Australia | Apr 01 2009
By Greg Peel
The global financial crisis has proven somewhat of a distraction, and more ominously a hindrance, to that which was the focus of the world’s and the financial market’s attention prior to the GFC’s arrival. Just as the problems of global warming and solutions to overcome such problems were reaching a head, we were plunged into another significant problem of more immediately pressing need. If the move towards the introduction of a global carbon trading scheme did not already have its detractors prior to world recession, it certainly does now. But that does not mean the situation has in any way improved.
Carbon trading schemes may involve rather complex models that many of us have found difficult to grasp, but at the end of the day there are few on the planet who do not now appreciate what dangers the build up of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere may have unleashed. Even scientists who suggest that global warming is a natural phenomenon within the Earth’s millennial cycles concede that man-made carbon emission is only saving to exacerbate the problem.
High school science taught most of us that we breathe in air, utilising the oxygen therein, and breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants then absorb that carbon dioxide, and through the process of photosynthesis return oxygen into the air for us to breathe, and the cycle thus repeats. But we also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the process of burning fossil fuels – something we have gradually come to do on this planet with gay abandon. And we have now cut down most of the trees, so the Earth’s chances of recycling that excess carbon dioxide have been severely diminished.
The result is a build-up of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere which causes a greenhouse effect, trapping heat and causing the Earth’s temperature to rise. Grim warnings of climate disaster have thus followed, and it seems that every other week, somewhere on the globe, we are provided with ominous curtain-raisers – fires, floods and cyclones, heatwaves and deep freezes.
A carbon trading scheme is intended as a way of forcing heavy carbon emitters to clean up their act. At the same time it is a means of providing financial support to alternative fuel measures such as solar power and alternative lifestyle solutions such as the electric car. While alternative energy and its uses are a means of reducing the Earth’s carbon emissions, we cannot escape the fact that coal burning power stations, for example, will be with us for a long time yet. And that the world’s population expands exponentially to provide more and more demands on fossil fuels each year.
It is to that end that governments including Australia’s, and more recently America’s, have set aside significant budget allocations to fund research into “clean coal” solutions. Such allocations look good as a matter of policy, but there is general confusion as to exactly what “clean coal” is and as to whether in reality it might be as illusive as the Holy Grail, and just as real.
“Clean coal” is really just a blanket expression pertaining to “anything that can be done to reduce carbon emissions from coal burning”, from washing the coal first to capturing the carbon that is emitted. There is no one “clean coal” technology. Many such technologies along the coal burning process are already being developed, but none has drawn as much attention as the possibility of “carbon capture”, or more correctly, “carbon sequestration”.
The concept of carbon sequestration is a simple one. One captures carbon at the point of emission before it is released into the atmosphere and stores it somewhere out of harm’s way. Some processes such as underground gasification and coal liquefication are able to capture carbon dioxide before it reaches the atmosphere and redirect it to further use. While such a system increases the energy output per unit of carbon emitted, it does not actually destroy any carbon.
Nature’s way of storing carbon is to utilise trees. Trees grow by photosynthesis which releases oxygen into the air and retains carbon for the purpose of tree growth. When you burn a tree down to charcoal, that is the captured carbon revealed. Carbon sinks have already become popular in the form of deliberately replanted forests, but unfortunately nature is never in much of a rush. It takes a long time to grow a forest to maturity and thus a long time for trees to draw a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
So it has been left to something called “geosequestration” to offer the world the most viable and expedient solution for carbon capture to date. Utilising a “sweep it under the rug” philosophy, geosequestration simply means pumping carbon dioxide deep into the fissures of the earth’s crust where surely it will be safely stowed away for millennia to come. One day our distant descendants might get a rude shock, but that’s hardly our problem.
One is reminded that when Britain embarked on policy of embracing nuclear energy fifty years ago it began storing radioactive waste in the belief that some time down the track a solution for the waste would be found. Fifty years later it hasn’t, other than burying it deep into mountains.
Not only is geosequestration somewhat of a “cop out”, and not without an element of later danger, no one has really yet come up with a commercially viable solution to capture and store carbon dioxide underground anyway. This is one reason why many believe the concept of “clean coal” to be somewhat of a myth.
But Mother Nature is an extraordinary woman.
