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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a strategy to capture, store and eventually recycle carbon from vehicles to prevent the pollutant from finding its way from a car tailpipe into the atmosphere. Georgia Tech researchers anticipate a zero emission car, and a transportation system completely free of fossil fuels. Many people think that huge power plants are main source of harmful carbon dioxide inventions, but this is not the case as smaller polluters such as cars and transportation vehicles account for nearly two thirds of total carbon emissions.
What team at the Georgia Institute of Technology plans is to create a sustainable transportation system that uses a liquid fuel and traps the carbon emission in the vehicle for later processing at a fueling station. The carbon would then be shuttled back to a processing plant where it could be transformed into liquid fuel. Their current research is based upon developing a fuel processing device to separate the carbon and store it in the vehicle in liquid form. As Professor Andrei Fedorov said "we wanted to create a practical and sustainable energy strategy for automobiles that could solve several severe limitations, including a limited supply of fossil fuels, high cost and carbon dioxide pollution, eventually using renewable energy sources and in an environmentally conscious way".
While there is much more research involving carbon capture technologies done to find its implementation in power plants, very little has been done to explore carbon capture from vehicles and Georgia tech plans to put more emphasis on this segment. Their new strategy involves capturing carbon emissions from fossil liquid hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles with an onboard fuel processor designed to separate the hydrogen in the fuel from the carbon. Afterwards hydrogen is used to power the vehicle, while the carbon is stored on board the vehicle in a liquid form until it is disposed at a refueling station. It then gets transported to a centralized site to be sequestered in permanent locations, such as geological formations, under the oceans or in solid carbonate form.
They put an emphasis to a hydrogen-fueled vehicle for its carbon capture plan because pure hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when it is used as a fuel to power the vehicle unlike traditional gasoline-powered vehicles that have combustion process that combines both fuel and air leaving the carbon dioxide emissions highly diluted and very difficult to capture and their goal as David Damm, PhD candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the team's lead author said "was to find a system that never dilutes fuel with air because once the CO2 is diluted, it is not practical to capture it on vehicles or other small systems".
As it turned out to be, the only real problem using hydrogen is infrastructure since the distribution of gaseous hydrogen would require the creation of a new and costly infrastructure of pipelines, tanks and filling stations. The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO2/H2 Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO2 from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport.
The Georgia Tech team isn't satisfied by (only) coming up with a proposed system and device to produce hydrogen and, at the same time, capture carbon emissions as they have few ideas to conquer the greatest challenge of them all that would include making a synthetic liquid fuel from just CO2 and water using renewable energy sources. If this works then this would be really an astonishing achievement.
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