Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What products will Cv̄ictus produce?
A: Cv̄ictus can produce clean hydrogen gas (H2) and single cell protein for animal feed.
The clean hydrogen gas can be used in place of fossil fuels to reduce carbon emissions. The hydrogen can also be used to make methanol (CH3OH), from which Cv̄ictus will produce single cell protein (SCP) to take the place of soybean meal and fishmeal for animal feed and aquaculture, which will be better for the animals, the climate, and the terrestrial and ocean environments.
Q: How will Cv̄ictus produce these products?
A: Our process starts deep underground, with Enhanced Hydrogen Production.
Cv̄ictus uses a patented thermo-chemical process called Enhanced Hydrogen Recovery™ (EHR™) to remove hydrogen from coal and from saltwater brines that are located thousands of feet underground. Heat for the process comes from controlled partial combustion of hydrocarbons in some of the coal, while the remaining coal and the saltwater give up their hydrogen and a portion of their carbon (leaving the rest of the carbon underground).
Brought to the surface, the produced gases from the coal and the saltwater will be cleaned, the hydrogen put to use, and any carbon not used to make methanol will be reinjected at the same great depth in the form of carbon dioxide, and permanently geologically sequestered from the atmosphere.
Q: How will Cv̄ictus control the underground portion of the process?
A: By controlling the oxygen that the underground process depends on.
The Cv̄ictus process requires oxygen, which Cv̄ictus supplies via injection wells from the surface. Through the injection wells, Cv̄ictus controls exactly where the oxygen is delivered underground, and hence where the thermo-chemical process of converting coal and saltwater to gasses actually takes place. There is no danger of the process getting out of control. If it ever became necessary, Cv̄ictus could simply shut off the oxygen and the underground process would stop (and the cavity would fill with saltwater from the surrounding geology).
Still have Questions?
Q: What products will Cvictus produce?
A: Cvictus can produce clean hydrogen gas (H2) and single cell protein for animal feed.
The clean hydrogen gas can be used in place of fossil fuels to reduce carbon emissions. The hydrogen can also be used to make methanol (CH3OH), from which Cvictus will produce single cell protein (SCP) to take the place of soybean meal and fishmeal for animal feed and aquaculture, which will be better for the animals, the climate, and the terrestrial and ocean environments.
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Q: Is there a risk of ground water contamination or leakage to the surface?
A: No. It’s all a matter of pressure.
The Cv̄ictus process creates a channel deep underground, thousands of feet below any groundwater or fresh water supplies and with plenty of thick, impermeable layers of rock in between. The great pressure of the surrounding geology always exceeds that of the deep channel the Cv̄ictus process creates. As a result, everything always flows into the channel, not out of it. Nothing can come to the surface except what Cv̄ictus brings to the surface via extraction wells.
Q: What about the CO2? Can it escape?
A: No, the CO2 that Cv̄ictus injects will be permanently sequestered underground.
Cv̄ictus injects the CO2 that comes to the surface back into the same formation, for permanent geological sequestration. There is no pathway for the CO2 to get back to the surface. All wells will be permanently capped when no longer in use. The CO2 can’t penetrate the thousands of feet of rock above the Cv̄ictus chamber in which the injected CO2 is stored. With the EHR™ process, Cv̄ictus actually uses the injected CO2 to swell the surrounding coal and create an impermeable geological shell around the chamber, from which CO2 cannot escape in any direction.
Q: Shouldn’t we make hydrogen from renewable energy instead?
A: It’s not a case of either/or. It’s both/and.
“Green” hydrogen produced from renewable energy and water via electrolysis is very costly and currently too expensive to bring about a transition to the “hydrogen economy” in the energy sector. We need clean hydrogen to begin substituting for fossil fuels right now.
“Blue” hydrogen – that is, hydrogen accompanied by carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), such as the hydrogen that Cv̄ictus’s process makes from coal and saltwater – can be produced abundantly today, and much more cheaply. With the carbon geologically sequestered from the atmosphere, Blue Hydrogen can essentially be just as “green” as Green Hydrogen.
Enhanced Hydrogen Recovery™ has the added benefit of using almost no freshwater. Electrolysis requires a huge amount of pure water.
Q: How will Cv̄ictus make single cell protein (SCP) for animal feed?
A: We first make methanol (CH3OH) from hydrogen and carbon, then SCP from methanol.
Methanol is the simplest form of alcohol. Bugs love it. Cv̄ictus has improved an already commercial and approved process for making SCP from methanol, using special bacteria that eat it up. The bacteria are harvested, dried, and converted to animal feed that’s already been scientifically tested and approved for sale in the European Union. Animals like it! A major international company sold its earlier version of this SCP as animal feed for years. Cv̄ictus has made its SCP better and much lower cost.
Q: What makes Cv̄ictus’s SCP better than soybean meal and fishmeal?
A: Cv̄ictus’s SCP is better nutritionally – and better for climate and the environment.
Pound-for-pound, Cv̄ictus’s SCP has more net utilizable protein and more essential amino acids than either soybean meal or fishmeal.
Our protein also has a very beneficial impact on the environment. 22% of all fish by weight caught in the oceans are boiled and dried for fishmeal. Basically, the world’s oceans are being strip mined of small fish to feed aquafarm raised fish.
On land, the world has lost about half of its forest cover, almost all for agriculture. 77% of all agricultural lands are used for animal feed and forage. The Amazon rainforest, for example, is rapidly being clear-cut to create new soybean fields. Cv̄ictus’s SCP can help stop and eventually reverse deforestation and enable more trees to remove and store gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Q. How can Cv̄ictus’s process be carbon ‘net negative’?
A. Cv̄ictus can sequester more CO2 into the space it creates underground by extracting hydrogen than the CO2 it emits into the atmosphere.
Cv̄ictus does emit some CO2 as it extracts hydrogen gas using its Enhanced Hydrogen Recovery™ process. But EHR™ can create enough space to geologically store more CO2 than we need to sequester all the CO2 we capture from our own process. This allows us to sequester additional CO2 from other producers and processes.
Production of low-cost single cell protein also enables massive reforestation. Trees are the fastest, lowest cost way to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Q. Cv̄ictus still uses coal. Isn’t coal bad for the environment?
A. Yes, coal can be very harmful, if it’s conventionally mined and burned. But Cv̄ictus uses coal as a chemical feedstock – a raw material – to produce hydrogen, not for combustion, and captures and sequesters CO2 as a critical part of its process.
Conventional coal mining and power generation produces massive amounts of CO2. It also scars the landscape, pollutes ground water and causes black lung and other diseases. But Cv̄ictus doesn’t mine or burn coal. We gasify coal in situ, without conventional mining. Only a small amount of the surface is disturbed, and only for a short period. Almost all the CO2 we do produce is captured and sequestered back into the same ultra-deep geological formation.
Coal is an abundant resource, and often the only significant energy resource in India, China and other developing countries. They will continue to burn huge amounts of coal unless advanced economies demonstrate a cleaner, lower cost way to extract the hydrogen from coal without CO2 emissions.