Skyonic’s plan to commercialize Skymine, a process that scrubs SOX, NO2, mercury, and other heavy metals from industrial plant exhaust and converts leftover CO2 into sodium bicarbonate, was just a glimmer in the company’s eye as recently as February.

But this week Skyonic announced that it is opening a carbon mineralization demonstration facility at San Antonio-based Capitol Aggregates, one of the biggest cement plants in Texas. The plant comes courtesy of a US$3m DOE grant that also requires Skyonic to produce qualifying samples of its baking soda-like CO2 byproducts, which can be turned into animal feed, glass products, and even a growth catalyst for bioalgae.

"We do a full scrub of acid gases as well as mercury scrubbing. Then we have the CO2 capture piece and we also make byproduct chemicals with lower energy than traditional methods," explains Joe Jones, Skyonic’s founder and CEO.

Now that the demonstration plant is up and running, Skyonic is getting to work on a commercial scale facility at the same location. When complete, the facility will directly remove 75,000t of CO2 from the cement plant’s flue gas. Skyonic will also indirectly offset another 200,000t because the chemicals produced with its sodium bicarbonate can be made using less energy than they would with traditional production processes.