Dr. Paul Comet Advocates "Salvation by Waste" to Achieve Economic and Social Sustainability

    HOUSTON, TX, May 4, 2011 /24-7PressRelease/ --Dr. Paul Comet of Comet Environmental Consulting has been recognized by Cambridge Who's Who for showing dedication, leadership and excellence in environmental consultancy.

Dr. Comet's decades of organic geochemical research into products of the global carbon cycle indicates that changing our management methods of municipal, and more important, our agricultural waste, can combat global warming and unsustainable use of resources.

He believes that by using a range of long known but rarely used techniques (fermentation or gasification of agricultural waste for energy recovery) as well as phosphate recovery & methane from sewage, municipal "self sufficiency" can be obtained. Also important are rare & precious metals from electronic waste & more phosphate & methane from food waste (given additional energy from the sun and wind). Plastic can also be recycled, used as construction material, or gasified for fuel. Glass jars & bottles can be cleaned & recycled - perhaps using "bottle tax" or "returned deposit" systems. Money, manufacturing jobs and materials would tend to remain within a recycling community rather than be lost to the job bank, landfill or banks abroad. Many separate steps towards these goals are being undertaken on a world wide basis, however, until now, a unified policy of energy and material recovery appears to have not been expressly stated. The author combines 4 models of sustainability that would help in providing a "Plan B."

1) A "medieval underpinning" where waste sorted by households is sold and processed for energy and resource recovery & used in remanufacturing within the municipality.
2) A cellular model: here a single symbiotic cell containing organelles for both photosynthesis and respiration - think of symbiotic algae responding in the tissues of corals and clams (animals) of the coral reef. Each cell contains the organelles for its continued function, just using sunlight and water; the organelles can be compared to a city, a power-station (mitochondrion), fields and agriculture (chloroplasts). The waste products of respiration are the "food" for photosynthesis and vice versa. Essentially the entire carbon cycle can be found in a single illuminated protist cell. This model can be scaled up to an entire city using "medieval" technology and hence is also applicable to the third world.
3) The rainforest is another important model in which "self-sufficiency" can be achieved. However this scenario involves an "open" system in which the tight regulation of cellular metabolism is replaced by a plethora of photosynthetic and respiratory strategies (plants and animal diversity) which are unrestricted. However, all waste is rapidly consumed by the decomposers, be it dead leaves, dead animals or dung. Rainforest "resource recovery" (energy & nutrients) occurs rapidly. A simplified analogy to this "ecological" approach can be found in a $65 "biosphere". This is a 2-inch sealed glass egg filled with sea water, shrimps, algae and a minor brown basal deposit of decomposers. The egg, left to itself by a window is nearly indefinitely stable and the water remains clean. The egg is a microcosm representing our entire planet. The decomposers act as the "balancer of nature" (photosynthesis with respiration) and stabilize the system. Mankind does not know how to do this yet.
4) A lunar/Martian base. Here almost all organic materials & water would have to be recycled. The only way for man to survive long term would be to assume the role of the shrimps in the biosphere. Fast growing crops such as the legume, kudzu, could supply oxygen & "starvation" food. Human & agricultural waste could be decomposed to methane (fuel), water & organic soil. Establishing the carbon, nitrogen & hydrological cycles around oneself would probably be the best way of sustainable survival.
A good example of inadequate recycling is provided by animal bones & phosphate recovery from waste water. If you apply Dr. Comet's "municipal cellular theory" (a holistic grouping of local industries serving an urban base and sustained by nearby agriculture), then reusing the acidified bones, phosphate sludge & slaughter house waste as fertilizer, rather than importing more North African phosphate rock would prevent the communities money and resources unnecessarily leaving that community. However our present day scenario involves discarding most of the bones & sludge. Unfortunately, the imported phosphate will probably be cheaper than recycled phosphate, at least until all those rapidly disappearing reserves are fully depleted. Presently an individual company that now imports phosphate rock will probably outcompete a municipal waste-based bone reclamation company. This is not sustainable. However a more tightly regulated, municipally subsidized, arrangement (using a "tipping" or disposal fee) that recycles the bones as fertilizer, perhaps supervised by an ex phosphate importer, will be economically advantageous to the community (or municipal cooperative) but may be disadvantageous to phosphate importing.

