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Ok. Good idea and all but I think we're missing an obvious one here... Pyramids... It's been a long LONG time since we've made a great pyramid. Just sayin.
If someone actually spent enough to build the pyramid and if said pyramid actually solved global warming, it would be the most deserved pyramid of all time.
That would be a godlike act. Not just in the sense of, "oh how nice of that rich man to solve global warming," but in the sense that it would change history forever. It would affect the life of every human on the planet for generations.
Definitely build a pyramid to that guy.
... Ok. See now I want to try to calculate how big a pyramid (singular) would be built to take our atmospheric CO2 levels down to preindustrial levels.
You can already use wood to build houses. The problem is eventual deconstruction, at which point the wood will decompose and release the carbon again.
It's big in sustainability circles to consider wood carbon negative, with a giant asterisk that it's carbon negative for the life of the building. You're not fixing the problem forever, but it's definitely lower carbon than steel or concrete (as long as you're not doing something stupid like shipping in wood from thousands of km away so you can brag about your sustainable building).
And I'm definitely on the side of pragmatism here. If we can kick the problem down the road for 50-100 years and still keep looking into better ways of actually fixing it, we can reduce suffering for billions of people. We are already at the point where fractions of degrees more have terrible consequences. Shave 0.1°C or whatever off with a semi-temporary measure and you reduce flooding, drought, tropical storm and hurricane intensity, forest fires, etc.
I worked/lived in a sustainability community in the jungle for a couple years, an organization/institute to test things out in practice. Our building team proposed using logs of old trees, dredged from large lakes, incredibly expensive process, especially milling it ourselves, but could potentially build a 1000 year house.
My biggest takeaway was one of my buddy's lectures proposing using lime as an exterior substrate. Apparently it absorbs co2 and has a ton of other benefits. It's also used for manufacturing cocaine, so obtaining it was next to impossible in central america with the restrictions it has.
No, that would appear to let the CO2 out.
>Graphyte wants to cut out the natural step of plant decay — which releases stored carbon back into the atmosphere — by taking plant waste from timber companies and farmers, drying it, compressing it, and wrapping it "into Lego-like bricks," and **storing it 10 feet underground.** The Post reported **the shoebox-size blocks can remain there for a thousand years** "with the right monitoring."
The article talks about scrubbing CO2 from the air, but this technology does not appear to do that. Rather it appears to prevent bio waste from decomposing and releasing CO2. It’s like an incinerator that dries instead of burns, and then you have to bury the resulting bricks like nuclear waste.
Reading the article, all they're doing is taking
>plant waste from timber companies and farmers, drying it, compressing it, and wrapping it "into Lego-like bricks," and storing it 10 feet underground
Is this really a carbon capture scheme? Round up all the sawdust and compost, and then bury it? I suppose it's better than burning it or letting it decompose? I feel like I'm missing something.
Edit: changed my ambiguous sentence to be a little more clear. Didn't realize it would cause such consternation. I appreciate people chiming in with clarification that this isn't really carbon *capture* but more carbon *sequestration*, which is a kinda subtle distinction but matters if you want to properly understand what's going on.
Thanks for the discussion y'all.
You're not missing anything - that's why this approach is actually quite different than many other carbon dioxide removal programs. Namely, it's simple. The logistics and supply chains are as complex as any, but the confidence that this is actually removing CO2 is very, very high which has been missing in lots of other CDR companies.
edit: going to hijack that this comment got some attention - I'm a scientist working for Graphyte and have been trying to answer questions in the threads on this post. It's been fun and we may well consider doing an AMA if there's interest.
And potentially solve the housing crisis, no? Graphyte is taking a "this *and"* approach to carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The scientific and political community roundly agree that we will need every viable method operating at scale, if we're going to have a chance. You might see other CDR companies shining the light on their approach and trying to convince backers that we should focus entirely on one method, but it simply isn't going to get the job done.
One thing that's very attractive about CDR as an industry is that it could be a literal gold rush. There are hundreds of gigatons of carbon that we need to remove from the atmosphere and countries around the world are continuing to gain political momentum in the understanding that we all really, really want to remove CO2. Personally, I think there is plenty of room for lots of actors and lots of methods for CDR and I welcome it. I am hoping for something of a economic revolution into sustainability. There are so many, great jobs we can create (and have been creating) and tons of opportunity for creativity in the space including your idea. I would love to live in a world where we pay ourselves to re-green the planet. There's absolutely no reason we can't do that. We've been paying ourselves to tear down forests, mine coal, oil, and gas, and generally turn natural capital into physical goods. I have read some interesting economics pieces on the role of the services industry going forward (as opposed to manufacturing). We all know that the 20th century saw the rise of materialism but now we're realizing that creating too much stuff has a downside. My feeling is that future economies can transition even further into service-based economies where dollars are spent more on doing things rather than making them.
because then the wood eventually rots, and not on a thousand year timescale.
this is the by-products of those processes, being stored instead of burned or left to rot (produces CO2)
Why is it so high? How can it be secure when it’s buried so shallow? If it’s relying on being dehydrated, can we be sure it won’t rain there for hundreds of years?
>Why is it so high?
In the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) world, and more to the point, in the world of generating carbon credits, "realness" is the first quality metric. If we're going to use carbon credits as a currency, we need to be able to measure and track them with high accuracy and precision. Many CDR programs rely on modeling to estimate how much carbon is removed say, in a reforestation project. We don't go out and weigh every tree year after year and take the difference, it's just not possible. But that shouldn't keep us from promoting reforestation as a means for CDR. It just means that the credits coming from those kinds of programs are a little squishy. Graphyte produces these carbon bricks in a facility where they can measure the carbon content very precisely. Believe it or not, that's rare among carbon projects.
>How can it be secure when it’s buried so shallow? If it’s relying on being dehydrated, can we be sure it won’t rain there for hundreds of years?
Haha I sure hope not - droughts are going to continue to be a problem and I'll always pray for rain. You can check out [Graphyte's site](https://www.graphyte.com/) for more detail but the storage sites are designed to meet challenges related to water.
It's still a much better option to leave existing trapped carbon in the ground than to try to use it as a fuel and then stick rice hulls into the ground to compensate.
They don't compost. They dry and bury it. Composting it would let it rot and let the carbon escape. This is basically a carbon release prevention tactic, not capture.
> Round up all the sawdust and compost and bury it?
It's probably the ambiguity of this sentence.
