Air Pollution Control & Clean Up

Electric cars may be only one aspect of urban air protection. Electric cars require electric power and electric power is generated mostly by burning coal, oil, wood, or natural gas.

Replacing a car that runs on oil with an electric car, puts one source of pollution into another. Power plants that work hard to make electricity for light-bulbs and toasters now have to work even harder so we can plug-in electric vehicles for an overnight charge.

This means incomplete combustion functioning to make steam that turns electric generators.

Much of our air contamination control efforts need to be focused on smoke stack scrubbers for power plants.

The choice fuel for heat to turn the electric generators doesn't matter much. They all pollute the air in regard to carbon dioxide (CO2). Some less than others.

The least CO2 polluting fuel is natural gas or methane (CH4). How much CO2 pollution exactly does natural gas produce?

A good example is given in Dr. Michael Fayer's new book, Absolutely Small (AMA, 2010). Burning natural gas to make electricity to run a 100 watt light bulb 24/7 for one year puts 1000 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere. Heating oil is 1.3 times worse, and If we burn coal instead, “it will be 2000 pounds or the weight of a small car.”

If we had a United States Energy Policy - which we don't - and if that energy policy were comprehensive, with long term initiatives, then new air pollution could be prevented; existing air pollution could be cleaned up. What a concept.

Not dealing with air pollution is like not doing an oil change: we pay for it whether we get one or not. We suffer low gas mileage or bronchitis, and the cost is in the billions.

Most people live in cities. Most cities have oil-based motor transport. If we changed to all electric transport, the cities could become cleaner - providing the power plants put scrubbers on the smoke stacks.

But, how can we keep our turbochargers? our V-12s? our Hot Rods? We can keep these by simply running them on the highways where they belong and by providing pollution protective measures so we can all breathe easier.

What protective measures? PROMOTOR Low CO2 Exhaust, Hydrocarbon Particle Filters, Gasoline, Diesel, Coal, Wood & Natural Gas Combustion systems. Road-Tunnel & Underpass Viaduct Smog Filtration on all road tunnels, train tunnels, and underpass thoroughfares to clean enough air to make a difference.

PROMOTOR Low CO2 Exhaust & Hydrocarbon Particle Filters

For cars and trucks, the filters are made to order. They are custom-built to fit each make and model. The price of course depends on the vehicle.

Vehicle filters are made to trap CO2 from tailpipe exhaust before it's released to the atmosphere. We do this by offering a soap-like chemical of opposite polarity, potassium (K)(+). It's like attracting bees with honey (sort of). Except in this case, the CO2 (-) sticks to the potassium (+) with a little help from water (H2O).

Gasoline + air burns to create energy to move the car. Leftover waste including CO2 goes into the air we breathe. We try to catch CO2 and, as much as possible, before it goes out of the tailpipe. We use a filter material mixed with potassium hydroxide (KOH).

The exhaust CO2 + H2O meets KOH in a flow-by reaction. Immediately a molecule is formed that becomes a soluble, slightly negative, potassium bicarbonate (KHCO3) ion. The CO2 is now captured and stays that way until the filter is removed and rinsed in a tank of water.

The CO2 collected in the KHCO3 will dissolve in a tank of water. To safely store the captured CO2, a small amount of additional KOH is sprinkled into the water. This action creates a chemical reaction with the dissolved CO2 to make potassium carbonate (K2CO3), which turns the water milky white.

The tiny white particles are now solid, potassium carbonate and settle to the bottom of the tank in a thick paste. The harmful greenhouse gas, CO2 is sequestered in carbonate.

The formula looks like this:

C8H18 + 2O2 ---> energy + CO2 + 2H2O [add KOH] CO2 + 2H2O ---> KHCO3 [add KOH] KHCO3 + H2O ---> K2CO3 carbonate

This protective measure is a simple, inexpensive process. We can attach a scaled-up version to a slipstream on a smoke stack. A good proportion of combustion waste from a power plant can be captured and safely stored indefinitely by using a variant of this method.

Air Pollution Scrubbers

Urban Street Air Cleaner

Air pollution control is critically absent in mega-cities like Delhi and Shanghai. Riding a motorized rickshaw in India for example, or a bus in China often leaves the rider with polluted air to breathe. In Mexico City tourists find the same is true. In Tokyo there are street-side vending units for oxygen masks, but no street-air cleaning devices can be found.

Urban Street Air Cleaners are pollution scrubbers specifically developed by Industrial Environmental Carbon to receive significant volumes of street air, and to safely treat the polluted air with chemical solutions containing potassium hydroxide, activated carbon, calcium hydroxide, and water.

