Local inventor's process may produce clean air, clean water for all
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| Sunday, 06/09/02 Local inventor's process may produce clean air, clean water for all |
Staff Writer
Vanderbilt children's neurologist and inventor Robert Holcomb may be, in the words of one university official, the Thomas Edison of our age.
Holcomb and a lot of other people think he has solved a scientific riddle whose answer could reduce the United States' dependence on Middle Eastern oil, keep industrial poisons out of America's back yards, and turn the oceans into drinking water for dry, poor countries.
He has invented a chemical process that would allow power companies to burn coal without spewing pollution into the air. The same process, changed somewhat, preserves lumber without using toxic chemicals that are being banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With another change, it makes gasoline burn more cleanly, he said; change it again, and it purifies sea water that would destroy ordinary filters.
This process, which one executive in the wood-preservation industry called ''magical,'' is called Inorganic Polymer Electret. IPE-C, the name for the substance used to treat coal, consists of ordinary ingredients such as sand, water and alkali. What Holcomb does to those ingredients, however, is not ordinary. He manipulates their molecules' electric charge to make them behave in new ways.
Holcomb compared it to the way your tongue reacts differently to sweet and sour flavors.
''There are receptors on your tongue,'' he said. ''When you eat a good-tasting Nutty Buddy, it stimulates those.'' IPE stimulates molecules the same way.
Black & Veatch, the worldwide engineering company, was hired to test samples of crushed coal mixed with an IPE product. Even when the company burned high-sulfur coal mined near Jamestown, Tenn., there was almost no pollution in the smoke.
The sulfur, which causes acid rain when it goes up a power plant's smokestack, stayed in the ash and was transformed into a substance resembling the gypsum used in the wallboard of houses. Emissions of mercury were reduced. Levels of nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons also fell substantially, Black & Veatch reported.
IPE could breathe new life into economically depressed Appalachian coal-mining communities by giving electric utilities a way to burn millions of tons of coal with too much sulfur to meet federal clean air regulations. Utilities could burn that coal instead of oil.
''I think we may have found a revolutionary solution to the energy crisis,'' Black & Veatch consultant Suquing Wang said at the April public unveiling of Green Coal, the official name of coal treated with IPE.
Greater use of coal would make the United States less dependent on foreign oil, Black & Veatch executive Alex Silver said.
Coal generates more than half of the electricity in the United States, but environmental concerns keep the country from making full use of its huge reserves, which are expected to last 400 years at the current rate of use, said Burt Davis, associate director of the Center for Applied Energy Research at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
''The United States, as far as coal, is the Saudi Arabia of the world,'' he said.
That would be good news to the 7,700 members of the United Mine Workers of America who lost their jobs after passage of the Clean Air Act of 1997, union spokesman Doug Gibson said. The law clamped down on sulfur emissions.
''We got killed out there,'' Gibson said.
He asked the same question others have about Green Coal and IPE: ''Does it work?''
Dr. Harry Jacobson, vice chancellor for health affairs and professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has no doubts.
''The data is the data,'' he said of the test results. ''We can make a profit and produce a significantly beneficial effect on the environment.''
Holcomb says he is pursuing contracts with large energy companies and that the technology could be on the market in a year to 18 months.
To attract the power industry, Green Coal must be substantially cheaper than the $20-a-ton cost of using a scrubber, said Tom Jaster, a consultant to the electric power industry who has worked on the Green Coal project. Scrubber devices treat the smoke before it leaves a power plant's smokestack.
The only question is how much it might cost to produce huge quantities of IPE-C. The answer looks encouraging.
''The numbers look like the utility could save more than we would charge them,'' Jaster said.
Vanderbilt has invested $500,000 in IPE and Demeter Systems LLC, the company formed to market it. Jacobson is a member of the company's board of governors.
Green Coal was unveiled in April, but it might not be the first IPE-based product that is sold. That distinction may go to Herculean, the brand name of the IPE formula used to treat wood.
Rock Island Tie & Timber Inc. in Jefferson City, Mo., plans to build a plant that will use that formula of IPE to preserve wood without using either creosote or a very toxic preservative called CCA, short for chromated copper arsenate.
The arsenic in CCA, one use of which is to protect backyard decks from insects, can seep out of the wood and into the ground and water. Children who play nearby are vulnerable to arsenic poisoning.
Creosote, a probable human carcinogen, is used primarily in railroad ties. There are also concerns about creosote contaminating the environment. It takes about 7 gallons to preserve one railroad tie, and it takes 3,200 ties to lay a mile of track, said Bob Moses, Rock Island's president.
Herculean, which Moses developed with Holcomb, not only is nontoxic but also preserves wood better than creosote or CCA and doesn't cost more, Moses said.
The IPE used to formulate Herculean is a mixture of borate and silicate that crystallizes inside the wood, making it stronger, harder and fire-resistant.
In one test, a propane torch took 45 minutes to burn through a 1-inch-thick board treated with IPE. The torch burned through an untreated board in 15 minutes, Holcomb said.
Two other companies that are part of Demeter — ROM Technologies LLC and Emissions Control LLC — are marketing IPE's use in water and gasoline.
IPE ''de-clusters'' gasoline molecules, Holcomb said. In tests, pollution went down 36%, while gas mileage went up 10%.
Gasoline is made up of clusters of different-size molecules that don't burn evenly. IPE rearranges those molecules so they burn completely in an engine. The result is less carbon monoxide and other pollutants.
Because more of the fuel is burned, IPE squeezes more energy from a gallon of gasoline. It even cleans the fuel injection nozzles, according to literature produced by Emissions Control LLC.
In water, IPE helps remove chemicals and microbes. Seawater becomes drinking water. It works by protecting the membranes used in reverse-osmosis filters. It also removes minerals that can collect on equipment exposed to water, such as air conditioning and heating systems.
''In some parts of the world, they have no water,'' Holcomb said. ''We're excited about being able to provide clean energy and clean water.''
Holcomb unlocked the secrets of IPE slowly. When the answer came one day in 1995 as he labored in the workshop he keeps in Birmingham, Ala., he was ready. Working without pause, he built the machine that made the first IPE.
''I basically worked all night when I finally figured out how to build it,'' he said.
Using his blacksmith's forge and an emissions tester borrowed from Vanderbilt, he burned a sample of coal. There was almost no pollution.
Not bad, Holcomb jokes, for a one-time art major at the University of Alabama.
He never got a degree in art, but he did earn a medical degree and a doctoral degree in pharmacology and holds numerous patents, as well as keeping his practice at Vanderbilt.
He followed his natural curiosity into his laboratory, where, in the 1990s, he developed and marketed pain-relieving magnets that he uses himself. He also developed a self-cooling beverage can.
''I'll go to the grave to defend my inventions,'' he said.
His self-cooling beverage can caught the eye of a thief, he said.
He alerted the authorities, proved he was the owner of the Cool Can, and, then, after making his point, made sure it never appeared on store shelves.
The technology wasn't ready, Holcomb said. The problem was that occasionally one of the cans would go off like a firecracker.
He's still working on the idea and believes that one day it will work.
The same goes for his pain-relieving magnets, which also became the focus of a court battle.
The company he formed to sell his magnets, Holcomb Healthcare Services, went to federal court in Nashville in 1999 to defend his patent. That lawsuit was settled earlier this year, and the final court record was sealed.
For now, he promises to keep ''tinkering'' in his workshop, always with the goal of finding answers that help people.