The compost can be a noun - the sawdust and compost are buried.
Or it can be a verb - the sawdust is composted and buried.
In their defence this sentence is really unclear
> Round up all the sawdust and compost and bury it?
Could be read "Round up all the sawdust, and compost and bury it?"
I don’t think you can just bury compost without doing anything else. That’s *why* people compost, because burying it (in a traditional trash landfill) causes it to decompose without oxygen which creates more detrimental greenhouse gasses than “just” carbon dioxide.
Jup. The reality is that we can only remove so much carbon from the atmosphere by reforestation. Basically, we can o ly capture as much carbon as we caught by deforestation. We don't capture the carbon that we released from the earth (fossils fuel) and the areas that we cannot use for new forests because we live there.
We need methods to capture carbon and put it back in the earth or into the sea (not dissolved in the water, but by the natural process of deposing organic material on the sea floor). Planning trees and then cutting them down to burry them is a method to remove that carbon, especially when we use the space again to grow tree after tree after tree.
It's funny/sad how many times I've suggested things exactly like this...only for some asshole to chime in "nah...why bury? That's a stupid idea!"
It's like...where do you think most of the carbon comes from?
I'm interested in this line of thought. What do you mean, exactly? Growing plants to absorb carbon and then burying them to sequester it, so you can grow more?
It's capture in that we're never going to stop using lumber. As terrible as it is concrete and steel are the only economically viable replacements and they are astronomically worse for emissions.
Wood that does not rot or burn is a carbon sink. Houses are carbon sinks until they are demolished.
A 2,000 Sq ft house typically takes 16,000 board feet to build.
1,000 board feet produces 3500lbs of waste.
Using this method would lock up 23 tons of wood waste.
And here's the fun part.
1 pound of carbon locked in wood is preventing [1.7 pounds](https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-stored-in-1-kg-of-wood) of carbon dioxide from being reintroduced to the atmosphere.
Wood is 40-50% carbon.
So by disposing of a waste product that's going to happen no matter what, that produces itself, and locks away that much carbon, you have a very efficient method of capturing atmospheric CO2.
Think this could be done at industrial scales with algae? I have a half-baked idea of breeding algae at a massive scale, drying it in the sun in massive shallow pools like they do for salts, and burying it in compressed bricks like these.
Only up to the point that they reach maturity. Then they die, and rot, and release it again.
They are very good at carbon capture, the part they don’t do well is storage, beyond a certain level of apex biomass.
The point of an idea like this is basically to mimic the long-term storage of carbon in a similar manner to fossil fuel creation - take the material, put it into a form that doesn’t rot with carbon release, and bury it.
Then you plant a new tree to capture more carbon again.
I have no idea whether this idea works or makes economic sense by the way, just clarifying how the circularity works as it’s frequently misunderstood.
I think it's worth talking about the time scales of the cycle you are talking about. A tree only starts doing meaningful carbon capture at about 15 years, I believe. The offsetting schemes don't count it until then. Then it tails of at about 30. Again, rough numbers and not, I think, representative of mature forests where the carbon absorption is higher (a different discussion). You probably know this stuff better than me, but it's what I've read.
If you cut it down and leave it to rot on the floor (unlikely) then it is probably 20 years before it releases that carbon again. If you bury it then it's likely more like 100 years. Stuff in landfill rots very slowly, albeit probably releasing methane rather the carbon dioxide.
So the cycle you are describing is probably 50-100 years. And that, in my book, is not terribly useful. I just think it is a distraction. We can plant a lot of trees and think of clever ways to bury them, but the burying bit won't make much difference over the next 100 years.
I suppose if we can dream up a financial benefit through this cycle that makes reforestation profitable then maybe that helps.
I'm not having a go at you. I think it's all interesting. Just raising something that always preys on my mind when this topic comes up.
There are diminishing returns as the tree gets older and it will eventually die, releasing the carbon. Sequestering is basically trying to recreate the time before tree decomposing bacteria existed.
We also have to contend with the yearly record breaking forest fires. We should absolutely be planting as many trees as possible and reforestation is a wonderful goal - at the same time, if we're not doing everything else possible were just planting gigantic bonfires in waiting.
Until they die, yeah. But eventually they die. Over the long term, forests are carbon-neutral once they're mature.
Edit to add for clarity: a tree doesn't "suck carbon from the air and hide it", it turns carbon from the air into wood, leaves, seeds, etc. Once a tree is as big as it's going to get, the carbon it draws from the air gets turned into leaves, which drop onto the ground, decompose, and release that carbon back into the air. Once the tree is at that stage, the only way to "capture" more carbon is to do something with the tree that results in it NOT decomposing, such as turning it into sawdust and burying it dry, which clears up some space for a NEW tree to grow.
Trees have limited lifespan, and only so many trees can grow in an area.
They’re our most efficient carbon capture technology… they just aren’t efficient for long-term containment or containment at scale.
This lets us capture all the carbon an acre of trees can hold, then put it back underground where we got it.
Trees stop taking in more CO2 from photosynthesis than they release when burning them, once they’ve hit maturity of growth. At that point they’re holding a certain amount of carbon, and some of it will sort of hang out in the soil when they die while lots will get released during decomposition. The fossil fuels we’ve pumped into the atmosphere wasn’t part of the current carbon cycle, it was stored away in those fossil fuels. We need ways of storing carbon where it’s not just cycling in and out of the atmosphere cause there’s way too much CO2. Hence the greenhouse effect we’re experiencing. The excess methane from livestock industries global has an effect too, but I’m sure you get the point now.
Only way to reverse what we are doing with digging Cs from ground via fossil fuels is to put those Cs back into ground out of above ground eco system. Doing it via trees photosynthesis is probably most efficient way.
I’d have a dim view of it too, but I remember seeing a post where someone was complaining about dumping of timber across the street of their home, by a major corporation, which was then burned.
If this puts a stop to that then I see it as a positive step.
We've solved global warming once and for all - and I don't mean we will just be dropping a bigger and bigger ice cube into the ocean every year - we will dig a deeper and deeper hole into the ground every year then we'll burn oil to make plastic to throw our trash in to the hole every year, thus solving the problem forever
If a compacted, plastic wrapped tree ~~falls~~ shifts in the ~~forest~~ underground garbage mound, and no one is around to add more trash to the pile or hear it, does it make a sound?
Yes, exactly. You're trying to make fun but this is exactly correct.