So how would one take CO2 (and methane) out of the air? To solve this one need to fully understand the difference between a) neutral carbon (carbon active in the present carbon cycle, essentially green annuals such as crops & the associated food & waste stream); b) positive carbon (fossil fuels) and older trees; c) negative carbon (carbon sequestered from the current carbon cycle).
In short, Dr. Comet sees the following scenario:

The basic model:
Imagine a tiny cartoon planetoid; there are lots of trees on this planetoid which is also similar to earth in that it has a coal seam which the "planetoidians" use for fuel (carbon positive). Every year the trees shed their leaves in the fall & if the trees in my yard are anything to go by; the leaves are entirely disintegrated by bugs & molds in the fall. The inhabitants notice that CO2 levels are rising in their atmosphere as the coal seam is used up & get worried as the climate starts to change (hotter) so instead of coal, they try using the dried leaves (carbon neutral) as fuel & their planetoids CO2 levels stabilize as there is now no net addition of CO2 to the system from the planetoids active carbon cycle. Eventually, the inhabitants figure out that if they use hydrogen from water as their chief fuel, using sunlight as the energy source in H2 production, and char the leaves instead of using them as fuel, then CO2 from their (current enhanced) carbon cycle could be entirely removed by just sprinkling the CO2 as nearly indestructible charred leaves or biochar (carbon negative) on the ground as a soil conditioner. The nearby sea also absorbs considerable amounts of CO2 during the "spring blooms'.

Over the next 50 years, one could implement the following series of steps:
(1) Moles of fossil fuel CO2 emitted are taxed or offset by moles of carbon fixed from the current carbon cycle. Municipal industrial and agricultural waste are used as sources of liquid fuels and electricity. The system remains carbon positive. Existing energy infrastructure & automobiles are retained but modified.
(2) Waste, solar, algae and wind derived energy become dominant. Carbon neutrality is established. Biogasoline, biochar, sewer gas & solar/wind power (electricity) steadily replace fossil fuels.
(3) Disassociation or electrolysis of water to H2 and O2, better storage batteries and related technologies that could be used to store energy or hydrogen from wind or solar (or perform an industrial function on an itinerant basis). Thus isolated wind turbines or solar based steam turbines that run only intermittently could store that energy by electrolyzing water to make hydrogen. The stored hydrogen can be used as fuel or a valuable chemical feedstock. Iceland uses a related geyser-based approach. Many other uses could be suggested for excess energy production that is too isolated for power line extensions to the main grid. By collecting the products of electrolysis such as hydrogen or metals, the energy could be stored. Alternatively, useful manufactured materials such as unfired ceramics (which could wait until sufficient energy has being stored, then automatically fired). The batteries from electric cars could be left to be charged wherever sporadic solar/wind energy is available. Electric fuel cell & storage technology becomes dominant in transportation. Most organic waste is converted into H2 using the water shift reaction. A hydrogen energy-based infrastructure is gradually created.
(4) When enough energy is available from solar, algal or wind resources for general consumption, then CO2 could be removed and stored as char and charcoal for soil additives. (Artificial recreation of coal.) Syngas from waste-based power plants could be converted into plastic construction materials. City waste is reformed to H2. Fertilizer derived from the waste stream is given to farmers in return for storing organic waste as char. A carbon negative environment would become established.

