Skyonic awarded $3m grant by National Energy Technology Laboratory

8 February 2010

Carbon capture technology company Skyonic Corporation, based in Austin, Texas, has been awarded a $3m grant as part of the National Energy Technology Laboratory for Capitol’s stimulus funding packages which it administers in conjunction with the Department of Energy. Skyonic will use the new capital to fund the first phase of its carpbon capture technology, providing modeling for the final construction of the plant in 2010.

Skyonic’s Co2 project, SkyMine, is also backed by private investor Carl Berg, and the company will work alongside Capitol Aggregates, a cement maker and subsidiary company of the industrial conglomerate the Zachery Corporation. SkyMine will be located onsite at Capitol Aggregates’s plant in San Antonio, Taxas and is intended to capture 75,000 metric tonnes of C02 flue gas from the plant’s operations, creating baking soda as a by-product.

‘The members of the Skyonic Team are the ones who deserve the credit for meeting the exacting standards set by the Department of Energy for insuring that only true carbon-reducing projects are chosen. It takes a world-class team to earn public funding for new technology development,’ said Joe D. Jones Skyonic Corporation’s founder.

The SkyMine process will also aim to offset an additional 200,000 tonnes of CO2 in the production of other chemical products too. At full scale the plant, when operational, will provider 200 jobs and be profitable as it will sell these by-products.

The mineralised carbon dioxide will be used in several industrial applications and tested as feed-stock for bio-algae fuels. The company said the technology will also neutralise acid-rain emissions, and reduce mercury and heavy metals emissions.

Other partners currently include Ford, Bacon & Davis, the engineering and procurement company as well as help in the past from NYSE listed TXU, who invested in 2006 and have worked with Luminant, another Texas Based Energy company.

Some commentators who follow the industry have pointed out that the idea to turn CO2 into solid waste and by-products has been around since 1985, and that the embedded carbon in the process makes the outcome a less satisfactory solution, others point to the production of chlorine as a by-product as an issue.

Copyright © 2010 NewNet

Tags: carbon capture

This story was published on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 12:57 pm and is filed under North America, deals, energy efficiency. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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