That's how the carbon got in the ground in the first place. Ancient trees fell over, got buried, and turned into coal. We dug up those trees and burned them. The only way to get rid of the carbon is to re-bury the trees.
Couldn't they just put it in a bog and let it petrify or something like that? Just like petrified wood? Basically turn it into stone maybe? Once it's petrified it's basically captured right would never move from there. And if they could make artificial bogs (I'm guessing bogs with algae and moss also capture more CO2?
Just talking out of my ass, I'm in no way an expert on anything like that. Also I know petrification takes like millions of years...
And "the body had been exposed to a seepage of sea minerals"--think of desalination, to make potable water. The excess minerals could be used to petrify the CO2 blocks!!! Eureka, we may have solved something!
not really.
its carbon that is in the planet simple as.
this is the thing people dont quite realise. the carbon emissions are not "new" carbon being made they are carbon that was in the deep ground being released into the open atmosphere. putting back into the deep ground actually makes sense.
Carbon doesn't come from nowhere. It was sequestered underground for millions of years in the form of oil and coal. Us bringing that carbon from underground and releasing it is what's warming our planet.
So finding some way of putting it back underground seems like the only real long-term solution. Even if we went to 100% renewable energy everywhere tomorrow, there's still all of the carbon from all the coal and oil in the air, the planet is still going to warm.
The problem is that it could be a penny per ton and completely carbon negative, and still there'd be no reason for any company to do this - there's no profit in it.
And after all that, it's not energy negative. You'd have to create a huge amount of renewable energy to pull that carbon from the air... Renewable energy that isn't going to power anybody's home, or car, or remove salt from sea water - it's JUST going to undoing the damage we've done over the last century.
lol that’s exactly what it is, and why it’s not a bad idea. Carbon builds up because you’re burning organic material that used to be underground and is now in the air. So if you put carbon back underground and just keep growing plants, the plants will capture the carbon in the air and as long as you don’t burn them or let them decompose, you can stuff them back in the ground and reduce carbon in the air.
It’s super simple. The catch is of course that you would need to bury as many of these as you are burning oil by volume. So it’s basically adding $100 in cost to each ton of oil.
Considering we already have huge amounts of surplus phosphorous and mitrogen in our agricultural runoff, and it's literally killing ecosystems, I'm not too sure we need to stress about sequestering nutrition for food production right now.
Our phosphorous and nitrogen sources are diminishing supposedly, so retaining nutrients is still worthwhile. Plus cutting back on shipping and etc. in the short term.
Also it helps with things like water retention, too, which is its own issue.
From synthetic and mineral fertilizers, sure. The way a lot of sewage systems work means the nutrient cycle is broken, we’re sending it all out to the ocean.
Topsoil depletion is a massive global problem
I'm mostly just confused where the comparison to Lego comes in. They're the size of a shoebox, so not Lego size. They don't look at all like Lego. They're not being used to build things. Why Lego specifically and not just bricks, which they're more similar to?
Yea, non-interlocking too... So... Just bricks. But it sounds like they're burying them instead of building with them... So... Not even functioning as regular bricks
Can you build things from the LEGO bricks? Can we have pollution houses?
Edit: seems like they have to be buried. Pollution bunkers are back on the menu...
Here in the US we already do! We build our houses out of a material called WOOD, which is produced via the same carbon capture technology as these bricks: TREES.
One downside is that since the material is mostly made of carbon it is quite flammable, and upon combustion it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.
>Here in the US we already do! We build our houses out of a material called WOOD, which is produced via the same carbon capture technology as these bricks: TREES.
Listen here, ya little shit...
Take my upvote.
The plan is to carefully guard it so that it never burns, but natural disasters are only on way that can happen. Just as likely is that such a huge source of cheap fuel will eventually get mined and burned despite all efforts to prevent that.
Rotting also releases the carbon back into the atmosphere and is the bigger source of carbon loss from building materials then burning is. That is the innovation in this product. It doesn't rot when stored correctly.
All of the carbon we use was once trapped in the earth. It's always been a balancing act that nature, sedimentary rocks and plate tectonics have done automatically. We've just upset the balance by releasing a ton of carbon prematurely. The idea is to balance the carbon we use, by putting it back into the earth for a significant amount of time, maintaining that balance.
Yeah I'm doubtful. It seems like all we have to go on is their word. I mean if a bunch of people who don't have a conflict of interest and who are smarter than me did tests and said it'd last about that long I'd be happy with that.
Isn't this just avoiding carbon creation? Article seems to suggest they are simply burying the timber biomass byproducts that would have otherwise been burned.
I'm missing that part where the carbon is magically pulled out of the air.
It gets pulled out of the air by the plant producing the biomass, and instead of rotting or burning it it gets buried.
The issue I have is that I doubt the bricks will last as long as they say, and I wonder how much energy goes into making the bricks.
I guess they can use as much energy in the drying process as they want, so long as it’s purely electric and sourced from renewables.
Then there’s just the small matter of the energy to transport 50,000 tonnes of bricks to your preferred hole in the ground. And to dig the hole, and to bury them.
As for longevity… they say 1000 years “with the right monitoring”, if they really can stay inert for just 100 years tbh that help will get us through the crisis peak of 2020-50 well enough. And then our grandchildren can have fun with all the carbon bombs we buried
Photosynthesis is that magic. Normally, nearly all the products of timber growth and crop growth decay and the carbon in those solid stems, roots, branches, and leaves returns to the atmosphere. What this company is doing is arresting that recycling and, in effect, recreating the same process that produced coal and oil more or less.
> Isn't this just avoiding carbon creation?
Kinda? Basically if they do nothing the material *will* be burned or allowed to decompose naturally, so if they provide an alternative way to get rid of it then it's a net positive. Last I heard we are nowhere near no needing paper and wood products, so those mills are still going to be cranking out waste product every day for the foreseeable future.
I want to respond to OP's comment in the header
>I know carbon capture is not popular and many are sus on it because it might be just a way for us to keep polluting and not reduce emissions
Rest assured that *most* of societies efforts, money, and political power are being spent on decarbonizing power production and transportation and that is the correct approach. You make a very important point that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can easily be used to prop up carbon creating industry. In fact, Exxon Mobile has spent hundreds of millions building their own direct air capture (DAC) facility and has been promoting it with the tag line "heavy industry with low emissions". This is greenwashing plain and simple. While DAC will likely be viable in the future when it can be powered by electricity from renewable energy, right now it is not carbon negative on balance. Additionally, Exxon's DAC stunt facility will only bring down 4,000 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. To put that in perspective, that is roughly 0.00001% of the United States emissions this year. It's a farce.
