That was the key takeaway from a conference held last week at Brown University that brought entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers together to discuss ways of turning the carbon dioxide that is being released into the atmosphere into a valuable commodity that can be captured and put to use.
Do that and there will be a business incentive to act against global warming, speakers said at the "CO2: From Waste to Worth" conference on Thursday at Brown's Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics.
"The message is simple: price changes behavior," said economist Richard Sandor, chairman and CEO of Chicago-based Environmental Financial Products.
Sandor, the keynote speaker at the event, designed the Chicago Environmental Exchange a decade ago, signing on a host of big companies, including American Electric Power, Ford Motor Co. and DuPont, and using greenhouse gas trading to get them to reduce emissions. His experiment ended in 2010, but the importance of putting a price on carbon still holds true today, he said.
It is indeed a timely topic as academics, activists and lawmakers try to implement policies to rein in greenhouse gases. Under an agreement reached in Lima, Peru, last month, all the nations in the world pledged to create plans by the end of this year to start lowering emissions.
On the same day as the conference, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, the leading voice on climate change in the Senate, sent a letter with Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, urging the Obama administration to support carbon capture and utilization (CCU) efforts.
"CCU transforms carbon dioxide from a waste disposal problem into an economic resource and could lower the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions," the senators wrote in the letter to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy.
At the conference that was cosponsored by the Slater Technology Fund and the New England Clean Energy Council, panelists detailed some of the potential uses for carbon dioxide, including using it as a feedstock for algae, which can be turned into a biofuel, and using it as a replacement for petroleum in the chemical ingredients that make up pharmaceuticals, plastics and other products.
Ironically, one of the immediate uses is in the oil industry. Carbon dioxide can be pumped into underground wells to help push otherwise impossible-to-reach stores of oil to the surface. Naturally occurring reserves of the gas are currently used in the extraction process, but speakers said that research is under way to utilize manmade emissions.
Once the carbon dioxide is pushed underground, it stays there. Using power plant gases can partially offset the carbon emitted when the oil that's extracted is burned.
"It's an opportunity," said Mark Dye, a partner with Morgan Stanley's Private Equity Group. "You can sequester that CO2."
Algae production is another option. Portsmouth-based BioProcess Algae operates greenhouses in Iowa that channel carbon emissions from an ethanol plant to grow algae used for animal and human foods and in chemicals.
"It's one of the only profitable solutions out there," said Toby Ahrens, chief technology officer at the company. "We're one in a portfolio of CO2 mitigation options, but we think we're the first one."
Brown Provost Vicki Leigh Colvin said finding uses for carbon is the pragmatic approach to addressing climate change. There's an urgent need to come up with viable solutions, she said.
"It's important in this area where I don't know if we have 10 or 20 years to wait," she said.
___
(c)2015 The Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.)
Visit The Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.) at www.projo.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
