Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S) isn’t the first thing you think about when you try and identify environmental enemies.  That is, of course, if you don’t live next to a landfill.  But it is attracting more and more attention in local communities, following reports of children feeling sick, public water being contaminated, and of course, the foul stench it creates when its gas emissions are released into the air.

Hydrogen Sulfide has been around for a long time.   In fact, some scholars theorize it was partly responsible for the “first mass extinction” millions of years before the dinosaurs met their demise.  They hypothesize this occurred during the Permian period, between 299 to 252.6 million years ago.  They think the Hydrogen Sulfide emitted from the oceans and elsewhere, such as “flood basalts,” turned the sky green, chocked off oxygen for plants, animals and marine life and killed 90 percent of species in the oceans and 70 percent of life on land.  That was a natural phenomenon.  But one expert thinks we’re on track for opening that door again.

Permian Period 291 - 251 million years ago (courtesy University of Michigan)

“We’ve had these mass extinctions [from hydrogen sulfide] when carbon dioxide has hit 1,000 ppm. We have not hit that [level] for 100 million years,” said Peter Ward, professor of paleontology at University of Washington.  “But we are currently at 380 ppm — and climbing rapidly at 2 ppm a year and accelerating — and this is the highest CO2 I think in the last 40 million years. The only time [these extinctions] ever happened in the past is when these big flood basalts happened. But now we’re making it happen far faster than the flood basalts ever did. This is a unique event in the history of the planet.” (Wired Magazine 3/2008)

H2S should certainly be part of the discussion over global warming causes, but there of course remains the question of what to do with CO2.  Emit it or bury it (energy policy is driving carbon capture technologies still in the emerging stages of course.)  Like energy, you can’t destroy it. But what if you could turn it into something else?

But finally, what if you could turn H2S into something else as well?  www.swapsol.com