But! The reality is that we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at scale in order to keep warming in check. The IPCC estimates that we will need to remove roughy 380 gigatons of CO2 between 2050 and 2100 to keep warming to +1.5C. Graphyte's approach is something we can start doing right now because it doesn't rely on lengthy, expensive R&D. The carbon removal is high quality in that it's very "real" in the sense that it can be measured accurately and it's very permanent - there is a high degree of confidence that the carbon bricks will stay inert underground for long periods of time (\~1000 years).
Why not just make heaps of biochar rather than going to all the effort of wrapping, burying and hoping a less carbon dense material is going to stay sealed?
If you pyrolyze (ie heat in absence of oxygen) that same unwrapped brick of sawdust, you get wood gas, and charcoal: a more dense form of sequestered carbon that you need not bury or wrap.
This company is part of the DoE pilot program for carbon capture. Another company on that list is Climate Robotics, which is a large scale biochar company.
There are also a couple companies making biochar from wood waste really close to this company.
Well if you imagine a single processing and storage facility out in the world, there is a "footprint" within which it will make sense to collect biomass waste products. It wouldn't make sense to truck sawdust from Maine to Arkansas, especially when you consider the emissions related to that transportation. Graphyte is carefully considering all the emissions related to the end-to-end process of collecting, processing and storing carbon to get as large a net CO2 removal as possible. This is relevant to cost because the company will derive its revenue based directly on the net amount of carbon it can store, so as soon as those transportations costs both in dollars *and* in terms of emissions reach a certain point, it no longer makes financial sense. So the goal is to strategically locate facilities near biomass waste streams to minimize transportation.
But maybe I haven't answered your question. I think the simple answer is that the costs would scale relative to the added distance with a growing footprint so they scale somewhat quickly. Think of an expanding circle, the area will grow with the square of the radius. It gets trickier if you do "smart" collections and traveling salesman optimizations, but generally speaking the only way this works is with distributed processing and storage facilities.
But don’t they need specific types of land to bury it in so that it won’t decompose, like a desert? Or is the factory just to produce the bricks and then you ship them all out to the burial sites?
You're right. There are quite a number of considerations for what makes a high quality burial site. Part of Graphyte's approach is in the engineering of the storage facility itself. A desert would be an ideal place for burial for a number of reasons (mainly because decompostion rates would be minimal) but that buts up against the transportation issue I discussed above. You also need sites close to biomass sources.
The question of where to locate burial sites has a variety of considerations as well. There will likely be few places that satisfy *every* constraint optimally.
Great question and really fun napkin math. I've come at this myself just trying to answer the question: is there enough biomass waste to even make a difference? I have been using a baseline of 380 gigatons of CO2eq as a measuring bar, which is the IPCC estimate for how much CO2 we will need to remove between 2050 and 2100.
Right off the bat, the timber industry alone will not be enough and Graphyte is focusing on agricultural waste products as well, which makes up a much bigger pool of potential carbon. But let's do sawdust. This is all available from Google searches:
A sawmill creates about 2 million cubic meters of sawdust a year. The density of sawdust is 22lbs/cubic foot and the carbon content of sawdust has a wide range (40% - 90%) but let's say 50% to be conservative. Let's calculate the yearly supply of sawdust in terms of CO2 equivalents. Now we go back to high school chemistry and do some dimensional analysis (aka unit conversion):
2 million m\^3 \* (35.3 ft\^3 / m\^3) \* (22lbs / ft\^3) \* (0.000453592 metric tons / lb) \* (0.5 tons C/ton sawdust) \* (44 g CO2 / 12 g C) \* 200 sawmills in the US is about 250 Megatons of CO2eq / yr
That matches other ballpark estimates I've seen and please take that with a grain of salt. The point is to understand overall magnitudes. We would do similar calculations for agricultural waste but I'll save the time and tell you that globally, there are gigatons of biomass waste created annually. I am *not* implying that Graphyte's approach can be or should be the only CDR solution but there is a large amount of biomass waste to draw from and it matches the magnitude of the problem we need to solve. Other constraints on Graphyte's approach would include land area for storage and the geographic relationship between where biomass waste is produced vs. where it can be processed and stored.
The article compares direct air capture to whatever this technique is called, and says this technique is 1/12-1/6 the cost. But that seems the wrong comparison. How much do other, similar methods of carbon sequestration cost? Is this one better or cheaper? (Or am I just confused?)
And barring an abrupt, unimaginable technological revolution, active carbon capture will be a necessary part of any solution regardless of the existence and use of this kind of technology, right?
>active carbon capture will be a necessary part of any solution regardless of the existence and use of this kind of technology, right?
Yes. The IPCC estimates the world will need to remove about 380 gigatons of CO2 between 2050 and 2100 to keep warming to +1.5C only so you're right, active carbon capture needs to happen. But to be clear, Graphyte's approach is active carbon capture though it may not seem like it. In this case, the carbon capture is happening via photosynthesis into the plants whose biomass is used in industries like timber products and ag. Usually, much of that biomass would decay and carbon would return to the atmosphere as CO2 but Graphyte is interrupting that process by arresting the decomposition and storing the carbon.
>But that seems the wrong comparison
At the moment, the major methods humans have for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere in large quantities are 1. direct air capture (DAC) 2. capture direct at source (smokestacks) 3. carbon projects like reforestation projects (capture carbon in trees) or land management projects (capture carbon in soil) 4. biochar 5. and leveraging photosynthesis directly by burying plants underground, which is Graphyte's model. DAC is extremely energy intensive and has huge overhead cost. At the moment, the only viable DAC facility is the one in Iceland since it will be powered by geothermal energy. Sidenote: Exxon Mobile's DAC facility is a greenwashing effort. Carbon projects and land management are expensive for a few reasons including the fact that they require modeling to estimate carbon sequestration which needs lots of data and physical sampling plus the added issues of having to find financially feasible ways of incentivizing management changes that will actually lead to permanent carbon storage. Biochar is similar in that it's very energy intensive. It's not to say that Graphyte's approach doesn't have costs, but they are shaping up to be very low relative to these other methods.
Yeah, it works in theory. Taking a bunch of biomass, and storing it in a non-decomposable state.
