Turning CO2 into Baking Soda.

A company called Skyonic, based in Austin, Texas, recently announced it has been testing a system (called Skymine) to collect carbon dioxide created by factory processes to make food-grade baking soda. Using exhaust heat, generated from factories processing, to power the system makes it an economically viable system that can be custom built to any smokestack. The resulting baking soda can then be marketed for home or industrial use. Or it can be buried harmlessly in landfills or abandoned mines.

The process of filtering out carbon dioxide is called carbon sequestration and uses algae to collect the carbon dioxide. It is a very simple and ingenious system using items found anywhere in the world.

The inventor of Skymine, Joe Jones, has been working on the idea in his garage and was able to patent it in 2005. Since then he has field tested the system at a coal-burning power plant in Texas. Skyonic is currently performing pilot-scale demonstration plant work at Luminant’s Big Brown Steam Electric Station in Fairfield, Texas, under real-world conditions.

Testing the system will work out any bugs in order to make it viable for large scale use, but the process is very promising as an alternative to other carbon sequestration methods.

It’s not that we need baking soda, but we don’t need carbon dioxide. This system has the potential to go world-wide.

Kudos to Joe Jones in helping find a workable solution to the global warming threat.