Mantra Venture Group Ltd. signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with KC Cottrell Co., Ltd. (KC Cottrell), a global leader in air pollution control based out of Seoul, Korea. Under the terms of the LOI, Mantra and KC Cottrell will enter into a strategic alliance to engineer, build, test, and deploy a 100 kg-per day Electroreduction of Carbon Dioxide (ERC) reactor.
KC Cottrell is currently in the construction phase of a pilot project that captures and purifies 1/2 tonne of CO2 per day from an industrial power plant. With completion scheduled for December 2009, the company is now looking for an end-use for the concentrated CO2. ERC, Mantra’s CO2 recycling technology, converts concentrated CO2 into useful products such as formic acid. Formic acid is used in numerous industry applications worldwide and has a current market value of $1,400/tonne.
In November 2007, Mantra acquired 100% outright ownership of the Electroreduction of Carbon Dioxide (ERC) technology, developed by the University of British Columbia’s Clean Energy Research Center. Powered by electricity, ERC combines captured carbon dioxide with water to produce high value materials that are conventionally obtained from the thermochemical processing of fossil fuels, including: formic acid, formate salts, oxalic acid, and methanol.
While thermochemical reactions must be driven at relatively high temperatures that are normally obtained by burning fossil fuels, ERC operates at near ambient conditions and is driven by electric energy that could be taken from an electric power grid supplied by hydro, wind, solar or nuclear energy.