Recycle CO2??

Five Ways to turn CO2 into CASH
Written by Benjamin Jones
Thursday, 17 April 2008

These days, many experts are saying that we’re not going to be able to stop climate change just by decreasing emissions. To dig our way out of this hole, they say, we’re actually going to need to take carbon dioxide out of the air.
The first instinct has been to bury the CO2. Just pump it into the Earth and try and forget how ashamed we are of these massive quantities of CO2. But a new breed of entrepreneur has sprung up, saying "If we have this CO2, why don't we do something useful with it!?"
Obviously, we've got to get rid of all that carbon, but if folks can make some money and lower the cost of sequestration while they're doing it...then that's just icing on the cake. So here are five of the ways in which people are hoping to make bank with the millions of tons of CO2 that are pumped out of coal plants and into the atmosphere every day.
Feed it to Algae, and then Turn the Algae to FuelYou may know that biofuels can be made from algae. You may also know that algae thrives on carbon dioxide. A company called GreenFuel Technologies has put two and two together, and is using captured CO2 to grow algae, which will then be made into biofuels. But they aren't the only ones working on it. There are dozens of startups working to create different techniques and algal strains that will allow them to maximize carbon capture and minimize costs. Earth2Tech recently had a writeup on 15 of the top algae biofuel startups. Of all of the techniques listed hear, algae farming with CO2 is probably the most mature technology, and the first fuel-producing plants are already going online. And, of course, we don't have to worry about ever running out of a market for biofuels. As long as we're creating CO2 by burning fuels, there will be a place to burn biofuels.
Turn it into PlasticRecently the American Chemical Society saw a proposal to use captured CO2 to produce polycarbonate plastics, like those used in CDs and DVDs. The idea is to take carbon dioxide emissions, and instead of sequestering them in the ground, trap them in resilient products. This approach makes sense, but because it relies largely on sequestering carbon in disposable products, like plastic forks and water bottles. So, basically, we'd be sequestering carbon every time we threw away plastic. Landfill sequestration seems like a pretty wasteful way to go to me, but it's certainly better than the alternative. But even with the amount of disposable plastic we consume in the world, we would have plenty of CO2 left over if all of it was turned to plastic.
Make Sodium Bicarbonate (Baking Soda)Joe David Jones, CEO of Skyonic, has created a process that captures CO2 as it exits power plant smokestacks and mixes it with sodium hydroxide to form baking soda. This process, called SkyMine, also removes heavy metals and dangerous pollutants and coverts the CO2 into sodium bicarbonate. Baking soda has a variety of uses on the commercial market, and this process could help make carbon capture more economically viable. Even if the baking soda is not sold, because it is solid it is immensely easier to store it in old mines or landfills than it would be to sequester gaseous CO2 beneath the ground. The real question is whether the world can produce enough sodium hydroxide to keep the process going.
Calcium Carbonate A company called Carbon Sciences has a new process called GreenCarbon, which, at the base of things, turns carbon dioxide into useful stuff. The GreenCarbon process mixes the CO2 with crushed calcium minerals, one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust. The end result is calcium carbonate, an industrial chemical that's used in thousands of applications, from PVC to paper to toothpaste and, in its pure form, as wall board and chalk. Because calcium carbonate is used in just about everything, there’s a huge market for it, and depending on the quality, it can sell for hundreds of dollars a ton. The question remains, though...is there enough of a market? The CEO of Carbon sciences says yes, but we're skeptical as a single coal plant could produce millions of tons of calcium carbonate per year.
Convert it Directly into FuelSandia National Laboratories is working on creating fuel directly from CO2 without any pesky biological intermediaries like aglae. The carbon dioxide would be super heated to around 1,200 C and mixed with water to create various hydrocarbons of the sort we're already burning in our cars. All of that heat, of course, is energetically expensive, but Sandia is hoping to use leftover heat from nuclear or utility-scale solar thermal power generating plants. The process basically reverses combustion, and is only economically viable if the energy can come from cheap, clean sources. The good news is that it can be scaled much more easily than algae production, which requires thousands of acres of space to soak up the CO2 from one coal plant.
In ConclusionThere's no one solution to this problem. We'll probably start out pumping most of it underground, while turning a good portion of it into fuel. But I expect that, in the next 20 years, power producers start having to pay the true costs of releasing CO2, techniques for creating useful products with that CO2 will multiply. Depending on where coal plants are and what resources they have around them, project planners will have to figure out what the most economically viable thing to do with the CO2 is. If there's a lot of calcium deposits around, they'll be creating calcium carbonate, but if there's a lot of sun and ample space, maybe algae farms will pop up around the power plant.
In any case, we'll see an entire economy spring up around actually using our societies primary waste product. And not only is that just good policy, it's a gigantic economic opportunity.

