Power Through Solar Dissociation of CO2

Power Through Solar Dissociation of CO2

The Product:

Los Alamos Renewable Energy, LLC has the world's first dispatchable solar power plant. It provides the power when you want it, around the clock. During sun-up, it produces electric power and fuel. During sunless times, it burns its fuel to keep the turbines producing power as the demand requires. It does not simply stop when the sun goes down or the wind stops, as other technologies do. It can also produce excess fuel to sell on the general fuel market.

The technology is proven and promises to be economically viable. A prototype has been built and tested at our site near Los Alamos, NM. We believe it is the only dispatchable system in the solar or wind energy field. The others require fossil or nuclear back-up nearly equal to the total nominal power requirement.

Our technology position is protected by a comprehensive patent, US 6066187, in force until 2020, assigned to the inventor, Dr. Reed Jensen. Reed is presently serving as a Managing Director of LARE. He is also the President of Renewable Energy Corporation, which is performing the SOLAREC™ development and whose majority is owned by Los Alamos Renewable Energy, LLC.

How the Process Works:

A very high temperature solar focus heats the CO2 working gas to provide high quality heat to drive a gas turbine and simultaneously produce CO (carbon monoxide) which is the key to energy storage through fuel production. We focus the sun to high intensity to provide a hot zone to accomplish dissociation. The hot product gas is about 15% CO, 7.5% oxygen, with the balance being CO2. The high quality heat is transferred from the product gas to steam to run a turbine and the CO produced is then reacted chemically through well-known industrial processes to yield fuel and CO2. This latter reaction gives us our CO2 back and completes our thermo chemical cycle.

The process has an over-all efficiency of nearly 48%. A 100 square meter mirror system will yield about 25 kW of electrical power from the heat from the hot product while also storing 24 kW as chemical power in the form of fuel. This stored energy gives the dispatchability and flexibility essential to an effective energy system. We call this process SOLAREC™, an acronym for Solar Reduction of Carbon Dioxide.

The Advantages:

The process plays to the sun's strength in producing photons/heat in a way that can be focused to achieve high energy intensity and therefore high efficiency. Our 40 square meter solar concentrator is shown in Figure 1. For example, our costs for producing green (no associated CO2 emission) fuel will be one half the cost of fuel produced by windmills/electrolysis and one fourth of the photovoltaic/electrolysis costs.

FIGURE 1:

Photograph of the LARE 40 square meter focusing dish just after its primary assembly.

This dish is capable of ultra-high intensity because of its f number and individual stepper motor control of each mirror segment.

Application:

There is an enormous potential market for the SOLAREC™ process. We will deploy the process in a modular way. The nominal concentrator (focusing dish) will have 100 square meters of mirror and produce 25 kW of electric power. Off grid customers may order 4 to hundreds of dishes to go green and avoid the grid connection, while grid customers may order groups of ten thousand focusing dishes. Each set of concentrators will have a single, appropriately sized, turbine and fuel conversion plant.

To date, the fuel/fuel cell movement has been misleading. There has not been a way to provide motive power without producing emitted CO2. In other technologies, the CO2 source is merely moved from the vehicles or power plant to the fuel plant where fossil fuel is processed into fuel. SOLAREC™ recycles the CO2 and uses no fossil fuels resulting in zero pollution. SOLAREC™ can make the pollution free fuel movement a reality.