Robert Copcutt's Healthy Atmosphere campaign

My passion is reducing suffering, particularly that due to pollution and selfish industrial growth. When I did the bulk of the work writing the first version of this website in 2009 it was clear to me that the world was heading for a difficult time because of decreasing honesty and increasing pollution causing disease and global warming. I wanted to help, but now in 2024 the situation is worse. It is not all bad news because the seriousness of the situation is becoming clear to an increasing number of people, and there is a huge business opportunity here. Outlined below are my ideas. I am looking for investors to help me turn them into reality.

Over billions of years the sun grew gradually hotter yet the temperature of the Earth remained roughly constant. James Lovelock observed this phenomena and came up with his famous Gaia theory. 100 million years ago India was an island. About 50 million years ago it crashed into Asia. That caused massive errosion of the Himalayan mountains formed by that collision. Much of the rock contains magnesium silicates and these very slowly react with the CO₂ in the air. Over about 40 million years the planet was transformed from a steamy swamp with sea levels over 10 metres higher than they are today to a place with regular ice ages. In the era of ice ages the atmoshperic CO2 levels oscillated between 180 and 280ppm. In the last 100 years humanity has pushed it up to over 420ppm, and the evidence that it is causing the melting of the polar ice caps is overwhelmingly strong. Under a large area of that ice are vast methane hydrate deposits. Methane hydrate is stabilised by pressure and cold. Already there are huge craters appearing in the arctic where these hydrates have decomposed and vast quantities of methane have exploded into the atmosphere. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂. All life on earth would be wiped out if we let this situation get too much worse.

There is no shortage of magnesium silicates, but the natural weathering process is very slow. Working with Cambridge Carbon Capture Ltd we have worked out a process called CO2LOC that accelerates the carbonation of these rocks. We need investment to finish off our research, and then we will need financial help to scale up the process. We are grateful for the help to get this far given to us by the UK government, and others, but the global situation is now urgent and we need more investors.

A benefit of the CO2LOC process is that it unlocks a whole host of valuable metals like nickel, cobalt, chromium and many others, that are incorporated within these rocks which geologists call ultramafic. My ambition is to turn mining from a process where only part of the mined rock is utilised, and vast tailings dams are created, to one where most of the rock is utilised. The magnesium forms magnesium carbonate and the silicate forms silica and those can be used to reduce the amount of cement and wood we use for construction. The CO2 captured in the magnesium carbonate eases global warming and the valuable metals help build various renewable energy technologies.

CO2LOC is capable of capturing CO₂ from the air, but it is better to capture it from point sources if we can. Biochar is an idea with huge potential, and it makes a good partner for CO2LOC. The manufacture of charcoal or biochar involves heating the organic material in the absence of air (pyrolysis). During pyrolysis volatile organic materials are released and these are burned to provide the heat. Nearly all charcoal today is produced in a batch process and that is far more wasteful than a continuous process. The snag is that a machine capable of continuous processing is highly complex and no one has invested the billions needed to manufacture such a machine. The time has come to get together and invest those billions. In a continuous process a little of the heat from burning the volatile organics is used to heat the fresh material, but there is a significant excess that can be used for other purposes such as generating electricity. I imagine a machine small enough to load onto a truck to be taken to where organic materials (eg. farm waste) are produced. The local community would feed the material into the machine and it spits out biochar and electricity for them to use. This biochar machine obviously produces CO₂ so my idea is to take the magnesia produced by the CO2LOC process and process the flue gas with it. Not only does this final processing step turn the CO₂ into magnesium carbonate, but it also takes out some of the minor polluting gases such as NO_x. Magnesium carbonate makes an excellent fire proof building material.

The electricity produced by the biochar machine won't always match the needs of the community using it so a battery will be needed. Batteries are needed for photovoltaic and wind systems as well, so there is huge interest in them. I have an idea for a battery so cheap that it could store power between seasons. Again, I need investment to go from fairly detailed theory to practical device. I first started battery research 50 years ago so this field is not new to me.

Another issue I would like to tackle is the shortage of fresh water. Electrochemical systems for water desalination are promising. They could operate while there is excess power from solar and wind systems, and then rest at night and when the wind has died down. Water desalination could also be incorporated into the CO2LOC process.

The wind gets much stronger at higher altitudes, but a turbine on a tower is strictly limited to the height it can reach. A kite puts all its components into tension which means that it can reach much greater heights and sweep much greater areas of the sky while using much less material than a turbine. Controlling kites automatically is difficult but the recent developments in AI for things like automomous driving opens up the potential for a system that not only flies the kites, but also changes the kites as the wind levels change.

I live in Cambridge which is one of the world's top concentrations of brain power. Ambitious youngsters hoping to make their fortunes flock to silicon valley, but there are plenty of very bright people who are motivated more by a meaningful project than fame and fortune. They want to stay where they are. My ambition is to help create a private research institute with links to the university, but independent of it. It would work on projects such as those outlined above and concentrate on producing real products that bring real benefits for the world, and financial returns for those who invest. We already have similar places in the medical and software fields, but nothing concentrating on CO₂ capture and renewable energy production.

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