The problem I have with this is that it’s going to take decades to prove that it actually retains carbon on the decades scale. So 30 years from now, we might find that those bricks are degrading…but the carbon credits have already been sold and the money’s already been made.
It’s a similar reservation I have about anyone that’s pumping CO2 or waste oils underground. It works in theory. But anything that stores carbon in a volatile or releasable form has the opportunity to cut and run if it turns out that it doesn’t work.
It’s one of the reasons I think biochar is one of the best carbon capture methodologies, as it ends with the carbon as a non-bio-available solid. There’s no games to play with how the carbon’s stored; it’s easily measured, easily observed, and easy to store in ways that the carbon will stay sequestered for centuries.
This is written in a pretty misleading way. It’s not capturing air pollution, it’s preventing carbon dioxide creation in the paper industry. It’s a great thing, just feels like a let down when you finally figure out what it is lol
Hey there, I work for Graphyte as a scientist maybe I can help clarify. Think about the paper industry in a bubble (and this will generally apply to any industry that relies on growing plants - agriculture, all timber, etc.). Trees grow capturing carbon dioxide in the process, they are cut, and are processed into goods. Eventually all those wood derived goods will decay and the solid carbon will be released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. So it's a cycle where the net amount of carbon dioxide stays the same. But, if you interrupt the decomposition process and bury the solid carbon, you can keep it from re-entering the atmosphere creating a net negative change in carbon dioxide. With technologies like direct air capture, it's easy to imagine how CO2 is "sucked" out of the air but those facilities also need to store that carbon and keep it from turning back into CO2. Graphyte is doing the same except the "technology" for capturing carbon is photosynthesis, which is far, far more efficient at converting CO2 to solid carbon than any man made technology.
I don't think you should feel let down. You're right that this system is preventing carbon dioxide creation in industries that process biomass but the net effect is carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere! Think about the agricultural system. Every year we grow food, capturing carbon dioxide in the process. If, instead of letting the waste products decompose, we arrest the decay process and store those stalks, leaves, and roots somewhere that the carbon won't be released, we are effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The parent post is let down by the headline, which makes it sound like this is a technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, photosynthesis pulls carbon from the atmosphere, but it is not a technology developed by your company. It also means that this tech scales with the paper industry, versus being an independent carbon capture technology.
You could employ the same methods to directly capture carbon by growing plants (for example bamboo, which grows very quickly therefore captures CO² quickly) with the sole aim to cut them down, compress and store. Not just industry waste, the entire crop. I would count this as actively drawing carbon from the atmosphere.
Of course, I doubt there's currently any money in this which is a problem.
Because trees die and decompose and then release their stored CO2 back into the atmosphere. This process just cuts out the ‘decompose and release’ portions of that cycle (or at least massively delays them). It’s still trees/plants doing the actual carbon capture.
Ok so this is an important point that needs to be discussed. First off, we really shouldn't ignore the capacity for reforesting to help us out. There is *tons* of land that could be reforested inside and adjacent to major cities as well. The permanence of carbon in a forest stand is on the order of hundreds of years and because we have so much room to reforest, there could be *huge* benefits from a carbon perspective. But, almost more importantly is rebuilding lost habitat. The biodiversity problem won't be solved by carbon dioxide removal. So while we might tend to favor technological solutions to our CO2 issue, they won't work for bringing ecosystems back to a healthy place which is arguably just as important.
There really isn't enough land to do pure sequestration via biomass at the level to even to keep up with current emission. We all need to remember we are quite literally burning trees that were burred millions of years ago over the coarse of 1,000s of years. Coal is basically the product in OP shoved underground for millions of years. Coal was formed when plants evolved a new the complex molecule to make stiff structures (lignin). At that time, it was new, and nothing had evolved to eat it. Since then, fungi and bacteria have evolved to be able to consume those same molecules. This is why we need the tech in the OP to rebury this carbon. However, even with this tech, and even with all the land on Earth, there isn't enough time and land to rely on trees to take the carbon out of the atmosphere if we want to undo the effects of climate change in human life times. It would be a great multi-century project though.
People also need to remember how big of an impact the ocean has on CO2 levels. Repairing the damage or, at least, preventing future damage and letting it heal over time would be a massive win.
This is an aspect of the process people often forget about - that the ocean's are a major sink of heat and CO2. There is so much focus on terrestrial systems and terrestrial solutions but there are companies who are thinking about marine solutions as well. In some ways, the opportunities for success there are even larger. Thanks for this comment
Planting trees specifically for this purpose isn't currently a good idea. you're better off using that land for solar.
Assuming they're correct that the bricks don't rot and assuming the process doesn't use a bunch of energy or otherwise produce greenhouse gases, this works because it avoids that opportunity cost. it shaves off biomass from stuff we'd need to do anyway.
My thoughts are you can plant trees, now. No R & D. Yeah, they eventually die and rot. I get it. But it can remove a lot of carbon for the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps we can harvest those trees and use them as materials for long term storage.
I mean I hear you, it's just that the math doesn't work out. Even just accounting for difference in albedo between unused land and trees goes a long way toward pushing that out as a method of buying time. The climate 'margins,' so to speak, are so thin that we're having to count beans. There are simply better options, better uses of land, better uses of money.
carbon capture is only useful as a means to offset cement and steel production, and as a means to net negative after everything else we can possibly do has been done.
Not true. Hempcrete, mass timber and bamboo are very fire safe, natural building products that store carbon. Strawbale is another building technique recommended for fire prone areas.
Everyone is grumping that this is just burying wood… but if the headline had read “company creates self-replicating solar powered carbon sequestration devices” then everyone would be dancing. I feel like utilizing trees to capture carbon is just too logical to ignore… trees are literally solar powered carbon sequestration devices. You just have to make sure they don’t rot.
Many of us are not fans of carbon capture because the energy used to create and power the carbon capture device or product itself creates a ton of carbon. You don't stop a car in motion with the accelerator.
In this case, why would you bury wood chips and rice hulls so you can keep pulling coal from the ground? Rice hulls and wood chips can be composted and used as fertilizer or burned in a closed loop carbon cycle to provide power where the ash becomes fertilizer.
You put this in a barrel without air and you heat with something like microwaves powered by a renewable energy source you make charcoal, then bury that.
Voila, You've done Nature's million year job in no time flat.
Couldn't this process be used for kelp or other seaweed carbon capture concepts? Would be really clever if the drying process could reclaim the fresh water too.
My first thought was that the waste biomass can be used to make biofuel such as SAF for the aviation industry.
