Q: What do you mean by “interim” solution?”

A: Our national discourse with regard to our energy policy is focused on what is generally referred to as an “energy crisis.” But what we really have is a fuel crisis as a result of the end of cheap, easy oil.

The nation consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day–primarily for transportation–of which 13 million barrels comes from foreign sources. We are spending more than $1 billion a day on imported oil, which represents nearly 75% of the nation’s trade deficit.

In his recent speech on energy policy, President Obama called for cutting consumption of imported oil by one third in a little more than a decade through a renewed commitment to energy conservation and the development of new sources of clean, renewable energy. Even with the achievement of this aggressive goal, however, we will still be consuming seven million barrels of imported oil a day.

While a shift to alternative energy technologies will eventually take place, many of these technologies are still decades away from being affordable without substantial government subsidies. Renewables now supply only a tiny fraction of the nation’s energy. While waiting for renewables to mature, we need an “interim” solution that bridges our current and future fuel consumption needs.

Q: How does the Carbon Sciences’ technology answer that need?

A: Our “gas to liquid” (GTL) technology uses natural gas to produce transportation fuels. Carbon Sciences’ breakthrough technology takes traditional GTL technology to the next level by using CO2–the main constituent in harmful greenhouse gases–in combination with methane from natural gas, one of the nation’s most abundant sources of energy, to meet the growing demand for gasoline and other transportation fuels while mitigating harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Q: Why hasn’t anyone done this before?

A: Conventional GTL technology has been around for a long time–the petroleum-starved Third Reich used the revolutionary “Fischer-Tropsch” technology to produce diesel during World War II. But this technology is expensive and dirty, making it impractical for large-scale implementation.

Carbon Sciences has developed an affordable “CO2 reforming” catalyst for the efficient transformation of CO2 and methane (the primary constituent of natural gas) into a “synthesis” gas that can be processed into gasoline and other transportation fuels.

In addition to natural gas, the methane used in the process can also be obtained from other sources, including landfills, plant biomass such as algae, switch grass and wood and human and animal waste.

Q: Do we have enough natural gas to meet the nation’s fuel needs through this process?

A: Without a doubt. The United States has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. We have more than 2,000 trillion cubic feet of known reserves–enough the meet the gasoline demand for decades using Carbon Sciences’ technology without competing with current natural gas consumption. The supply of CO2–the other feedstock used in the process–is virtually inexhaustible: the world is expected to produce more than 42 million metric tons of CO2 by 2030.

Carbon Sciences estimates that their technology can produce the 138 billion gallons of gasoline that the nation now consumes annually by using 23 trillion square feet of natural gas in combination with 586 million tons of CO2 that otherwise would have been released into the atmosphere.

Q: What about other substitutes for gasoline, such as biofuels or compressed natural gas?

A: The problem with other liquid fuel substitutes is that they require costly engine modifications and the reconfiguration of the nation’s fuel delivery infrastructures. By contrast, the end product of Carbon Sciences’ technology is a drop-in substitute, meaning that it is identical or even cleaner than the gasoline or diesel now used in our cars and trucks.

Q: President Obama has called for a transition to electric vehicles. Wouldn’t that be a solution to our fuel needs?

A: For the most part, electric vehicles are powered by energy generated from nuclear and coal-fired power plants, which together produce more than 65% of the nation’s electricity. Although an improvement on foreign oil in the sense that it comes from domestic sources, power from coal and nuclear sources creates environmental problems of its own. Moreover, the electric grid in many parts of the nation is already overstressed even without the prospect of millions of new electric vehicles charging up on grid power.

Of all the alternatives now under development, only Carbon Sciences’ revolutionary CO2-based GTL technology has the scalability to replace the fossil fuels the nation consumes each year.

Q: How close is the Carbon Sciences technology to commercialization?

A: We have launched an aggressive development strategy to demonstrate the performance of our catalyst in a commercial-grade testing facility. The process will be continually scaled up until we make a commercial-scale development package available to a partner, which we expect to happen in 2011.

Because natural gas facilities produce both natural gas and CO2, they will be the first sector to be targeted. In the future, other processes will be exploited, including methane from landfills, flare gases from refineries and flue gases from coal-fired power plants.

Our technology will produce a cleaner, more affordable and higher performing transportation fuel than is currently available.

Q: What is the potential market for such a technology?

A: Since there is no larger market in the world than energy and transportation fuels, the potential is enormous. Using only half the world’s active 6,254 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves (which does not include unexplored reserves) Carbon Sciences’ technology can produce enough gasoline to meet the needs of the entire world for 31 years.

While conventional GTL technology has not been implemented on a large scale here, it is now being used in other countries. Royal Dutch Shell has invested $19 billion in the world’s largest GTL facility, the Pearl facility in Qatar, an Arab Emirate. A city has grown up around this facility, which employs 35,000 people.

The Pearl GTL facility points to another advantage of GTL technology — job creation. In addition to meeting the need for a petroleum substitute, enhancing our national energy security and removing harmful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, Carbon Sciences’ CO2-based GTL technology also offers the prospect of large-scale “green” job creation, effectively making good on Obama’s promises.

Byron Elton is President and Chief Executive Officer of Carbon Sciences. A veteran media and marketing executive, Elton most recently served as Senior Vice President of Sales for Univision Online. In the 1990s, he served as an executive with AOL Media Networks in the roles of Regional Vice President of Sales and Senior Vice President of E-Commerce for AOL Canada. Elton is a graduate of Brigham Young University, where he earned a B.A. in Communications with an emphasis on Broadcast Sales.

This Q&A originated with Carbon Sciences, which is a chemical engineering firm that specializes in transforming natural gas into gas, diesel and jet fuel.