Western Railroad Discussion > Power Plants could make Soda Ash ?

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428348/what-to-do-with-co2-from-coal-how-about-make-baking-soda/

Someday we could Unload coal and load soda at a power plant? Who knows.....

30 years down the road leading to the ruinous global baking soda glut! :)


Seriously, that's a cool article, there has to be some solutions out there to this problem.

We should probably just come up with a process to combine all of those CO2 byproducts of combustion with a little hydrogen and oxygen into some sort of solid material with a long lifetime and very little evaporation, and then we can bury it in the ground where it won't contaminate the air. I'm sure someone can figure out some sort of Green solar-powered process for doing this. Could probably store it in all those empty coal mines back east, so that it won't pollute the ocean or the groundwater.

The chemistry for this requires a good deal of input energy and catalyst -- essentially, teh very high energyu of oxidation that is released during burning would have to be put back into a reduction process with CO2 and Hydrogen. This is essentially thermodynamics....and since this process is highly unlikely to be 100% efficient, it would require more energy to do this than was released in burning the coal. No bueno.

What? You mean making coal out of coal-burning byproducts wouldn't be Green?
But think of the Children! What will they be able to burn in another century!