At a time when nature is giving a lot of signals all around the world regarding how damaged it is and how badly it needs to recover, a startup backed by Bill Gates is planning to take big steps towards tackling climate change.
The startup?Graphyte is backed?and incubated by Bill Gates¡¯ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. It has engineered a hybrid technology that combines engineering with natural photosynthesis processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground. For the unversed, Breakthrough Energy Ventures is the umbrella name of several organizations founded by Bill Gates in 2015?to accelerate innovation in sustainable energy and other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.?
¡°It¡¯s important to understand that carbon removal is not an excuse to keep emitting, or to slow down our transition to a clean energy economy ¡ª we need to keep innovating as fast as we can,¡± Bill Gates wrote in his firm¡¯s ¡°State of the Transition 2023¡± report, released on Monday, as per Bloomberg. ¡°But it¡¯s become clear that carbon removal will be a necessary tool to have in our toolkit.¡±?
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Plants naturally pull CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their tissue, but that CO2 is released back into the atmosphere when the plant decomposes. Upon launching, startup Graphyte takes waste biomass like discarded wood residue or rice hulls, dries and sterilises it to prevent decomposition. It then condenses it into dense carbon blocks, wraps it in a proprietary polymer barrier and stores it underground in an engineered storage site. The carbon within will be locked away and prevented from being re-released.
The idea for the carbon removal process, which Graphyte calls ¡°carbon casting,¡± was first conceived by BEV partner Chris Rivest, who brought in the startup's Co-founder and CEO Barclay Rogers to commercialize the technology.
¡°He and I started going back and forth on such an approach of trying to make the most of the carbon within the biomass and then determine ways to ensure that it¡¯s not re-released,¡± said Rogers. ¡°And through those collaborative discussions, Graphyte was born.¡±
What appealed to Rivest about this approach was its potential for durable, affordable and immediately scaleable carbon removal. ¡°There¡¯s a concern around the energy and capital intensity of some of the existing approaches, particularly the engineered approaches,¡± he said,?Bloomberg reported.
Graphyte plans on buying waste biomass from local sources and selling its carbon removal services to corporate buyers. Today those buyers are mostly technology companies like Microsoft and Shopify, which have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help scale the nascent carbon removal industry and view it as critical to meeting their sustainability commitments.?
Existing carbon removal technology like direct air capture currently costs hundreds to thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 removed and would require large amounts of renewable energy at scale. Cheaper, nature-based options like planting trees also have drawbacks when it comes to durability and measurement challenges.?
By comparison, Graphyte says its levelized cost of production is currently under $100 per ton, a moonshot target for carbon removal that direct air capture is still far from achieving. It also requires a tenth of the energy of direct air capture, and the carbon blocks are projected to be durable for over a thousand years, due in part to the proprietary polymer barrier protecting them, according to Rogers. The process is also land-efficient, with the potential of removing 10,000 tons of CO2 equivalent per acre, he said.?
Graphyte is in the process of building its first plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, near local timber and rice mills that could serve as biomass sources, according to Rogers. It¡¯s also in the process of signing customer offtake agreements, or a contractual commitment to buy carbon removal services at a predetermined price upon delivery. The first carbon blocks are expected to be produced by January 2024. The project will have the capacity to remove 5,000 tons of CO2 per year by the end of 2023 and 50,000 by July 2024.?
To monitor and measure the CO2 within the blocks, Graphyte will install sensors and proprietary tracer systems in the storage sites. The company has also elected Puro.earth as its carbon registry, a first step towards independent verification of its removals, as per the Bloomberg report.
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