Carbon Sciences claims breakthrough technology

Carbon Sciences Inc., based in Santa Barbara, Calif., confirmed that recent commercial tests prove the value of the company’s natural gas to gasoline technology. Carbon Sciences’ catalyst technology transforms natural gas and carbon dioxide into a synthesis gas (syngas), which can then be transformed into gasoline and other fuels using conventional Fischer-Tropsch (“FT”) gas-to-liquids (“GTL”) technology. CEO Byron Elton called the company’s technology as a “game changer.” The company said up till now, there has been no commercial catalyst robust enough to sustain dry reforming reactions on an industrial scale. The Carbon Sciences technical team has solved this problem, it said. It said its novel catalyst has been proven to work continuously at high conversion efficiency during more than 2,000 hours of laboratory testing and more than 1,000 hours of commercial testing even without regeneration. “Based on these results, the company’s management believes its catalyst is the most robust catalyst available today for dry forming of methane,” a company press release said. (June 24, 2011)