End of the World?

          Is carbon sequestration the end of American business?  There are people who say, "No!"  Among the benefits they see:  (1)  A 20% to 30% increase in farm production immediatly and double eventually,  (2) Immediate saving of a similar amount of the water needed for agriculture.  (3) Recovery of thousands of acres of previously unusable land due to lack of water.  (4)  Vast new grain fields in Nevada, Arizona and Colorado producing millions of tons of grain.  (5) Eventual 96% saving of all water needed for agriculture with complete control over genetically engineered crops that cannot escape agriculture to become "Frankenplants."

Where 70% of all water now goes to agriculture a 96% saving releases 67.2% of water now used for crops.  And, using these systems in our home yards and gardens to grow grass and landscape plants saves 1/3^rd to ½ of all suburban water.  It is a new era in America and the world thanks to the implementation of carbon soil amending and CO2 injection.  How can this be?

U.S. Patents by Adrian Vance are collectively entitled “Sequestered Carbon Amendment and Fertilization” acronym SCAF.  The system operates in three phases:

 Carbon Capture

          Carbon from industrial steam generators is captured two ways:  The Cottrell Precipitator is 100 year-old technology that electrostatically charges carbon atoms to become molecular allotropes in several forms now called Fullerines.  These exist as 40 to 70 carbon atom allotrope "Bucky Balls" or long, fishnet stocking-like tubes of carbon with strength greater than steel.  The nanotechnology potentials are incredible.

        Cottrell technology used to clean aerosols, dust and bacteria from households in electrostatic, fan-free air circulators and is only scaled up to large chimney-sized systems for industrial elemental carbon capture.  And, capture as sodium carbonate using a new proprietary system called NatroX™.

        The burner exhaust passes through a scrubber that is loaded with a proprietary sodium hydroxide including a microscopic impurity of nuclear power-plant waste, enough to ionize the air around the sodium hydroxide castings in the patented form of little "X's" to increase the surface area and exposure with geometrically caused loose packing.  Ordinarily the hydroxide would form small spherical pellets that could close pack and be less permeable to exhaust gas than desired.

         Weak radiation from the very diluted nuclear waste encourages sodium carbonate formation on the "X"  forms appearing as miniature tree-like “dendrites” on the surface of each “X.”  The scrubbers are vibrated constantly causing the brittle feather-like carbonate crystals to fall to the bottom of the scrubber into a collector box.  This is emptied at each refueling when NatroX™ is reloaded.   

           This chemical trick has compressed the gas as much as 555 atmospheres of pressure, 8159 pounds.  The carbonate is wet with about one-sixth its’ weight in water, put into a sealed vessel where the slurry is heated to boiling, driving off the CO2 at high pressure.  The generators can be any size and with heat alone produce very high pressures for applying the gas to subsoils. The irradiated hydroxide is recovered in the heating and it only needs be recast to be reused.  There is no loss or waste other than heat in the process.  A stationary system could be solar heated.
         
          Meanwhile back at the large coal fired power plants the Cottrell precipitators are working full time. Depending on burner tuning for every ton of coal burned we could have 1870 pounds of carbon as 6856 pounds of carbon dioxide where it combines with 5000 pounds of oxygen if the combustion is 100% efficient.  Modern coal burners are very efficient so we may assume 90%.  The remainder is 1683 pounds of carbon converted to 6171 pounds of CO2 and 187 pounds of elemental carbon per 2,200 pound long or metric ton of coal burned.

          The efficiency of combustion can be controlled and cost accounting may dictate a lower efficiency to give a better carbon product mix as it has been observed the Cotrell apparatus manufactures a new class of chemicals called “Fullerenes” or “Bucky Balls.”   While experimental they will be of considerable interest to the newly developing science of nanotechnology.

          Fullerenes are carbon allotropes which are molecular forms that vary in the number of carbon atoms per molecule, but it is all pure carbon in any case.  The number of carbon atoms ranges from 40 to 70 in the yet observed “Bucky Balls” so-called because they are little geodesic dome forms named after F. Buckminster Fuller, the famous designer-engineer who popularized geodesic dome designs in building.

