Today Dr. Naveed Aslam -- chief technology advisor at Carbon Sciences, Inc and the inventor of the ground-breaking approach to converting CO2 emissions into portable fuels -- offered his thoughts on hydrogen procurement, as well as his waste-to-energy system.
"Unlike other CO2 to fuel approaches, Carbon Sciences' technology does not use molecular hydrogen (H2) because the creation and reaction of H2 is very energy intensive," Dr. Aslam explained. "Rather, the company's approach is based on a low energy biocatalytic hydrolysis process where water molecules (H2O) are split into hydrogen atoms (H) and hydroxide ions (OH) using a biocatalyst. The hydrogen atoms (H) are immediately used in the production of hydrocarbons and the free electrons in OH are used to power the various biocatalytic processes." He went on to add that the "technology is not based on photosynthetic plants where sun light is used to drive biofuel production reactions, such as in algae. Instead, it is based on natural organic chemistry processes that occur in all living organisms where carbon atoms, extracted from CO2, and hydrogen atoms extracted from H2O, are combined to create hydrocarbon molecules using biocatalysts and small amounts of energy."
Carbon Sciences' CO2-to-Fuel technology employs hi-tech nano-engineering and is highly scalable, turning CO2 into the basic fuel building blocks required to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other fuels. Learn more about Dr. Aslam's system here.