H2CO3(s): a new candidate for CO2 capture and sequestration

To reduce the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming it is necessary to remove CO2(g) from the effluent streams of coal-fired power plants and to sequester the CO2 either as a liquid or by reaction with other compounds. A major difficulty in achieving this goal arises from the very weak acidity of CO2(g), causing it to react only incompletely with weak bases, although this weak interaction does provide a means for "stripping" the CO2 from the acid-base complex at high temperatures. Reaction with strong bases like Na0H yields more stable complexes, but massive amounts of chemical reactants would need to be purchased and chemical products like NaHCO3 then stored. However, when gas-phase CO2 reacts with the weak base water (or when bicarbonate reacts with strong acid) the unstable product monomeric "H2CO3" can be formed. The free energy required is about 16 kcal/mol in the gas phase and about 10 kcal/mol in aqueous solution. This energy can be supplied by particle or photon excitation and is only a small fraction ofthe energy released when a mole of CH4 is converted to a mole of CO2. Although this monomeric compound is highly unstable, its oligomers are considerably more stable, due to internal H-bonding, with free energies for the larger oligomers in the gas phase which are about 4 kcal/(mol of H2CO3) lower, only about 6 kcal/mol H2CO3 higher than the gas-phase combination of CO2 and H2O at room temperature. Also, at lower temperature the entropic penalty for the oligomer is less and oligomeric H2CO3 becomes stable around the sublimation temperature of dry ice. This indicates that it may be possible to capture gas-phase CO2 directly, using only cheap and abundant H2O as a reactant, and to store the resulting (H2CO3)n as a oligomeric solid at only moderately cold temperatures. These conclusions are based on quantum computations that accurately reproduce the structures, spectra, and stabilities of H2CO3 oligomers. Methods for producing and characterizing the H2CO3 oligomers are discussed. However, some aspects of the proposed scheme are quite speculative and will require additional investigation. Several important questions need to be answered before the feasibility of this procedure on a planetary scale can be assessed, particularly those involving the vapor pressure curve, heat of sublimation, density, and compressibility of (H2CO3)n.