Who knows? In the beginning missioning for Carbon Recycling was prompted by most people to be too complex for laymen. But the clearer we started to illustrate how we could emulate Nature the more often we were confronted with perceptions of “too good to be true – if it was that easy, why is it not done yet”? And of course for most people the best excuse for doing nothing is, when they can say, nobody else did it yet! But nobody admits that this is the explanation, why nobody did yet!
When thinking about why someone maybe should have done it already one must admit that over the last 60 years our world adopted the current linear Carbon consummation Eco-System. It delivers convenience at affordable cost to people and good profits to corporate and fiscal sectors. So we have a “never change a winning team” phenomena! Being honest, a competitive Circular Carbon Economy technically and economically may only have been envisaged for the last 10 years, after oil prices rose beyond U$30 per barrel and industrially stable processes for accelerated decomposition of biomass into energy rich gases were successfully demonstrated at scale. Unfortunately in many places the latter had been attempted inappropriately. Instead of just disqualifying the specific method such failure ended up blackmailing the total concept. So such first attempts in learning became the end of the whole story and were used by linear Carbon eco-system profiteers as a testimonial that the Circular approach just wouldn’t work. Luckily sometimes there are exceptions that can break the rules! For example Canadian industry colleagues Enerkem: They meanwhile turn plastic waste into Methanol, representing a chemical Recycling of Carbon. And Methanol is actually a very versatile chemical energy storage medium that can directly adsorb CO₂ in its synthesis or deliver Electricity in a Fuel Cell. We look at Enerkem as a peer having apparently raised already half a billion dollars in capital after completing its small scale demonstration under a US-DoD funding a few years ago.
Carbotopia™ advocates for physical catalytic Carbon Capture for re-Use [CCU]. It is enabled by our proprietary Hydrogen production from hydrocarbon gases via Chemical Vapor Deposition of Carbon. A process, originally developed for high performance laser-light emitters in fiber optic telecom transmission networks. Such originally synthetic diamond heat sinks actually enabled affordable backbone hardware for today’s broadband already 20 years ago. 10 years later we industrialized the original Acetylene feedstock high pressure process to an atmospheric Natural Gas (Methane) input process. Thermodynamically it can deliver Hydrogen at 20% of electrolysis energy input. After to date achieved efficiency rates it results to actually ⅟₇ of electrolysis. Anybody who may ever have heard of landfill-gas, the part containing energy is Methane coinciding with CO₂. Contemporarily popular Power to Gas concepts make use of natural equilibrium reaction of Electrolysis Hydrogen with CO₂ into Methane and water. These are the two most preferred storage concepts for Hydrogen by Nature. Carbotopia™ just dissociates waste derived Methane together with the one from rebound reaction between any coinciding CO₂ and the Hydrogen yielding from catalytic Capture of Carbon in the Methane. That way as much as possible Carbon can be recovered as chemical Energy Storage for versatile re-Use options in other locations and/or at other times of demand.
No rocket science. Just dignifying Nature’s binary concept of Carbon and Water – the two building blocks of Carbohydrates being the basis of organic life, perpetually built and broken down again in life-cycles of Nature. Carbotopia™ just uses State of the Art Technologies, as Enerkem does, to accelerate decomposition at end of life-cycle and homogenizes output to highly pure nano-crystalline Carbon for downstream re-Use in synthesis by combinations with water. It could change our whole Carbon Eco-system at fossils’ arm’s length price structures – but some entrenched interests don’t want to let it happen and rather privately capture “more of the same” linear Carbon squandering.