plastics from air carbon

[sky otter]

just saw a clip of this on the weather channel and wow..now this is a great idea




http://www.rdmag.com/award-winners/2013/08/carbon-negative-plastic

Carbon-negative Plastic
Wed, 08/28/2013 - 2:30pm

2013 R&D 100 Winner

A carbon-negative plastic has been sought-after for many years. While a material that pulls carbon out of the air has been produced, the cost to process it has been three times higher than the cost to produce plastic from oil.
Developers at Newlight Technologies LLC, however, have achieved a scalable, cost-effective production method for AirCarbon, a high-performance thermoplastic made by pulling carbon out of air.
Newlight's manufacturing process begins with a point-source stream of air containing greenhouse gas that is collected and fed into a proprietary gas polymerization reactor.
Using multiple gas mass transfer technology, air and greenhouse gas is then converted into aqueous form.
Dissolved gas is then contacted with an engineered biocatalyst that polymerizes hydrogen, oxygen and carbon into a long-chain thermoplastic polymer at high yield. The resin is converted to plastic pellets, which are as strong as oil-based plastics and more cost effective.

Technology
Thermoplastic

Developers
Newlight Technologies LLC


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Development Team


Newlight Technologies LLC's AirCarbon development team (l-r): Evan Creelman, Mark Herrema, Kenton Kimmel.

X

The AirCarbon Development Team from Newlight Technologies LLC
Mark Herrema, Principal Developer
Evan Creelman
Kenton Kimmel
Jim Lunt
Award Year
2013
Organization
Newlight Technologies LLC
Developers
Mark Herrema, Principal Developer
Evan Creelman
Kenton Kimmel
Jim Lunt
TopicsR&D 100 AwardsMaterials SciencesMaterials Science


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http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/air-capture-drawing-carbon-from-the-air-to-make-plastic-new-tech-entering-the-market-place/question-3993259/?link=ibaf&q=&esrc=s

     
"Air Capture", drawing carbon from the air to make plastic. New Tech entering the market place.
by Dwight-AFCL, PWCM-JLA Posted October 16, 2013
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http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/13/carbon-capture

Art: Splashlight. Source: Klaus Lackner, Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, Columbia University

Scrubbing the Skies
Pulling CO2 back out of the air might be easier
than building jets and cars that don't emit it.

Every time you drive to work, or worse yet, fly on a plane, the vehicle emits carbon dioxide that will stay in the atmosphere, warming the planet for thousands of years. Does it have to? Trees can take CO2 back out again—but even covering the planet with forests wouldn't solve our problem, and there would be an awful lot of wood to preserve. (If allowed to rot or burn, trees release their carbon again.) Physicist Klaus Lackner thinks he has a better idea: Suck CO2 out of the air with "artificial trees" that operate a thousand times faster than real ones.

They don't exist yet, and when they do, they probably won't look like real trees. But in Lackner's lab at Columbia University he and colleague Allen Wright are experimenting with bits of whitish-beige plastic that you might call artificial leaves. The plastic is a resin of the kind used to pull calcium out of water in a water softener. When Lackner and Wright impregnate that resin with sodium carbonate, it pulls carbon dioxide out of the air. The extra carbon converts the sodium carbonate to bicarbonate, or baking soda.

Continue »

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http://news.sciencemag.org/2012/01/new-co2-sucker-could-help-clear-air


New CO2 Sucker Could Help Clear the Air
9 January 2012 5:23

Air scrubber. A new polymer has proved adept at removing CO2 from the air.
Researchers in California have produced a cheap plastic capable of removing large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. Down the road, the new material could enable the development of large-scale batteries and even form the basis of "artificial trees" that lower atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change.

These long-term goals attracted the researchers, led by George Olah, a chemist at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Olah, who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in chemistry, has long envisioned future society relying primarily on fuel made from methanol, a simple liquid alcohol. As easily recoverable fossil fuels become scarce in the decades to come, he suggests that society could harvest atmospheric CO2 and combine it with hydrogen stripped from water to generate a methanol fuel for myriad uses.

Olah and his colleagues also work on making cheap, iron-based batteries that can store excess power generated by renewable energy sources and feed it into the electrical grid during times of peak demand. To function, the iron batteries grab oxygen from the air. But if even tiny amounts of CO2 get into the reaction, it kills the battery. In recent years, researchers have come up with good CO2 absorbers made from porous solids called zeolites and metal organic frameworks. But they're expensive. So Olah and his colleagues set out to find a cheaper alternative.

They turned to polyethylenimine (PEI), a cheap polymer that is a decent CO2 absorber. But it only grabs CO2 at its surface. To boost PEI's surface area, the USC team dissolved the polymer in a methanol solvent and spread it atop a batch of fumed silica, a cheap, industrially produced porous solid made from microscopic droplets of glass fused together. When the solvent evaporated, it left solid PEI with a high surface area.

When the researchers tested the new material's CO2-grabbing abilities, they found that in humid air—the kind present in most ambient conditions—each gram of the material sopped up an average of 1.72 nanomoles of CO2. That's well above the 1.44 nanomoles per gram absorbed by a recent rival made from aminosilica and among the highest levels of CO2 absorption from air ever tested, the team reported last month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Once saturated with CO2, the PEI-silica combo is easy to regenerate. The CO2 floats away after the polymer is heated to 85°C. Other commonly used solid CO2 absorbers must be heated to over 800°C to drive off the CO2.

"This is intriguing. It's nice that it works at low temperatures," says Klaus Lackner, a CO2 air-capture expert at Columbia University. That could make it useful for grabbing CO2 out of the air in addition to safeguarding batteries, says USC chemist and team member Surya Prakash. The polymer could be useful for building massive farms of artificial trees that would aim to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But that's only if countries around the globe are willing to spend untold billions of dollars to rein in atmospheric CO2. The polymer also degrades at high temperatures, meaning it likely can't be used to snag CO2 from industrial smokestacks or automobile tailpipes, where the CO2 is often highly concentrated but typically comes out at high temperature. To overcome that limitation, Prakash says the USC team is now working to produce high surface-area PEIs that are better at taking the heat.

Posted In: Chemistry

[robomont]

the temp could be brought down by using a heat pump that extracts the heat .concentrates  it and converts it into more energy.

the carbon being extracted could be very valuable over time as we continue to bury carbon in landfills.those who extract it the cheapest will gain the most from it.such as carbon fiber sky scrapers.autos etc.basically carbon will be the new steel.

also the extraction method would work great in scuba rebreather setups i would think.