World Wide, Not!

Blackmail Against Cuba on the Net

The alternative media are still rejecting the new crude global effort to attack and isolate Cuba, after the complaint by the American newspaper The New York Times denounced the prohibition established by the White House on American public access to digital sites and web pages from different points on the planet if their content relates to the island.According to a report, 557 companies and 3,719.com domains were blocked by the Office of the Department of the Treasury without prior notice to their promoters or users in the Union itself. With this discriminatory practice the monopoly on the overall media universe that the United States exerts is confirmed once again, a real privilege in the hands of the powerful. The World Internet Usage Statistics website reported that of more than 6.6 billion people around the globe, only some 1.32 billion have access to the World Wide Web, that is, barely 20 percent of the overall population. The differences by area confirm the unevenness of levels. While North American users account for 71 percent of the regional population, and in Europe the figure is 43 percent, Africans are less than five percent of the inhabitants with coverage of the Internet of such a populated geographic area. Among the disadvantaged are also included Latin Americans, 22 percent of Internet users in Asia with little more than 13 per cent, despite its nearly four billion people. So the reality is obvious and clear. The powerful, and especially the wealthy American consumer society and its violent drivers, stand not only as virtual owners of Internet use, but also in global censors to try to maintain the network of networks in their exclusive service and alien to opinions, criteria and alternative interpretations.

Moose Introduction in UK

Moose return to the Highlands after several thousand years
Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent
The Guardian,
Tuesday April 15 2008

A moose in the Scottish Highlands. Photograph: Peter Cairns/PA
Last seen several thousand years ago loping through the ancient forests and glens of Scotland, two moose have arrived at a remote reserve in the Highlands as part of plans to reintroduce wild animals now extinct in the UK.
The male and female moose are part of ambitious and controversial proposals by a millionaire landowner to recreate an ancient mountain habitat, complete with wolves, lynx and brown bears roaming freely within a vast fenced-off wildlife reserve north of Inverness.
Paul Lister, the son of the founder of the MFI furniture chain, wants to "re-wild" 50,000 acres around his 23,000 acre estate at Alladale to create a safari-style wildlife reserve.
The moose are to join a family of wild boar living within a far smaller 500 acre enclosure at the estate where he is already recreating ancient Caledonian forest, planting 80,000 native trees.
He has been keenly pursuing his proposals for several years, but the scheme is attracting substantial opposition. Critics insist his plans are unlikely ever to be realised. It would, they argue, be a giant zoo and would illegally put predators and prey together. A herd of moose, otherwise known as European elk, and fenced off wolves already live in a Royal Zoological Society of Scotland wildlife park in the Cairngorms - carefully separated by several large fences.
Executives in Scottish Natural Heritage believe releasing wolves would break the key principle in reintroducing wildlife, that it should be socially acceptable. Local farmers are worried these predators would threaten livestock, and Lister has yet to persuade neighbouring estates to let him use their land.
The Ramblers' Association believes Lister's proposals to erect an 85-mile long, three-metre high fence around a 50,000 acre area is a clear breach of Scotland's countryside access laws and would be a blight on the landscape.
Dave Morris, chief executive of the Ramblers in Scotland, said: "This is totally in conflict with the land reform legislation. Were he to put in a planning application for such a structure we would expect strong opposition and expect it to be rejected."
But, speaking in a BBC 2 Natural World documentary tomorrow night, Mr Lister will say: "There's always going to be people out there that go: 'This isn't going to work. He's a crackpot, this, that and the other.' But as long as the majority of people can see what we are trying to achieve here, then it will happen."