 

 The castings may be shaken off by vibration and shrinkage from the cooling water running through the cylinder.  This produces a proprietary product.  The number of pounds made can be tracked by recording the number of rotations of the wheel.


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