The Oceans and Carbon Dioxide: Duplicating Hydrothermal Vents and Other Ocean Systems to Manufacture Complex Hydrocarbons from Industrial CO2 Emissions

Engineered systems that duplicate the physical and biological processes at ocean hydrothermal vents could sequester carbon from waste industrial greenhouse gases. Industrial waste gases that approximate hydrothermal vents are found in the flares of oil and gas fields, refinery off-gases, and the emissions of fossil fuel power plants. Such gases carry heat, hydrogen sulfide, other sulfur compounds, ammonia, carbon dioxide and various hydrocarbons that simulate in many respects the composition of hydrothermal vent gases. Salts, metal catalysts and other chemicals, such as amines, could be added to the system to enhance the needed reactions. To further investigate engineered systems that duplicate the prebiotic and biotic origins of life as may have occurred near hydrothermal vents from amino acid formation and their combining to form peptides and proteins, we present our approach for a proof-of-concept experiment; and numerical and order-of-magnitude calculations that illustrate key aspects of the proposed concepts. We conceive of the carbon entering an engineered micro-ocean exiting as long chain hydrocarbons, as organic solids and non-aqueous phase liquids that could be utilized as a fuel source. Archaea that exist at hydrothermal vents find chemical and thermal energy from the vents, and their carbon from the dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean. Green cyanobacteria provide another biological pathway to sequester carbon. Prebiotic reactions are also a fruitful pathway to consider, as quite reliably demonstrated by variants of the Miller-Urey experiment. In conclusion, we provide bounding calculations on the sizes of an engineered micro-ocean that may be required to treat the carbon dioxide from the off-gases of a thirty-thousand barrel a day petroleum refinery. A set of tanks of one hundred and fifty thousand barrels would be sufficient to treat the carbon dioxide currently emitted from a medium sized petroleum refinery. The fuel produced from the waste carbon dioxide of such a refinery could generate over two hundred thousand dollars a day of revenue.

Rajen, G., 2019, Using Amines to Capture CO2 and Form Long Chain Hydrocarbons for Fuels: Duplicating Life, 2019, 7th Conference on Carbon Dioxide as Feedstock for Fuels
Chemistry and Polymers, March 21-22, Cologne, Germany