Startups Aim to Turn Plant Waste Into Concentrated Carbon—and Bury It
by Matt Simon
January 16, 2024
Introduction:
(Mother Jones) In a roundabout way, coal is solar-powered. Millions of years ago, swamp plants soaked up the sun’s energy, eating carbon dioxide in the process. They died, accumulated, and transformed over geologic time into energy-dense rock. This solar-powered fuel, of course, is far from renewable, unlike solar panels: Burning coal has returned that carbon to the atmosphere, driving rapid climate change.
But what if humans could reverse that process, creating their own version of coal from plant waste and burying it underground? That’s the idea behind a growing number of carbon projects: Using special heating chambers, engineers can transform agricultural and other waste biomass into solid, concentrated carbon. Like those ancient plants captured CO2 and then turned into coal, this is carbon naturally sequestered from the atmosphere, then locked away for (ideally) thousands of years.
To be abundantly clear: Such “carbon removal” techniques are in no way a substitute for reducing emissions and keeping that extra carbon out of the atmosphere in the first place. But at the annual COP28 conference last month, carbon removal was a hotter topic than ever before. For years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has insisted that to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, we’re going to need carbon removal in one form or another, preferably a bunch of techniques working in concert.
If scaled up in the coming years, biomass carbon removal and storage could be one of those techniques.
Additional extract:
In the end, the science is very clear that in addition to reducing emissions, humanity has to figure out how to pull more carbon out of the sky. It’s not just going to be about relying on forests to capture carbon, or on enhanced rock weathering that reacts with atmospheric CO2, or on buried biomass, but ideally some combination of the best of the best techniques, both natural and technological. “We can have lots of different strategies, and they can be highly engineered, or they can be very simple,” says Parikh. “We just need to create all of these tools so that for each location and goal, we can use something to make a difference.”
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