Humans are naturally caring creatures. We care for our children, our ancestors, our pets, and everything in between. Even before we started having dogs or gardens, humans would care for their elders and their ancestors even if it provided them with no economic incentive and didn’t help to put food on the table.
We spend large amounts of efforts to slowly raise our children from infants to adults who can walk, speak, and navigate our extremely complex world.
We take hours going for walks with our pets and watering our plants. We nurture them when they can’t nurture themselves and take in those who have no one else.
Yet, we somehow can’t take care of the planet that has given us all of this opportunity to care for others. In 10 years, we as a society may reach a point of no return for global warming, and all of this love and care that others have put into us and that we have put into others may go to waste.
There are currently approximately 37.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the air. Yet, no one is doing to fix one of humanity’s largest problem.
Band-Aid solutions
Currently, many countries are implementing band-aid solutions.
According to the Cambridge dictionary, a band-aid solutions is a “temporary solution that does not deal with the cause of a problem”
These band-aid solutions to climate change include things like carbon taxes and pledging to reduce emissions by 3, 5, and 10%. These solutions may help to slow down climate change, but they do not tackle the root of the problem.
Currently, there is too much carbon dioxide in the air, and if we actually want to stop and reverse climate change, we need negative carbon emissions rather than just emitting less carbon into the air.
To help visualize this, think of the world as a bathtub, the carbon dioxide as the water, and the faucet as factories. If we turn on the faucet, the bathtub is going to start to fill up. And even if the faucet is only putting in drops of water every day, eventually the bathtub will still overflow. Right now, the bathtub is very full and is about to overflow, and what we need to do to stop the bathtub from overflowing is pull the plug. We need to actually get rid of water from our bathtub to stop the house from flooding. Now how do we pull the plug on climate change you ask?
Introduce Arbora Technologies
Arbora technologies is a company that is committed to solving our climate change problem. We plan on using carbon air capture to take remove carbon from the atmosphere and then transform that carbon into useful products to actually make an impact on climate change.
Carbon Air Capture
Carbon air capture is one of the many ways we can pull the plug on carbon air capture. Right now, we have too much carbon dioxide in the air and carbon air capture allows us to remove that carbon.
This is done by using an air contactor similar to a giant fan which pulls in air. This air then goes through a chemical process to separate the oxygen and nitrogen from the carbon. Once the carbon is separated, it can be used in many different products.
Now, this process of carbon air capture isn’t anything new, and has actually been done by many other companies. However, what makes us stand out compared to them is what we do with the carbon.
Most companies using carbon air capture usually only have net carbon emissions and their products emit the carbon they removed right back into the air. For example, many companies turn their captured carbon into synthetic fuels. However, whenever the synthetic fuel is used in your car or air plane, this carbon is just sent right back into the atmosphere as CO2 again.
If we go back to our bathtub analogy, these companies are essentially just adding a tube to the side of the bathtub but putting the other end inside of the bathtub again.
In essence, this could work if no other companies put more water in the bathtub, even so, that is not how this world works and there will always be individuals and corporations adding more water to the bathtub. However, my team and I at Arbora Technologies have developed a solution to this ongoing problem.
For more information about carbon air capture: Video, Article
The Phases
We plan on solving climate change in three phases. The first phase is making graphene through a process that uses copper-palladium sheets. These sheets allow the carbon and oxygen to separate, and for the carbon to restructure.
This is done at 1000 degrees Celsius inside an atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) reactor. This produces high-quality graphene at a relatively cheap cost, which we can commercialize to raise funds for business growth & development and will also fund the next 2 phases that our company has planned.
Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like pattern. It is considered as the world’s thinnest yet strongest material and has some very special properties which make it extremely useful. It has very high electricity and heat conductivity making it great for electronics and new cutting edge technology.
Graphene is used in many of your everyday electronics such as cell-phones, laptops, and many more. And with more developments going on in the field, it has the potential to revolutionize the fields of electricity, energy generation, batteries, sensors, and more.
The second phase of our company’s development is the creation of carbon nanotubes or CNTs. The creation of carbon nanotubes is done through the process of molten electrolysis.
In this process, we simply heat lithium carbonate to it’s melting point of 723 degrees celsius. This process creates dilithium oxide (Li2O) and releases both oxygen and carbon into the air. The oxygen is attracted to the passive aluminum oxide coated nickel wire anode, and the carbon is attracted to the iron cathode, creating carbon nanotubes of various diameters. Last but not least, the lithium oxide reacts with the carbon dioxide in the air to create lithium carbonate once again. This newly formed lithium carbonate can be reused in the same process over and over again.
This process creates CNTs ranging from 10–40 nm in diameter for about $50/kg, which can be sold for about $100/kg doubling revenue. Theoretically, if we were to switch aluminum oxide for zirconium dioxide, the same quality CNTs could be made for $5 and sold for the same price, raising large amounts of revenue. Yet, this new method still requires testing and more research needs to be done in this field.
In the final phase of the plan, we plan on capturing other harmful pollutants such as methane from the air and then using that to create other useful products as well.
All of these products permanently remove carbon dioxide from the air and are promising solutions to resolving our climate change crisis.
Vision
In order to meet the goal of keeping the average global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius, we would need to remove 100 billion tons of carbon from the air by 2100.
What we want to do is to use harmful emissions of our past to create visionary innovation of the future. Our plan works for three main reasons.
1: We are choosing a carbon-negative option. Instead of recycling carbon and emitting it back into the air, we plan on going carbon negative and actually make an impact on carbon dioxide levels in the air.
2: We are activating technological advancements. Carbon nanotubes and graphene are supposed to disrupt the tech industry in the future and by selling carbon nanotubes to companies and mass producing them, we will help significantly advance many different industries simultaneously.
3: Our model is economically sustainable. Being able to make money by selling our products will allow us to grow as a company and make an even larger impact on climate change.
For those three reasons, my team and I at Arbora technologies feel as though we have a good chance at turning back the clock on carbon emissions and reversing climate change.
All in all, carbon air capture can be a permanent solution to climate change, but it depends on what your plans are for the carbon after it is captured. Currently, the uses for captured carbon are not sustainable and will not make a significant impact on climate change. Luckily, my team and I think we have the solution to climate change.
So join us on our quest to reversing the effects of climate change and using harmful emissions of the past to create visionary innovation of the future.
To check out more about us visit our website at https://arboratech.com/ or feel free to contact me by email at bryankmlee3@gmail.com.