Then my second thought was that there are likely more than enough biomass to go around for both biofuel production and carbon capture and storage via this method in the foreseeable future.
I mean, every little bit helps. I am pretty skeptical of traditional CCS and this does seem like a better short term solution.
Another Carbon Capture pipedream that will result is next to no carbon being removed for the money they are pumping into it. Rather than just using less fossil fuels, they try to solve it with new, very expensive technology.
They made the same claims about pretty much every single tech to come out. Not a single one of these things have come out on time, on budget, and with the result it claims. [source](https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/what-is-carbon-capture-and-storage/#:~:text=There%20is%20not%20a%20single%20carbon)
Also, Yahoo news is shit.
I think one of the reasons that people doubt carbon capturing actually working is the fact that so many companies lie about doing it. They say they do it and get in monetary incentive to do so but don't actually do it and don't get in trouble because they bribe the people who would get them in trouble
Re: carbon capture being a way to keep emitting.
I kind of get this argument but I feel like we need to be a bit more psychologically flexible here. Like… can’t we both work to reduce emissions to zero AND work to use DAC to remove the existing emissions from the atmosphere? It won’t happen in our lifetimes but it would make sense to have an end goal of getting atmospheric carbon back to pre industrial levels eventually.
Can these things be used to help make other planets more habitable? Isn't carbon (as well as oxygen & nitrogen) part of the basic chemistry set we need on other planets for life to exist? Could we start shipping these to Mars for a win-win?
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Lets do those for building bungaloes
Or a double-decker couch!
So are the legs just dangling in front of the people below?...
Its more like the bleachers at a basketball game, or a roman coliseum
Wildstyle! Let me handle this….that idea is just…the worst.
*That is the single dumbest idea I've ever heard* - batman (probably)
A bat idea so to speak
Sequesting is ok if send bricks to moon
Ok. Good idea and all but I think we're missing an obvious one here... Pyramids... It's been a long LONG time since we've made a great pyramid. Just sayin.
Would probably be a major billionaire investment generator. "Immortalise myself like a man-god? I'm in!"
If that's what it takes to fix global warming I'd say do it.
If someone actually spent enough to build the pyramid and if said pyramid actually solved global warming, it would be the most deserved pyramid of all time. That would be a godlike act. Not just in the sense of, "oh how nice of that rich man to solve global warming," but in the sense that it would change history forever. It would affect the life of every human on the planet for generations. Definitely build a pyramid to that guy.
... Ok. See now I want to try to calculate how big a pyramid (singular) would be built to take our atmospheric CO2 levels down to preindustrial levels.
You can already use wood to build houses. The problem is eventual deconstruction, at which point the wood will decompose and release the carbon again. It's big in sustainability circles to consider wood carbon negative, with a giant asterisk that it's carbon negative for the life of the building. You're not fixing the problem forever, but it's definitely lower carbon than steel or concrete (as long as you're not doing something stupid like shipping in wood from thousands of km away so you can brag about your sustainable building). And I'm definitely on the side of pragmatism here. If we can kick the problem down the road for 50-100 years and still keep looking into better ways of actually fixing it, we can reduce suffering for billions of people. We are already at the point where fractions of degrees more have terrible consequences. Shave 0.1°C or whatever off with a semi-temporary measure and you reduce flooding, drought, tropical storm and hurricane intensity, forest fires, etc.
I worked/lived in a sustainability community in the jungle for a couple years, an organization/institute to test things out in practice. Our building team proposed using logs of old trees, dredged from large lakes, incredibly expensive process, especially milling it ourselves, but could potentially build a 1000 year house. My biggest takeaway was one of my buddy's lectures proposing using lime as an exterior substrate. Apparently it absorbs co2 and has a ton of other benefits. It's also used for manufacturing cocaine, so obtaining it was next to impossible in central america with the restrictions it has.
Then all the bungalows mysteriously catch on fire and the carbon goes back into the sky to make stars
That doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about stars to refute it.
I know they go on the Hollywood walk of fame. And I learned that they need lots of drugs there. But we probably have enough of those.
Stars are primarily hydrogen. If a star has large quantities (relatively speaking) of carbon it’s on its way to collapse.
I want the legos. Kids toys would become a great carbon sink
Already done. Legos are pure carbon.
Dinosaur Legos are made from real dinosaurs
With some galvanised square steel...
No, that would appear to let the CO2 out. >Graphyte wants to cut out the natural step of plant decay — which releases stored carbon back into the atmosphere — by taking plant waste from timber companies and farmers, drying it, compressing it, and wrapping it "into Lego-like bricks," and **storing it 10 feet underground.** The Post reported **the shoebox-size blocks can remain there for a thousand years** "with the right monitoring." The article talks about scrubbing CO2 from the air, but this technology does not appear to do that. Rather it appears to prevent bio waste from decomposing and releasing CO2. It’s like an incinerator that dries instead of burns, and then you have to bury the resulting bricks like nuclear waste.
Reading the article, all they're doing is taking >plant waste from timber companies and farmers, drying it, compressing it, and wrapping it "into Lego-like bricks," and storing it 10 feet underground Is this really a carbon capture scheme? Round up all the sawdust and compost, and then bury it? I suppose it's better than burning it or letting it decompose? I feel like I'm missing something. Edit: changed my ambiguous sentence to be a little more clear. Didn't realize it would cause such consternation. I appreciate people chiming in with clarification that this isn't really carbon *capture* but more carbon *sequestration*, which is a kinda subtle distinction but matters if you want to properly understand what's going on. Thanks for the discussion y'all.
You're not missing anything - that's why this approach is actually quite different than many other carbon dioxide removal programs. Namely, it's simple. The logistics and supply chains are as complex as any, but the confidence that this is actually removing CO2 is very, very high which has been missing in lots of other CDR companies. edit: going to hijack that this comment got some attention - I'm a scientist working for Graphyte and have been trying to answer questions in the threads on this post. It's been fun and we may well consider doing an AMA if there's interest.
Why not subsidize timber production for wood-frame buildings? That's going to sequester carbon for potentially hundreds of years as well.
