By Jennifer McKee
Albuquerque Journal
Thursday, January 11, 2001

You figure plastic water bottles or bags are pretty cheap, right? Even free. But what you don't see in every sandwich bag, say a pair of scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the cloud of greenhouse gases burned up and the millions of dollars spent processing them.

"It still costs a lot of money to make a lot of cheap things," said Jennifer Young, a chemical engineer at the lab. She and David Devlin, a lab materials scientist, have a plan to change that.

For the next three years, they and a team of scientists at the lab are perfecting a way of breaking out the building blocks of plastics -- in particular, the kind of flimsy plastic in garbage bags and sandwich baggies -- from their hydrocarbon raw materials in a cheaper, cleaner way.

Their project is funded by a $900,000 federal Department of Energy grant and will include an extra $900,000 in material and cooperating research from British energy company BP Amoco and French plastic and chemical firm MEDAL Airliquide. The two companies are part of the DOE's Industries of the Future program, said lab spokesman Jim Danneskiold. The program experiments with new, less-polluting technologies and looks for environmentally interested companies to share the cost and use the technology.

Plastic is made from a salad of molecules, most teased from petroleum products and hydrocarbon gases. Young and Devlin are concerned with the first step -- when ethane gas is fed into a natural-gas burning furnace which cooks it into a hodgepodge of other gases. Only one, ethylene, is needed for plastic, Young said. The rest -- butane, propane and others -- are either saved and sold, fed back into the furnace as fuel or released as waste.

Plucking the ethylene from that stew consumes huge amounts of energy and produces lots of greenhouse gases, Young said. That's what she and Devlin are trying to change.

Right now, plastic makers put the gas mixture under extreme conditions -- dropping its temperature to 70 degrees Fahrenheit below zero and smashing it with between 400 and 500 pounds of pressure. Young and Devlin, working with some special sponge-like membranes already on the market, are trying to find a way to sift the ethylene out of the mixture, a process that would consume far less energy.

Young estimates this new "membrane" technology, if used in just the plastic plants on the Texas and Louisiana coasts, would save 45 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year -- enough to heat every home in Albuquerque for a year -- at a savings of $250 million.

What's more, Young said, that's 45 billion cubic feet of natural gas not burned up and released into the atmosphere. "This is a project to reduce energy consumption and reduce carbon monoxide emissions," she said, adding that any cost savings is gravy.

Although the two haven't built their membrane system yet, Devlin said it will look like a bunch of tiny straws packed into a tube. The walls of the straws are made from specialized membranes. "The goal here is not to make more and better plastics," Danneskiold said. "What's really the goal here is reducing fossil fuel emissions."