Improvement of Ecologic Economics
Although incineration is a kind of thermal decomposition of materials, we address herein will be get rid of incineration since it is a process to emit high amount of Green House Gas (GHG) pollutants like NOx, SOx and dioxane and having limiting flexibility use of its deliverables. Thermal decomposition could be Pyrolysis or Gasification could convert organic or fossil based carbonaceous materials into carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the combination of these gases is called syngas. Both process give no NOx, which is a common GHG emission in Incineration. These technologies have made huge development steps in the last couple of years and syngas opens up its capabilities for the production of different synthesis products like natural gas via Water-Shift reaction or synthetic gasoline via Fischer Tropsch process.
Nowadays, over 90% of the produced H2 is from Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) on fossil fuels, while the rest is produced by electrolysis. This is achieved in a processing device called a reformer which reacts steam at high temperature with the fossil fuel. The steam methane reformer is widely used in industry to make hydrogen. During the conversion of the fossil fuel into hydrogen, carbon is either released into the atmosphere, typically as CO2 or left at reactor performed as Carbon Black .
Compare to our CCVD method, methane gas goes into solid carbon and hydrogen gas, obviously we have no CO2 emission and at the same time, we do not need huge amount of water to reform, particularly scarcity of water is one of the human challenges in 20th century. In the consideration of 1 ton of H2 production, SMR requires 9 tons of water in preparation; whilst CCVD requires none. Besides the consideration of water usage, crackings produce solid carbon as by-product and this would provide add-value for the whole process. In terms of energy involved, energy input in CCVD is only 55% of SMR to produce the same amount of Hydrogen. By doing so, we could produce Hydrogen in a more effective method.
Transforming e.g. biogas into the two commercially usable products, Hydrogen as well as the nano Carbon contributes significantly to green house gas emission reduction. E.g. 1t CH4 (reduce 23t CO2 equivalent) plus CCVD H2 (reduce 2t CO2 versus SMR) plus nC substituting CB (reduce 10t CO2) = Σ35t CO2 reduction.