          Long known as one of the strongest forms in nature as they are made of triangles, they will be of increasing importance in nanotechnology, technology that is on the scale of 10^-9^th or “billionth” meter.  The world of the very small is virtually another dimension where forces and their effects are very different from those we see in our “meter sized” environment.  The Cotrell apparatus is the primary source of these small forms and we will learn how to control the output of them.  This in itself will become a huge business.

 Carbon Soil Amending

           In agriculture and archeological scientific literature you will find the topic “Terra Preta Soils.”  They were originally thought to be natural, very black earth soils unique to Central America and the Amazon basin, but archeologists found pottery shards and ground carbon particles from stone mortars in these fields.  Add that to the fact that these soils were only found in well-defined fields used for growing crops and the conclusion had to be, “man made!”  Nowhere else on Earth had this kind of work been done and it produced the most fertile soils known.

        Soils with a lot of humus are very productive for only as long as the humus is fresh and decaying.  We know now that rotting humus produced carbon dioxide to feed the plants, a fact unrecognized until now.  When everything had decayed the soils ceased to be productive.  Carbon amended soils do not have this drawback.  Where the carbon does not decay, but continues to adsorb and hold water that would otherwise be lost to lower levels or evaporation these soils continue to be ideal for plants.  When we add CO2 that would be coming from humus decay we have effectively turned huge fields into "potting soil" of a kind no farmer could afford to use widely.

          When Cortez arrived in the New World he brought with him men trained in many fields.  The agriculturalists were astonished to see the fertility of the dark Terra Preta soils.  They determined Terra Preta soils were several times as fertile as anything known in Europe.  It is now believed the Indians saw their old fire pits become islands of fertility in otherwise barren areas, those like we have in our southwest.  Before long they were burning wood and grinding charcoal to make these fields.

          Amending bad soils with sequestered elemental carbon recovers them for agriculture and with the very low water demand plants the SCAF systems will be productive farmlands as long as they are fed carbon dioxide..  Many of these lands are on water tables insufficient for contemporary agriculture, but may have enough for the 1/25th need of SCAF served fields.

 Carbon Dioxide Fertilizer

           Meanwhile back at the carbon dioxide recovery sodium carbonate cooker/extractors, we are piling up tons of the carbonate and tank cars of carbon dioxide under high pressure.  What to do?  This material has been thought of as an industrial waste to be buried, pumped into deep wells or put in the bed of an ocean.  All of these are expensive, wasteful ways of dealing with carbon dioxide.  SCAF makes carbon dioxide a marketable product to be used as plant fertilizer.

          Carbon dioxide has never before been thought of as a soil fertilizer until the SCAF Patents.  In those patents several systems are outlined for dispensing the gas in ways that will keep it in the soil dissolved in water already present.

          The solution of carbon dioxide in water produces carbonic acid, H2CO3.  This is in all soda drinks and carbonated wine.  It is a very unstable molecule that comes apart explosively forming carbon dioxide gas and water.  It is capable of exploding bottles and cans if it is not handled properly, but dispensed at a depth of 18 inches goes quietly into solution with ambient water which is cool and dark just the way carbonic acid likes it to be.  Green plant roots absorb this water instead of processing a lot of air to put CO2 in the plant sap and the plant thrives.

        Carbon dioxide can be dispensed from a boiler-type device that heats sodium carbonate to the point where it dissociates producing sodium hydroxide and CO2 gas.  This process is capable of making high pressures as the gas volume is 555 times that of the carbonate salt and gas is produced until the generator gets to a temperature of 318 Celsius degrees, the melting point for sodium hydroxide, NaOH.  These generators can be made in size from an ounce of carbonate to a ton and heated with any flame, electric heater or even solar collecting mirrors.  In a solar application measured amounts of sodium hydroxide could be put in the generators and connected to an underground network of tubes supplying CO2 to row crops, orchard trees, etc.  With careful design and testing the sun could be the determinent of how much gas the plants get as they would need more when the sun is shining and less when it was not.

          With genetic engineering to reduce the number of leaf stomata on green plants we will make new classes of food crops that will be under our complete control, dependent on man for the carbon dioxide they need.  This will prevent any new food or fiber plant from breaking out into nature and becoming pests or “Frankenplants.”  If seeds escaped or were planted in a field not supplemented with CO2 the modified plants would quickly die.

          Thanks to a government program that many people hate and make dire outcome predictions about we are now entering an era of greater agricultural productivity with a fraction of the water of our plants have long required.

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