“If you have a gigatonne scale problem, you need gigatonne scale solutions.”
The emissions crisis is clearly that scale of a problem and the solutions Dr Arun Majumdar, Professor in Stanford University’s faculty member of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, calls for in response will need to include carbon removal innovations. Something the IPCC acknowledged as being an unavoidable reality in a recent report.
Which means solutions like those being developed at Brilliant Planet, where microalgae grown in waters around dessert areas can capture emissions at scale, are going to be critical.
“Brilliant Planet is unlocking the power of algae as an affordable method of permanently and quantifiably sequestering carbon at the gigaton scale,” the company’s website states.
The microalgae is ‘solar-dried’ after being harvested before it is buried in the dessert – where it won’t break down. It has already proved successful in tests in Morocco, and pretty much only needs seawater and sunlight to do its job, so has attracted a lot of backers, including Future Positive Capital and S2G Ventures.
Carbontech
As we reported yesterday there are a number of commercial dimensions to this carbon-removing future. One of them being carbontech – products made with waste carbon, which is a near $6 trillion annual market opportunity, according to Carbon180, an NGO on a mission to make it happen.
.
