Gates-Backed Startup to Give Old Wood a New Life – Removing Carbon from the Air!

A hybrid technology that combines engineering with natural photosynthesis processes has been developed by a startup supported and incubated by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is backed by Bill Gates. This technology aims to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground.

“It’s important to understand that getting rid of coal is not an excuse to keep emitting or to slow our transition to a clean energy economy — we need to keep innovating as fast as we can,” Gates wrote in his company’s “State of the Transition.” 2023” report released today. “But it’s become clear that decarbonization is going to be a necessary tool in our toolbox.”

Plants naturally draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their tissues, but carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere when the plant decomposes. Launched today, Graphyte takes biomass, such as discarded wood residue or rice husks, dries and sterilizes it to prevent decomposition. It then compacts it into dense carbon blocks, wraps it in a proprietary polymer shield, and stores it underground in a planned storage location. The carbon inside is locked away and prevented from being released again.

The idea for the decarbonization process, which Graphyte calls “carbon casting,” was first developed by BEV partner Chris Rivest, who brought in founder and CEO Barclay Rogers to commercialize the technology and guide the startup.

“He and I started going back and forth on an approach of trying to use as much of the carbon in the biomass as possible and then determining ways to make sure it wasn’t released again,” Rogers said. “And it was through these shared conversations that Graphyte was born.”

Rivest was attracted to this approach by its potential for sustainable, affordable and immediately scalable carbon removal. “The energy and capital intensity of some existing approaches, particularly engineered approaches, is a cause for concern,” he said.

Graphyte plans to buy waste biomass from local sources and sell decarbonization services to corporate buyers. Today, those buyers are mostly tech companies like Microsoft and Shopify, which have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help scale the nascent decarbonization industry and see it as critical to meeting their sustainability commitments.

Current carbon removal technology, such as direct air capture, currently costs hundreds or thousands of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide removed and would require large amounts of renewable energy at scale. Cheaper, nature-based alternatives, such as tree planting, also have disadvantages in terms of sustainability and measurement challenges.

By comparison, Graphyte says its levelized production cost is currently less than $100 per ton, a decarbonization goal that direct air recovery is still a long way from achieving. It also requires one-tenth the energy of direct air capture, and the carbon blocks are predicted to last more than a thousand years, thanks in part to the proprietary polymer barrier that protects them, according to Rogers. The process is also land-efficient, and can remove 10,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per hectare, he said.

According to Rogers, Graphyte is currently building its first production facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, near local wood and rice mills that could serve as biomass sources. It is also in the process of signing customer supply contracts or a contractual commitment to purchase carbon removal services at a predetermined price upon delivery. The first coal blocks are expected to be completed by January 2024. The project’s start-up projects will be able to remove 5,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year by the end of 2023 and 50,000 tons by July 2024.

The path to rapid expansion is by no means guaranteed. The challenges of commercialization are manifold, from courting enough buyers willing to pay for these moving services, to getting regulatory and community buy-in.

It is important to ensure that the blocks remain buried and that the CO2 trapped in them is not released through decay or decay. Leakage in these scenarios is possible if the biomass becomes wet or experiences significant microbial activity, says Dan Sanchezin, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is Graphyte’s scientific advisor.

In addition to drying and condensing the blocks, the polymer barrier acts as “useful insurance” to prevent the blocks from breaking up, Sanchez said.

Brian Snyder, an assistant professor in Louisiana State University’s Department of Environmental Sciences, says this insurance is key to ensuring that carbon dioxide stays buried and that the blocks don’t produce and release methane. A key risk of biomass-based carbon removal methods is that, like landfills, these biomass sinks can release methane, a harmful greenhouse gas, if exposed to bacteria that anaerobically break down the material. Graphite’s approach to drying, condensing and wrapping biomass helps prevent that process, he said.

Graphyte installs sensors and its own marking systems to monitor and measure the carbon dioxide of the blocks at the storage locations. The company has also chosen Puro.earth as its carbon registry, which is the first step towards independent verification of its emissions.

Another key concern in decarbonization pathways involving waste biomass is material availability. In Sanchez’s view, there is enough residual biomass in the United States for Graphite’s purposes and “more than enough to work with any company.”

Graphite’s coal blocks, which are mainly coal dumps, are buried underground according to the same permit requirements as construction waste dumps. While the land above the buried blocks can be used for things like solar farms, getting regulatory approvals to implement large decarbonization projects “is often a challenge,” Rogers said.

“If they have concerns, we address them,” he said of the company’s partnership with the local Pine Bluff community.