Greenbox: Captures Carbon Dioxide to Make Biodiesel
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 07.20.07
It sounds like three Welsh fishing buddies have developed the next best thing to a perpetual motion machine. The concept is thus: Fitted to car instead of an exhaust their Greenbox device traps carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The box needs to be replaced about every full tank of fuel. “Through a chemical reaction, the captured gases from the box would be fed to algae, which would then be crushed to produce a bio-oil. This extract can be converted to produce a biodiesel almost identical to normal diesel.” Voila! - driving your car produces fuel. After a couple of years of testing and umpteen hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in research it would appear that there is more to this than the usual magic solution that crosses our desks. Of course the devil is usually in the detail.
None is which overly forthcoming at the moment, with Reuters noting that the trio (a biochemist and two engineers) don’t even trust their wives with the info on how the Greenbox actually works. “After every demonstration they hide its individual components in various locations across North Wales and the technology is divided into three parts, with each inventor being custodian of one section.” (Indiana Jones would be proud.) What we can glean from the story is that in the UK they would need 10 genetically modified algae (Mmmm?) factories, each about 400 hectares (~1,000 acres), to process the CO2 from Britain’s 30 million cars. Still it’s good to know there are yet more inquiring minds at work on our global conundrum. Via ::Reuters UK
Check out this US Carbon Footprint Map, an interactive United States Carbon Footprint Map, illustrating Greenest States to Cities. This site has all sorts of stats on individual State & City energy consumptions, demographics and more down to your local US City level...
http://www.eredux.com/states/
OK, so the "greenbox" traps 95% of the emissions (or so they claim) and stores them.
So what happens to the Greenboxes after they've been emptied? Do they contain some kind of filter that gets thrown away? Can the filter be reused? What is the filter made out of?
Is it just me or does it sound like buying a new box every tank of gas is likely to be wasteful (and increase pollution).
Also, is burning the Algae any good for the environment, or is it just green because its renewable pollution?
One Man. One Year. $100,000 online.
http://wwwoneyeargoal.com
Interesting - sounds almost identical to this smokestack version I read about last year.
Fuel is a rather compact way of storing carbon, but add oxygen to it and you need as much if not more space to store it.
i.e. the "green box" would need to be rather large and at least as heavy as a tank full of fuel and that is not taking into account the substrate that the CO2 is absorbed into.
There is a high probability therefore that this story is a fraud or a gross exaggeration.
Another case of if it sounds too good to be true.
Fred, Brian,
The article I read says that the green boxes can be reused once the CO2 is extracted from them.
Oscar, Dan,
I hope you're wrong and it's not a fraud. There are some well-known companies out there that have offered these guys big sums of $ to buy their technology (which they've turned down). I suspect these companies wouln't chase a ghost.
Did anyone read that this solution is likely modifiable to utility-scale? It seems to me that the real bonus would be to stick this on a coal plant and capture the CO2 from that. It would be sort of like the GreenFuel solution, though the C02 would be transportable to a alge site if the plant didn't have the acreage for it.
How much to retro fit cars for the Greenbox alone & estd Processing plant.?
Can scrap CA smog emissions alone, Great.
Use for ALL vehicles, buses, fleets etc.
Major $$$$$ sources.
Neat-O.
(cant find website).
GreenBox the Auto Future.
Does that Greenbox convert only emissions made by usual engines? If not, I mean, if they also can convert the biofuel-engine emissions, the dicision of how to empty the box' tank is very simple to my mind. They sholud make some pipe to transport collected biofuel directly into engine to enclose the loop. I undertsand, that energy loss will take place, but this variant will reduce the fuel expenditure and number of box changes. Profitable it wuold be, I think.
Green box sounds like a standard CO2 scrubber on the exhaust. Three technologies exist: Lithium hydroxide, limewater or zeolite/carbon nanoparticles. All are reversible at the bowser but its not fast and it requires energy. That's why the box must be removed. Each would be approximately triple the mass of the fuel. That is still much better than many battery technologies. And for Fritzes information algae derived Biofuels are chemically identical to normal hydrocarbons so It should run on them.
Interesting technology. With oxygen storage it would even work on Mars. I think battery technology and plane vanilla biogas will supersede it though. If you can strip CO2 from biogas it becomes natural gas and thus LNG.
So why not patent it, release the details to the scientific community for verification, collect a Billion Dollar Paycheck before Christmas and save the world?
Answer: Louis Enricht (wiki it...)