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SKYONIC, a US-based process technology developer, is set to build a commercial carbon capture project in the US that will turn emissions from a cement plant into baking soda.

Backed financially by BP, ConocoPhillips and the US Department of Energy, a Skyonic spokesperson tells tce that the company will announce the specific construction date later this month for a facility that will capture carbon from Capitol Aggregates’ cement plant in San Antonio, Texas.

Skyonic says its carbon capture technology – dubbed SkyMine – will selectively remove carbon dioxide, acid gases, and heavy metals emitted from the cement plant’s flue gas streams and recycle it into hydrochloric acid and sodium bicarbonate – also known as baking soda.

Initially, this will be sold to animal feed producers, company CEO Joe Jones told Bloomberg in a recent interview, though it is also a valuable chemical used in a range of industrial applications, including the manufacture of glass.

Production of solid value-added chemicals offers an interesting alternative to mainstream CCS efforts to store CO₂ underground. Application of the technology would help to cancel out fears that buried emissions will escape into the environment and offers a capture technology suitable for industry based in regions that lack suitable geology to store emissions, or where the construction of accompanying pipelines and injection technology would be more expensive.

Skyonics expects that when the new facility is operational, in 2014, it will capture 83,000 t/y of carbon at a substantially lower cost than competitive technologies. It adds that the process could be retrofitted to existing industrial and power plants and can be configured to remove between 10–99% of emissions.

While the detailed process of capture and conversion remains under wraps, Skyonic was able to share with tce a simplified process flow diagram that includes low energy dewatering and electrochemical production steps.