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A green pond sits in the middle the sand of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, which is more than 300 miles away from the nearest city. It’s a test site for Brilliant Planet, a startup that plans to fight climate change by growing vast quantities of carbon-capturing algae in the world’s deserts.
“Per unit area, we can fix as much carbon—or more carbon, depending on where we are in the seasonality—as a rainforest,” says Raffael Jovine, cofounder and chief scientist at Brilliant Planet. “The difference is, when a rainforest tree falls down, it returns 97% of the carbon back to the atmosphere, whereas we can sequester all of it.” The production at the test site varies, as the company runs different trials. It expects to remove approximately 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year when it builds its first commercial-scale plant covering 1,000 acres. Similar emissions92,000 barrels oil. The system could be scaled up to cover the desert land on the coasts and remove 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year.
The company pumps seawater from nearby coasts into its facility. It takes advantage of the fact the water is rich in nutrients that algae requires and also contains CO2. Tens of billions upon tons of CO2 emissionsOver the past few decades. As the water flows through a series of containers and ponds, algae grows in the startup’s proprietary system and captures carbon. When the algae is ready to be harvested—a process that takes between 18 and 30 days—it’s filtered out of the water, which is returned to the ocean. This helps to solve the problem of acidity in the water. Another problem created by climate change is.) The algae is then dried and buried beneath the sand. There, the carbon it has captured can be permanently stored.
It’s one example of something that climate science says is necessary: Tackling climate change involves not only moving away from fossil fuels and eliminating other emissions, but also removing CO2 from the air. The latest IPCC report says that carbon removal—both through technology and natural solutions like planting trees— It is vital and will need to grow rapidly.The world must have any chance of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 or 2.
Other companies that grow algae, including biofuel startups that have failed in the past, used a different approach to growing algae. They used bioreactors that were costly and difficult to operate. Jovine likens the old approach to growing algae in a test tube. “Instead of upscaling a test tube, we’re downscaling the ocean,” he says. “What that really means is that, fundamentally, we have taken natural processes, natural algal blooms, that are the basis of the food chain in the ocean. And we have taken those and brought them on land in a very large scale.”
The ocean is prone to large algae blooms. But the company has developed a process which can grow algae quickly all year. The system can capture CO2 at much lower costs than traditional methods. Plants that capture carbon from the air directly through direct air capture. The algae facility is less expensive than direct air capture, which can cost up to 10x as much. The company will sell carbon credits, similar to direct air capture plants to offset carbon footprints. “The issue on the direct air capture side is simply that it’s so expensive,” says CEO Adam Taylor. “There’s just an inherent amount of energy required to separate CO2 out of the atmosphere in such minuscule quantities.”
The approach also has advantages to carbon removal in nature—it’s hard to measure exactly how much CO2 a forest is storing, or to know that the trees might not later be cut down or lost in a fire. Another startup plans on growing kelp in the ocean, and then sinking it to capture the carbon. However this startup will have to prove that the carbon has been permanently stored. Brilliant Planet will bury the algae close to the surface of the sand; because of the salty, dry environment, it won’t decompose.
“It’s just a shallow burial, one or three meters under the ground,” says Taylor. “So if anybody ever questioned, did you really bury the algae? Is it still there today? Did it decay? You could sort of say, Well, there’s the GPS coordinates of where we were burying on that day that we made your credit. Bring your shovel, and you’re welcome to verify it.”
Companies with goals to achieve net zero emissions or become “carbon negative,” like Microsoft, are looking for high-quality carbon credits to buy—solutions that are permanent, scalable, affordable, and proven to add a new benefit rather than double-counting something that would have happened anyway. Brilliant Planet is currently considering whether it may “pre-sell” any of its carbon credits to these companies. The full operation will be underway soon.
Since its pilots in South Africa, Oman, and South Africa, the startup has been operating its Morocco test site, leased from government, for almost five years. After raising $12 million in Series A funding, the company is now building a larger demonstration facility. A commercial facility will be constructed in 2024.
There are half a million square kilometers (more than 300,000 square miles) of flat, coastal desert land in the world—from Africa to South America to Australia—that the company says could be ideally suited to this work. “One of the key benefits of this system is the huge scalability because we are using otherwise unused desert land that has no real alternative farming or agricultural or economic use,” Taylor says.
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