Carbon gets a pretty bad rap when it comes to climate change because of all the harmful things humans have done with it to hurt the earth - but there's one big caveat - capturing it will probably save the earth.
Carbon capture technology (CCT) is an upcoming technology that currently has three primary applications:
🛢️ Enhanced Oil Recovery: turning CO2 into oil; creating carbon dioxide to put more carbon dioxide back in the air (kinda ironic lol)
🧪 Creating Chemicals: companies like twelve.co are harnessing carbon capture through their industrial photosynthesis tech to create more sustainable biofuel and other critical chemicals for the supply chain.
🪨 Storing CO2 in other materials: utilizing carbon capture to get the carbon dioxide, store it in rocks, and sink it into the ground. climeworks is a company that has direct air capture plants (DAC) that are mineralizing carbon dioxide into basalt rocks and storing them underground.
While these are novel uses of CCT, we want to be able to generate revenue which is why we went on a rabbit hole of carbon valorization. carbon valorization is the act of extracting value from captured carbon and implementing it today. for example, CO2 can be made into natural gas, e-fuels, ethanol, and other types of materials. chemist iris ten breaks down carbon valorization and the status quo of the valorization market here.
As valorization was the answer for us, we researched the most novel materials on the market and concluded that creating a more sustainable version of carbon black would make the most sense, and here’s how we’re going to do it:
This is a high level of what our innovation is - we’re going to break this process down into three steps:
Capturing Carbon Dioxide
Converting CO2 into Methane
Converting Methane into Carbon Black
Capturing Carbon Dioxide
carbon capture is the process of trapping CO2 emissions through different industrial processes. one of the most prominent processes is the DAC plants and here is how the ones built by carbon engineering work:
air travels into the air contactor plant where they have their own capture solution coated to the top of the plant.
the air and capture solution meet in the middle of the plant in a sheet of PVC where the capture solution is latched onto the PVC plant.
once the air hits the absorbed PVC sheets - the CO2 is turned into liquid carbonate and is dripped into a bucket below the plant. the trapped CO2 liquid goes through the pipeline for further processing.
*carbon engineering has a video that explains this process in more detail if you're really interested.
Converting CO2 into Methane
To convert CO2 into Methane (CH4), the most cost-effective and validated method that we are using is called the sabatier method.
We are using the methods of this research paper - where we use a ruthenium ceric oxide (the Ru/CeO part of the diagram) catalyst (a chemical that makes a reaction happen easily) to make the chemical reaction occur with 7x less energy than the industry standard.
What's happening to the CO2 is that we break the carbon-oxygen bonds in the CO2 to form new bonds with hydrogen to create methane. with this process at the helm we are able to produce methane with the only byproduct being water ( which is a good thing!)
Converting Methane into Carbon Black
To convert our newly made methane into carbon black, we mainly used plasma pyrolysis as the main process outlined in this research paper.
We can break this complex process down into three easy steps:
(1) methane flows through a large tank that is heated up to 200 degrees celsius where plasma is shot 💥 at the methane!
(2) this heat allows the methane to be broken down into two atoms: carbon and hydrogen.
(3) we harvest both portions - using carbon for carbon black production and using hydrogen as input for step 2
🤔What’s Next?
While this process can work in a hypothetical situation, we are taking a headstart and contacting potential customers, figuring out how to transport black carbon efficiently, and figuring out how to scale this process - so if you can help in any of these areas, contact piram and ahnaaf from black carbon labs!