It looks like two New Jersey scientists have come up with something that may potentially have a significant impact on our future energy policy, and it comes from toxic hydrogen sulfide (H2S).
"An Inconvenient Truth" (2006)
Ray Stenger went to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” when it came out in 2006. An engineer by trade, Stenger already a deep understanding of the chemistry behind the elements Gore proposed as global warming causes, among those being carbon dioxide.
But while Stenger was intrigued by some of the claims made by the documentary, he still had some questions about how we got into this mess in the first place. Addiction to oil and coal were the obvious reasons because of sulfur, sulfur dioxide (SO2) and of course, carbon dioxide. Chief emitters were the coal plants, the concrete plants and the oil refineries. But he kept coming back to carbon dioxide. With two parts oxygen, CO2 should theoretically be a powerful oxidizer.
Ray Stenger and Jim Wasas
He got together over lunch with his friend, Jim Wasas. Among other things, Wasas was a specialist in catalysts. Over the months they talked. Being the entrepreneurs that they were, they worked to figure out what conditions need to exist for CO2 to begin breaking down into its components. In 2007, they figured it out. And they figured out that hydrogen sulfide played a key role. But they needed to find a place where H2S and CO2 were both present. It was “sour” natural gas – an area of key interest of those involved in natural gas conversion and processing. Then came the catalyst to finish the job. Wasas’s extensive experience in catalysts brought him around to a hidden-in-plain-sight natural material that did the job extremely well. And the discovery has been shown to potentially have a wide range of applications. They call this suite of solutions the “Stenger-Wasas Process” (SWAP).
In less than a second in a single laboratory column, the SWAP reacts H2S and CO2, converting the mix into water, carbon and sulfur. The SWAP is not a carbon capture process. It is a conversion and elimination process based on a previously undiscovered exothermic reaction between the two. Stenger and Wasas seemed to have stumbled upon and verified An Inconvenient Truth if only because it’s not in the textbooks yet. http://www.swapsol.com
Tags: an inconvenient truth, catalysts, hydrogen sulfide, jim wasas, natural gas conversion, ray stenger, swapsol
First, let me say that this process is intriguing and has many potential applications.
With regard to the carbon and sulfur produced, I’d like to know their form and how they are separated. For instance, does the carbon precipitate first and then sulfur condensed afterward? What is the particle size distribution of the carbon product? What happens to the catalyst activity as carbon and sulfur are produced?
Certainly, the removal of hydrogen sulfur to the ppb levels alone could be commercially valuable. In that regard, I’d like to learn more of the details of the experiment and the gas chromatography (GC) analysis. For instance, what were the flow rates and concentrations of the hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide reactants? What was the sample size, column, conditions and detector used for the GC analysis? Were any other sulfur compounds besides elemental sulfur detected as a reaction product, such as carbonyl sulfide or carbon disulfide?
Dear R. Shearer:
Do you really expect these inventors to compromise their patented process with you? Why should they? You should be happy your future energy costs will drop thanks to these Global Warming problem solvers.
This is American intellectual property just like software.