Dermot -  They're cleaner because your starting point is essentially pure hydrogen and carbon monoxide, so you've got no sulphur in there.  As long as you're blowing your gasification with oxygen rather than air you've got no nitrogen in there to give you oxides of nitrogen, so you really ought to be able to synthesise a designer fuel, which is effectively what you do.  It can be a diesel type fuel, a petrol type fuel, an equivalent of jet kerosene for aircrafts... Ultimately the car companies would like to make an engine that's a combination of a spark ignition engine and a compression ignition engine. They'll specify exactly what properties they want the fuel to have and we can make that.

Ben -   So by spark ignition you mean - petrol engines are spark ignition, but the compression...

Dermot -   Yes, diesel engines are compression engines and they would like to get away from that situation.  We have to make two types of engine for two types of vehicle and just make one fuel that has the advantages of both. They'll specify exactly how they want that fuel to perform and we synthesise that.

Joe -   Well, taking CO₂ and reconverting it into fuel, CO₂ itself is completely spent fuel so one has to add energy to go back up the thermodynamic curve from carbon dioxide to usable fuel.  The most efficient chemistry for doing so is photosynthesis.  It is an intricate process that adds energy from sunlight.  Nothing else that man has done on a pathway has approached the efficiency of photosynthesis.  At Skyonic, we’ve been working with the University of Texas on bio-algal fuels made from bio-algae. We’ve been feeding it with bicarbonate of soda manufactured from our SkyMine process and they've reported very good results. 90% incorporation of the CO₂ and a tripling of the growth rate because it actually creates an algae bloom.  It also throws some of the biologic triggers inside the algae that make it produce oil preponderantly compared to plant matter.

Ben -   So we can't mimic nature yet, but we can of course get nature to do that work for us.

Joe -   We can hitch a ride on nature at this point and it’s probably the most promising means for making fuel directly from CO₂.

Dermot -   Well the South Africans have been doing this for a very long time because of the years of sanctions.  The well-known technology is called Fisher-Tropsch technology and that can be used to synthesise hydrocarbon chains.  Traditionally, the process was used for synthesising diesel but you can synthesise a naptha-type material if you want to or a kerosene type material.  It’s just a question of optimising the reaction conditions and choosing the right catalyst.  People are starting to develop a range of fuels now from synthesis gas.

Dermot -   It’s very important to do it at depths where all of the water has been formally classified as permanently unusable.  These are very, very salty water deposits at depths of a kilometre or thereabouts.  Nobody would ever extract those kind of waters, the very fact that they are heavily salty means they're poisonous anyway.  You have to be operating at the kind of depths where nobody would ever bring that water to the surface as a water supply.  Then no matter what happens, you're not going to cause contamination that causes any problems.

Joe -   Well, catalysts generally don't change chemistry.  They only drive it at accelerated speeds to the same end.  When a power plant operates perfectly it does achieve complete combustion.  So, a catalytic converter may be good for making carbon monoxide into truly carbon dioxide.  It’s still carbon dioxide at the end of it so you can't clean up with that fashion.  You can only change it from a gaseous form into a mineralised form or into some other form.  You have to change state.