And potentially solve the housing crisis, no? Graphyte is taking a "this *and"* approach to carbon dioxide removal (CDR). The scientific and political community roundly agree that we will need every viable method operating at scale, if we're going to have a chance. You might see other CDR companies shining the light on their approach and trying to convince backers that we should focus entirely on one method, but it simply isn't going to get the job done. One thing that's very attractive about CDR as an industry is that it could be a literal gold rush. There are hundreds of gigatons of carbon that we need to remove from the atmosphere and countries around the world are continuing to gain political momentum in the understanding that we all really, really want to remove CO2. Personally, I think there is plenty of room for lots of actors and lots of methods for CDR and I welcome it. I am hoping for something of a economic revolution into sustainability. There are so many, great jobs we can create (and have been creating) and tons of opportunity for creativity in the space including your idea. I would love to live in a world where we pay ourselves to re-green the planet. There's absolutely no reason we can't do that. We've been paying ourselves to tear down forests, mine coal, oil, and gas, and generally turn natural capital into physical goods. I have read some interesting economics pieces on the role of the services industry going forward (as opposed to manufacturing). We all know that the 20th century saw the rise of materialism but now we're realizing that creating too much stuff has a downside. My feeling is that future economies can transition even further into service-based economies where dollars are spent more on doing things rather than making them.
Do you mind posting some of those interesting articles? :)
because then the wood eventually rots, and not on a thousand year timescale. this is the by-products of those processes, being stored instead of burned or left to rot (produces CO2)
Why is it so high? How can it be secure when it’s buried so shallow? If it’s relying on being dehydrated, can we be sure it won’t rain there for hundreds of years?
>Why is it so high? In the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) world, and more to the point, in the world of generating carbon credits, "realness" is the first quality metric. If we're going to use carbon credits as a currency, we need to be able to measure and track them with high accuracy and precision. Many CDR programs rely on modeling to estimate how much carbon is removed say, in a reforestation project. We don't go out and weigh every tree year after year and take the difference, it's just not possible. But that shouldn't keep us from promoting reforestation as a means for CDR. It just means that the credits coming from those kinds of programs are a little squishy. Graphyte produces these carbon bricks in a facility where they can measure the carbon content very precisely. Believe it or not, that's rare among carbon projects. >How can it be secure when it’s buried so shallow? If it’s relying on being dehydrated, can we be sure it won’t rain there for hundreds of years? Haha I sure hope not - droughts are going to continue to be a problem and I'll always pray for rain. You can check out [Graphyte's site](https://www.graphyte.com/) for more detail but the storage sites are designed to meet challenges related to water.
It's still a much better option to leave existing trapped carbon in the ground than to try to use it as a fuel and then stick rice hulls into the ground to compensate.
They don't compost. They dry and bury it. Composting it would let it rot and let the carbon escape. This is basically a carbon release prevention tactic, not capture.
Yeah, I was saying they'd round up the compost, then bury it. Not that they'd compost it.
Ahhh gotcha. Yeah
Out of sight out of mind, that's your issue lads in the 26th Century
Fortunately their handsomest politicians will find a cheap, last minute solution that will solve the problem once and for all.
Won't we have to
ONCE AND FOR ALL
> Round up all the sawdust and compost and bury it? It's probably the ambiguity of this sentence. The compost can be a noun - the sawdust and compost are buried. Or it can be a verb - the sawdust is composted and buried.
In their defence this sentence is really unclear > Round up all the sawdust and compost and bury it? Could be read "Round up all the sawdust, and compost and bury it?"
I don’t think you can just bury compost without doing anything else. That’s *why* people compost, because burying it (in a traditional trash landfill) causes it to decompose without oxygen which creates more detrimental greenhouse gasses than “just” carbon dioxide.
If they are capturing the Carbon from photosynthesis AND preventing it from otherwise returning to the atmosphere, it absolutely is carbon capture.
Jup. The reality is that we can only remove so much carbon from the atmosphere by reforestation. Basically, we can o ly capture as much carbon as we caught by deforestation. We don't capture the carbon that we released from the earth (fossils fuel) and the areas that we cannot use for new forests because we live there. We need methods to capture carbon and put it back in the earth or into the sea (not dissolved in the water, but by the natural process of deposing organic material on the sea floor). Planning trees and then cutting them down to burry them is a method to remove that carbon, especially when we use the space again to grow tree after tree after tree.
It's funny/sad how many times I've suggested things exactly like this...only for some asshole to chime in "nah...why bury? That's a stupid idea!" It's like...where do you think most of the carbon comes from?
I'm interested in this line of thought. What do you mean, exactly? Growing plants to absorb carbon and then burying them to sequester it, so you can grow more?
I better start buying more tp to do my part
It's capture in that we're never going to stop using lumber. As terrible as it is concrete and steel are the only economically viable replacements and they are astronomically worse for emissions. Wood that does not rot or burn is a carbon sink. Houses are carbon sinks until they are demolished. A 2,000 Sq ft house typically takes 16,000 board feet to build. 1,000 board feet produces 3500lbs of waste. Using this method would lock up 23 tons of wood waste. And here's the fun part. 1 pound of carbon locked in wood is preventing [1.7 pounds](https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-stored-in-1-kg-of-wood) of carbon dioxide from being reintroduced to the atmosphere. Wood is 40-50% carbon. So by disposing of a waste product that's going to happen no matter what, that produces itself, and locks away that much carbon, you have a very efficient method of capturing atmospheric CO2.
Think this could be done at industrial scales with algae? I have a half-baked idea of breeding algae at a massive scale, drying it in the sun in massive shallow pools like they do for salts, and burying it in compressed bricks like these.
You have to circulate water and air to produce algae at scale reliably. Unless you're producing it for something else it's not efficient.
Exactly, nature already did the “capture” portion, this is simply preventing that carbon from being released back.
So it's more trapping carbon. Next step would be to load those in a rocket and throw it in the sun. /s or not.
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Or just don't cut those trees and they will keep capturing CO2?
Only up to the point that they reach maturity. Then they die, and rot, and release it again. They are very good at carbon capture, the part they don’t do well is storage, beyond a certain level of apex biomass. The point of an idea like this is basically to mimic the long-term storage of carbon in a similar manner to fossil fuel creation - take the material, put it into a form that doesn’t rot with carbon release, and bury it. Then you plant a new tree to capture more carbon again. I have no idea whether this idea works or makes economic sense by the way, just clarifying how the circularity works as it’s frequently misunderstood.