I suggest that each U.S. state be divided into carbon neutral regions; cities or urban (heterotrophic) areas, where consumption of alternative energy, as well as production of goods and services energy is high, are balanced by adjacent autotrophic regions (rural areas) which produce much of the energy used by the city. If the energy from the sun is transformed into hydrogen, electricity, biofuels and net carbon dioxide fixation in autotrophic zones is linked to consumption of energy in the heterotrophic zones, then considerable progress towards both carbon neutrality, and autarky will have been accomplished without compromising democracy. Lehman et al (2007) in their seminal study on "terra preta del Indio" (biochar) notes that if the complete planets' organic waste converted into "flash" pyrolytic oil, (all the waste organics are converted into oil) this would provide enough energy to replace fossil fuels. Fossil fuels yield about 2ppm of carbon dioxide added "permanently" to the atmosphere each year. If, instead, the agricultural waste is slowly pyrolysed at 600°C, one half of the carbon can be preserved as near indestructible biochar , the other half is distributed between oil and syngas. Thus, in theory one ppm of carbon dioxide can be removed every year from the atmosphere, as long as the pyrolysate is used instead of fossil fuels, and hydrogen and/or algal derived fuels make up the shortfall. (all of this assumes that energy demand remains stable). Thus it would take about a century, after a seven year "lead-in" period during which fossil fuels are replaced (assuming absolute universal compliance) to return atmosphere carbon dioxide concentrations to pre-industrial levels. This is too slow, as the polar ice is melting far too rapidly. However it is possible that the sea & northern continents "spring bloom" of vegetation might absorb another 2ppm. This would take us to 33 years.

Some further ideas: 1) Establish a network of carbon "managers" to regulate carbon sinks and; sources in each "domain" 2) Develop municipal domains where local government invites industry, on a competitive basis, to serve public needs. A balanced power structure whereby it is the municipal needs of the community that decides which industries will best serve those needs (and maybe not the other way around). Think about Venice during the 5th century CE, rising from the swamps of the Po delta when the mainland was overwhelmed by war, decline and destruction. Nothing but much mud (covered at high tide), reeds and fish! It was the establishment of excellent infrastructure & a good defensive site that formed the "medieval underpinning" of this little trading nation for more than 12 centuries. The modern "little dragons" of the far east, run by "Confucian cooperative capitalism," have some similarities. Essentially the whole city state is run as a single giant corporation. How much more naturally wealthy & spacious than all of these examples is the USA!

The problem of "sustainability" may be solvable by performing 3 experiments (at different scales). 1) Repeat the Arizona biosphere ("biodome") experiment using a psychologically better adapted team. 2) Take a small rural town, ask the people to agree to a giant experiment in recycling, using biological waste as fuel. Account for all carbon emissions. Collect all incombustibles, try & use or sell them (or perform metal recovery. Is the town viable in food, water, other resources & energy? Is the town economically viable? If not, what would have to be changed? 3) Apply economic rules determined in 1 & 2 to a dying town or even a city.

If successful, the "sustainability experiment" might be imitated on a worldwide basis, particularly if the results are surpluses of energy, raw materials, food and profits & removes CO2 from the air. It would also prepare us for occupation (under glass) on the moon & Mars and also might "inspire the nation" as the "eye of the economic hurricane" moves over us ........

Many of the above ideas have been published as letters to the American Chemical Society (Chemical & Engineering News, August 12, 2007 & March 19, 2010) and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Explorer magazine (May, 2006). Other ideas can be found at the ACS "Sustainability" website blog.

Dr. Comet is also active in petroleum geochemistry & has mapped out the petroleums of the Gulf of Mexico "as if they were rocks" using the biomarker (chemical fossil profiles) of the oils. These biomarker profiles show that the different oil types mimic the regional geology of the GOM & support a mainly Mesozoic source from "oceanic anoxic or stagnation events" for their origin. This work was performed at Texas A&M University while Dr. Comet was a Research Associate at the Geochemical & Environmental Research Group (1989-1998). His education includes a BS in Geology from London University (QMC, UK), an MS in micropaleontology from

London University (UCL) & a Ph.D. in Organic Geochemistry from Bristol University (UK). He has also performed post doctoral work at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) & has worked in the oil patch (Core Labs) in the Far East.

He has also taught high school science in Texas for many years & is retired but now works with Idea Connection as a "solver." He has recently won a major award for "applications of medical biomarkers" and is interested in scientific problem solving in geology & environmental chemistry.

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