Mar 14 - Waco Tribune-Herald

It cleans your teeth, makes your biscuits rise and kills odors in your fridge. Could baking soda also fight global warming?

An Austin startup business has set up shop at the Big Brown coal-fired power plant here to prove that it can. Skyonic Corp. is working with Luminant, the former TXU, to turn carbon dioxide from the smokestacks into sodium bicarbonate.

The point isn't to meet America's baking soda shortage -- there is none -- but to dispose of the huge amount of carbon dioxide that coal plants produce. Big Brown alone creates about 10 million tons a year of the global warming gas, and coal plants worldwide create about 40 percent of the world's manmade carbon dioxide.

Finding a way to "sequester" carbon underground instead of spewing into the air is the holy grail in the battle against global warming. Other research projects are under way to pump carbon dioxide gas deep into the earth or make it into a solid carbon, but so far, energy industry sources say, Skyonic is alone in the effort to make it into baking soda.

Skyonic officials said their process works on the small scale. Their mobile laboratory at Big Brown forces a stream of cooled flue gas through sodium hydroxide, converting the carbon dioxide into food-grade sodium bicarbonate. The Skyonic staff has even baked cookies with it.

Along the way, the process strips out pollutants such as mercury, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. And the sodium hydroxide production creates high-grade hydrogen and chlorine gases, which can be sold. In fact, Skyonic's process, once perfected, could result in profits for power companies that adopt it, said David St. Angelo, Skyonic vice president for field operations.

"Carbon dioxide for some people is a pollutant," he said. "For us it's a resource. Give us all you've got."

Luminant, Texas' biggest power generator, is investing in the company as one of several possible solutions to the carbon capture problem.

Environmentalists and some politicians are pushing for limits on carbon emissions through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system.

"We're supporting the SkyMine technology because this is a developing technology that presents a potential solution to the significant issue of greenhouse gas emissions," said Luminant spokesman Tom Kleckner. "We're researching solutions to the sequestration of greenhouse gases, without the compression and transportation issues other sequestration processes face."

The Skymine process faces its own challenges if it is to go mainstream. One is what to do with all that baking soda.

For every ton of carbon dioxide, the process would create about two tons of baking soda, Skyonic officials said. Or to put it another way, for every ton of coal a plant burns, you could create about 2.5 tons of baking soda, they said.

Big Brown burns about 6 million tons of Texas lignite and Wyoming coal a year.

To capture all the carbon emissions from that one plant, you'd end up with about 15 million tons of baking soda. That's nearly 10 times the annual worldwide production of baking soda, according to mining industry estimates.

Skyonic isn't planning to make that much. The company is planning a project in the next few years to treat 125,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, less than 3 percent of the total, at Big Brown, creating 245,000 metric tons of baking soda. The long goal would be capturing 20 percent of the carbon dioxide.

Most of that baking soda would be landfilled, put back in the mine or used as roadbase.

"It's not part of our business model to compete with Arm & Hammer," said Skyonic spokeswoman Stacy McDiarmid.

Texas Public Citizen director Tom "Smitty" Smith, who has battled the former TXU over efforts to build new coal-fired power plants, said the large volumes of baking soda to be transported and buried might make the process infeasible.

"It's not that easy to dispose of this much CO2," he said. "Are we trading one disposal problem for another? A better answer is not to burn coal in the first place. We think we can meet our growing energy needs with efficiency and not have to build new coal plants."

A bigger question is the amount of energy the Skyonic process uses, said George Offen, an air emissions expert at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif.

For example, it takes energy to turn water and salt into sodium hydroxide, hydrogen and chlorine by passing it through an electrical screen.

It also takes energy to dry the sodium bicarbonate solution and turn it into a powder.

Skyonic officials said they have been able to cut down on their energy costs significantly by using the waste heat from the power plant itself.

"Their own data suggests they can reduce the energy that is consumed in conventional processes by over 35 percent," Offen said.

Offen said the process is worth studying as a contender in the carbon reduction derby.

"The technology offers the promise of doing something our members are very interested in, and that's an alternative to having to store CO2 underground (as a gas)," Offen said. "The unique thing about SkyMine is that it's a solid product. Also, they claim to be able to make money. That sets it apart from all the other processes."

St. Angelo said the technology works, and he believes skeptics' questions will be answered in time. He said the three-year-old company is already working on plans for a larger-scale application of the technology.

He said the idea for the process was hatched when Skyonic founder Joe Jones and his sons were watching a program on the Discovery Channel about Mars. The discussion turned to how to get carbon dioxide out of space capsules, and Jones, a chemical engineer with long experience in high-tech manufacturing, said they should turn it into baking soda.

After consulting his old college chemistry textbook, he started dreaming up ways to apply that solution to global warming emissions.

"For an engineer, this is a rare opportunity to see a company go from a drawing on the back of an envelope to reality," St. Angelo said.

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