Carbon Sciences announces breakthrough process that recycles CO2 into gasoline

Carbon Sciences, Inc. a developer of a breakthrough technology to recycle carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into gasoline and other portable fuels, announced in January the development of certain process technologies that will allow for the production of gasoline, shorten the time to commercialization and reduce the system and operating costs of its CO2-to-Fuel technology.

The company’s current approach is an enzyme-based process used to transform CO2 into low-level fuels, such as methanol. Recently, Dr. Naveed Aslam, CTO of Carbon Sciences, discovered a new and more cost efficient process to produce gasoline from CO2. The key features of this breakthrough include the fact that this process can use flue emissions directly from coal-fired power plants or industrial factories, which eliminates the need for “clean” CO2, and it can use brackish water, which eliminates the need for distilled freshwater as the source of hydrogen and for the reaction medium. This breakthrough process also eliminates the need for capital intensive stainless steel equipment, and it provides a highly scalable system that will transform large quantities of CO2 into gasoline for use in existing transportation infrastructure.

“We always wanted to produce high-level fuels, such as gasoline, but knew that additional steps would be required to reach this goal,” said Byron Elton, CEO of Carbon Sciences. “Now, we have the way to go directly to gasoline.”
“The United Nations’ IPCC estimates that the cost of simply capturing CO2 for applications such as underground sequestration or for transformation into products, can range from $45 to $73 per ton of CO2,” continues Elton. “This cost is perhaps the single biggest economic barrier to any large-scale CO2 applications, such as carbon sequestration. However, by being able to use a raw CO2 flue gas stream in our CO2-to-Fuel technology, we are no longer dependent on the success or commercial availability of carbon capture systems. In addition, unlike biofuels based on growing plants to absorb CO2 from the air, our CO2-to-Fuel process is an industrial process that can produce fuel in minutes to hours – not months to years – to meet the demands of the world. These breakthroughs demonstrate why we continue to believe that Carbon Sciences is developing the most powerful and sustainable fuel technology in the world.”

“We are very excited about these new processes,” added Dr. Aslam. “Our end-to-end CO2 to fuel system will have several modules. We have determined that one of these modules can function as a standalone system for use by a sizable part of the energy industry, for the production of gasoline. Inquiries from potential strategic partners have further validated our decision to focus on this module. We are anticipating a shorter than normal development cycle, and are hoping to achieve commercialization in less than one year.”