AbstractsChemistry

"Many industries, ranging from power plants to breweries, produce large quantities of carbon dioxide as a by-product. The burning of limestone with natural gas produces a relatively clean gas in which the carbon dioxide content may exceed 40 per cent. It is with this type gas that the present thesis will be concerned. In this process the burning of the limestone is accomplished by using natural gas as a fuel, burning usually under a pressure of about two pounds, and obtaining carbon dioxide from the combustion of the gas and the decomposition of the limestone. Such a plant producing 70 tons of lime a day would yield approximately 56 tons of carbon dioxide. The figure is based on the carbon dioxide produced from the burning of the lime alone, and does not include that produced by the combustion of the natural gas. Many plants exhaust this relatively clean gaseous mixture into the atmosphere with no effort to reclaim any economic values. The possibility of recovering some of these gases for commercial use as such, or by converting them into chemical compounds of monetary value led to making this investigation the subject for a thesis" – Introduction, p. 1.