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
