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| Photo Credit: freefotouk |
What if, in addition to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, we could capture them from the air? That’s the question that prompted Marc Gunther, an author and contributing editor at Fortune magazine, to write the e-book Suck It Up, a Kindle Single. Below is an excerpt from the book on the history of the start-up Kilimanjaro Energy, a private company that is seeking to solve the carbon extraction equation.
Working
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the 1990s, Klaus Lackner
had numerous interests: the behavior of high explosives, nuclear fusion,
and self-replicating machine systems. At some point, he turned his
attention to the technology used to capture CO2 from the smokestacks of
coal plants — technology in which the U.S. government has invested
billions of dollars, with little to show for it. He began to wonder
whether it might make more sense to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. So
when his daughter Claire asked for help with a science project, he asked
her: “Why don’t you pull CO2 out of the air?”
Chemical
engineers have known for decades that sodium hydroxide, a caustic base
also known as lye, will bind with CO2, an acid, to make carbonates.
That’s basically how CO2 is removed from the air so people can continue
to breathe on submarines or in spaceships. Claire accomplished the feat
by filling a test tube with a solution of sodium hydroxide, buying a
fish-tank pump from a pet store, and running air through the test tube
all night. By the next day, some of the sodium hydroxide had absorbed
CO2, creating a solution of sodium carbonate.
“I
was surprised that she pulled this off as well as she did,” Lackner
recalls, “which made me feel that it could be easier than I thought.” READ MORE
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