Brown Panel: To Cut CO2 Emissions, Make It Profitable
by Alex Kuffner (Providence Journal) To get power plants and other large polluters to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change, make it financially attractive to them. That was the key takeaway from a conference held last week at Brown University that brought entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers together to discuss ways of turning the carbon dioxide that is being released into the atmosphere into a valuable commodity that can be captured and put to use.
Do that and there will be a business incentive to act against global warming, speakers said at the “CO2: From Waste to Worth” conference on Thursday at Brown’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics.
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“CCU transforms carbon dioxide from a waste disposal problem into an economic resource and could lower the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions,” the senators wrote in the letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy.
At the conference that was cosponsored by the Slater Technology Fund and the New England Clean Energy Council, panelists detailed some of the potential uses for carbon dioxide, including using it as a feedstock for algae, which can be turned into a biofuel, and using it as a replacement for petroleum in the chemical ingredients that make up pharmaceuticals, plastics and other products.
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Algae production is another option. Portsmouth-based BioProcess Algae operates greenhouses in Iowa that channel carbon emissions from an ethanol plant to grow algae used for animal and human foods and in chemicals. READ MORE