Those school students pursuing science a little further into the curriculum would perhaps have marvelled at why on the one hand carbon dioxide is a dangerous gas, but on the other hand its constituent parts – oxygen and carbon – are not. Obviously oxygen is not, except when we breathe too much of it, and carbon is a vital element in the very pencils we were to write out our chemical equations with. Graphite is no more than carbon atoms arranged in a particular four-sided molecular matrix.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Cozenage Capture ((COC)) is an Australian micro-cap which listed on the ASX in 2004 with a minimum of seed capital. FNArena was invited to a lunch presentation from Cozenage CEO John Walter last week.
Walter is the commercial brains behind the development of the company’s jewel in the crown scientific discovery – a means to split the carbon dioxide molecule safely into its constituent elements creating oxygen, and carbon in graphite form, as end products. Such a process is not necessarily the stuff of sci-fi novels but one step in the process had mostly remained illusive, being the correct and commercial application of pressure in the process to affect the formation of graphite.
Professor Friedrich Mittee, formerly of the University of Heidelberg, has supposedly cracked the code. Having long been interested in all things “green” in general, and carbon capture solutions in particular, John Walter invited Professor Mittee to Australia in 2002. He is now Chief Scientific Officer and a significant Cozenage shareholder. Unsurprisingly, Walter proved somewhat coy about expanding on Cozenage’s patented process any further, only to say that one of the beauties of its application was that everything needed could be easily provided by a large power plant, such as a coal burning facility.
While we all know that coal-burning power stations emit copious amounts of carbon dioxide, power companies have oft been at pains to inform us that the “gas” we see pouring forth from those huge spindle-looking smoke stacks is actually only water vapour and not CO2, which is indeed invisible. And this is where a lovely irony comes in.
Walter was happy to reveal that the required pressurising process for the production of graphite could best be achieved through the simple use of steam power. To create a potential solution for mankind’s evil power generation by-products requires only the use of the first legitimate power source mankind ever developed. And thus to best capture the carbon emissions of a power station one only need set up an ancillary plant right on site, redirecting the steam to re-use and capturing the carbon from the carbon dioxide. All that then is emitted is oxygen.
An obvious question arises. If the steam is generated by burning coal, and steam power is needed to provide sufficient pressure in the capture process, doesn’t the power station need to thus burn more coal, and create more carbon?
The answer is a hearty “of course”, but only marginally so given the amount of steam already generated. And the extreme cost savings (in a carbon-traded world) of safely capturing the carbon on site, and the unquantifiable cost saving to the planet, render any excess coal consumption largely irrelevant, Coal is, after all, vastly abundant.
One assumes that if the Cozenage process indeed works, it would not be long before it is globally adopted. This begs another question of what does one do with all that graphite. There is only so many pencils one could sell each year. However the reality is that if graphite production exceeds global demand for pencils, and for dry lubricants, or any other of the current uses for graphite, THEN can the stuff be harmlessly buried in the ground. Although Walter suspects that someone, or maybe even Cozenage, will come up with another significant use one day. At the moment that is not the concern.
Just don’t burn it.
As a start-up company in the alternative energy space, Cozenage has to date received only minimal government funding in the way of a small grant. But once the planned prototype carbon capture plant is completed (hopefully by mid 2010), Walter expects a good slice of the government’s clean coal budget to be sent Cozenage’s way. And that is before one considers just what energy companies might be prepared to invest.
Walter is quick to point out that the technology will not be fully proven until Phase III trials are completed, being the prototype plant. And Phase III will cost money, which is why Cozenage is planning a fresh IPO. Last week’s lunch was a precursor to a planned institutional roadshow.
Cozenage is looking to raise upward of $15 million in retail capital, with another $45 million from institutional investors. While the issue will highly dilute the existing 20c share price, it will expand the register beyond the bare minimum of venture capital and “friends and relatives” invested from the outset.
This may sound like an exciting opportunity, but there was more to come from Walter.
Returning to our high school science, some may recall that under rare circumstances carbon atoms can form itself not into a four-sided molecular matrix, but into a six-sided molecular matrix. Once again Mother Nature astounds us, given the difference between the two matrices provides us with the extreme differences of black dusty graphite, and diamond.
When asked as to whether the Cozenage process could actually produce diamonds as an end product of carbon capture, Walter was again somewhat illusive. But almost with a wink he informed the table that all one needed was a little bit more pressure.