Street air pollution from vehicle exhaust is ducted to a tower located either above or below ground (illustrated above). The tower unit's energy drives five regions of pollution control. The first treatment is particulate, ash, and hydrocarbon traps followed by CO₂ capture, and rainchamber clean. Further up are two separate rinse circuits which end with a cooling demister before clean air is driven from the top in continuum, as more air enters from the bottom.

Our pollution control, air purification towers are crafted to operate by convection forces alone - radiant heat-driven, or by solar, or wind, wave, or by grid-connected power. The towers may be installed in cities and remote desert or marine locations.

Measurements of the quantity of air impurities entering the tower are compared to those exiting from the top. We employ 5-gas analyzers for data collection, storage, and on-demand GPS viewing in real time.

The amount of carbonate collected from the captured CO₂ is an important industrial commodity.

C8H18 + 2O2 --> energy + CO2 + 2H2O [add KOH] CO2 + 2H2O --> KHCO3 [add KOH] KHCO3 + H2O --> K2CO3 carbonate [add aggregates] --> mineral products.

In addition, the potassium content of the carbonate paste, is in itself an important agricultural product because potassium is one of the major nutrients needed by plants. Potassium compounds are therefore important in fertilizers.

Combustion CO2 & Nutrient Recovery For Algae Growth

Capturing CO2 from combustion exhaust is one thing, trying to turn it back into a fuel is quite another.

Patented photobioreactor waste-to-energy operations are commendable efforts owned and maintained by algepower.com. This company grows oil-bearing algae for biofuel production as well as other products, and employs CO2 to encourage growth of the tiny aquatic plants.

To simplify algae respiration processes, suggested here is to introduce methane (CH4), combustion-derived CO2 with nutrients entrained for algae growth.

Fresh water algae evolve with obvious differences from salt water phytoplankton. One difference being a free exchange of fresh water CO2 (dissolved oxygen) with the atmosphere while it's not the case for salt water, where CO2 goes in and stays there.

Current research shows fresh water lakes are in fact becoming sources of atmospheric CO2 in the Northern latitudes.

Our studies indicate we can get CO2 to dissolve readily into fresh water where it becomes available for carbonate formation - if we introduce additional hydroxides.

If not, we simply keep the water covered.

However, it may be possible to use some of the captured CO2 from combustion exhaust by feeding a portion of it to fresh water algae. This would simplify existing waste-to-biofuel operations regarding CO2 supply and algae demand.

Further, the addition of native chalk (CaCO3), prevalent from the late Cretaceous Period, to fresh water ponds and lakes, should have an obvious effect of fresh water CO2 retention. From an algae point of view this turn of events may be an advantage.

Native to cooler regions, home-grown algae types are a already acclimatized variety which may enable renewed biofuel sources as well as food production if the right nutrients were to become available.

Seeding small Northern glacial meltwaters may encourage algae reactions which would not normally occur - at least in the foreseeable future.

This method can be found in one of our patents-pending.

All patent-pending systems reuse self-contained chemical and water solutions from reservoirs featuring conservative operation with carbonate production as a by-product. The carbonate may be mixed with selected aggregates to form bricks or cement as an added benefit.

A water source is a requirement. All systems demand supervision and maintenance.

All systems are available upon request.

Essentially, our structured filter designs transition order from the abandoned and disordered waste produced all around us.

However, carbonate is not an isolated system and the second law holds, predicting ordered systems (like Sun and Earth) evolve toward disorder and randomness.

The decreasing entropy of carbon in this case, should last longer than frozen CO2 in empty oil wells. Both storage concepts are only subsystems of the larger one above.

Atmospheric CO2 Collection Towers

Capturing low concentrations of atmospheric CO2 in desert conditions, or areas of high relative humidity are important applications for various Carbon Capture and Safe Sequestration Control Towers.

Some of these remote land or marine located structures are designed to operate independently, managed by machines tied to off-site computers.

Others require local labor and and are either stationary or mobile with collapsible canopies and wheels.

Wave, wind, or tide driven operations require minimum human intervention. One is designed to run by itself, independently, for at least a thousand years.

In the case of the 1000 year tower (figures 13,14,15), central to the system are tens of thousands of piezoelectric drivers each having small water reservoirs. These function to dispense 10 micron droplets by ambient mechanical forces alone for greenhouse gas abatement. They also withstand wind and seismic events with pre-set conditions.