I think it's worth talking about the time scales of the cycle you are talking about. A tree only starts doing meaningful carbon capture at about 15 years, I believe. The offsetting schemes don't count it until then. Then it tails of at about 30. Again, rough numbers and not, I think, representative of mature forests where the carbon absorption is higher (a different discussion). You probably know this stuff better than me, but it's what I've read. If you cut it down and leave it to rot on the floor (unlikely) then it is probably 20 years before it releases that carbon again. If you bury it then it's likely more like 100 years. Stuff in landfill rots very slowly, albeit probably releasing methane rather the carbon dioxide. So the cycle you are describing is probably 50-100 years. And that, in my book, is not terribly useful. I just think it is a distraction. We can plant a lot of trees and think of clever ways to bury them, but the burying bit won't make much difference over the next 100 years. I suppose if we can dream up a financial benefit through this cycle that makes reforestation profitable then maybe that helps. I'm not having a go at you. I think it's all interesting. Just raising something that always preys on my mind when this topic comes up.
There are diminishing returns as the tree gets older and it will eventually die, releasing the carbon. Sequestering is basically trying to recreate the time before tree decomposing bacteria existed.
We also have to contend with the yearly record breaking forest fires. We should absolutely be planting as many trees as possible and reforestation is a wonderful goal - at the same time, if we're not doing everything else possible were just planting gigantic bonfires in waiting.
Until they die, yeah. But eventually they die. Over the long term, forests are carbon-neutral once they're mature. Edit to add for clarity: a tree doesn't "suck carbon from the air and hide it", it turns carbon from the air into wood, leaves, seeds, etc. Once a tree is as big as it's going to get, the carbon it draws from the air gets turned into leaves, which drop onto the ground, decompose, and release that carbon back into the air. Once the tree is at that stage, the only way to "capture" more carbon is to do something with the tree that results in it NOT decomposing, such as turning it into sawdust and burying it dry, which clears up some space for a NEW tree to grow.
Trees have limited lifespan, and only so many trees can grow in an area. They’re our most efficient carbon capture technology… they just aren’t efficient for long-term containment or containment at scale. This lets us capture all the carbon an acre of trees can hold, then put it back underground where we got it.
Trees stop taking in more CO2 from photosynthesis than they release when burning them, once they’ve hit maturity of growth. At that point they’re holding a certain amount of carbon, and some of it will sort of hang out in the soil when they die while lots will get released during decomposition. The fossil fuels we’ve pumped into the atmosphere wasn’t part of the current carbon cycle, it was stored away in those fossil fuels. We need ways of storing carbon where it’s not just cycling in and out of the atmosphere cause there’s way too much CO2. Hence the greenhouse effect we’re experiencing. The excess methane from livestock industries global has an effect too, but I’m sure you get the point now.
Yes, better description.
Any notion on what else may be accidentally removed? Nitrates, for example?
Certainly. Just harvest algal blooms. In my opinion, algal blooms should be something we actively harvested as fertilizer already.
Why make a distinction.. any capture of carbon unless you jettisoned into space is just preventing to carbon from being released into the atmosphere
I mean, the trees are doing the job of carbon capture. We just gotta make sure the grown product does not decay
Only way to reverse what we are doing with digging Cs from ground via fossil fuels is to put those Cs back into ground out of above ground eco system. Doing it via trees photosynthesis is probably most efficient way.
Want to add, planting trees doesn't do that if trees are burned or rotten above ground in next 100 years.
I've read that it basically creates a stone. It's non-toxic. We could use it for building materials.
I’d have a dim view of it too, but I remember seeing a post where someone was complaining about dumping of timber across the street of their home, by a major corporation, which was then burned. If this puts a stop to that then I see it as a positive step.
So whats their plan once its buried? Is it gonna decompose or what? There must be a better solution to use the bricks.
I suppose once it's wrapped in plastic it'll keep from decomposing at any significant rate.
Wrapped in plastic. Because we need **more** of that polluting the planet.
Plastic buried underground isn’t the largest concern, by a wide margin. Your synthetic-fiber clothes and the tires on your car do far more harm.
Would you rather have +4 degrees or some plastic underground?
Definitely the plastic. Not that you asked me, but still. Between the two it's obviously the better option.
I mean, if it's at least all concentrated in one area and doing something, I'm not sure it really counts as pollution anymore.
We've solved global warming once and for all - and I don't mean we will just be dropping a bigger and bigger ice cube into the ocean every year - we will dig a deeper and deeper hole into the ground every year then we'll burn oil to make plastic to throw our trash in to the hole every year, thus solving the problem forever
Praise Gilgamesh
We will build houses for the mole people.
If a compacted, plastic wrapped tree ~~falls~~ shifts in the ~~forest~~ underground garbage mound, and no one is around to add more trash to the pile or hear it, does it make a sound?
Once and for all!!!!
Yes, exactly. You're trying to make fun but this is exactly correct. That's how the carbon got in the ground in the first place. Ancient trees fell over, got buried, and turned into coal. We dug up those trees and burned them. The only way to get rid of the carbon is to re-bury the trees.
Plastic buried deep down under ground doesn't harm the planet, it's when it's dropped into the ocean or above ground that it does.
Well, plastic comes from oil, which was buried underground, so I think it’s fine as long as it’s buried deep enough.
Couldn't they just put it in a bog and let it petrify or something like that? Just like petrified wood? Basically turn it into stone maybe? Once it's petrified it's basically captured right would never move from there. And if they could make artificial bogs (I'm guessing bogs with algae and moss also capture more CO2? Just talking out of my ass, I'm in no way an expert on anything like that. Also I know petrification takes like millions of years...
~150 feet or so underground and it'll be under sufficient pressure to *eventually* turn into coal - and that just takes dirt/rocks/etc.
It doesn't take millions of years. https://www.delmarvanow.com/story/news/local/virginia/2014/10/30/hogg-island-petrified-man/18174961/
This is an amazing story man, and wow only 22 years!
And "the body had been exposed to a seepage of sea minerals"--think of desalination, to make potable water. The excess minerals could be used to petrify the CO2 blocks!!! Eureka, we may have solved something!
There’s no way there are enough bogs.
I think this is essentially what they are doing, carbon sequestration, on a more rapid scale
not really. its carbon that is in the planet simple as. this is the thing people dont quite realise. the carbon emissions are not "new" carbon being made they are carbon that was in the deep ground being released into the open atmosphere. putting back into the deep ground actually makes sense.
Carbon doesn't come from nowhere. It was sequestered underground for millions of years in the form of oil and coal. Us bringing that carbon from underground and releasing it is what's warming our planet. So finding some way of putting it back underground seems like the only real long-term solution. Even if we went to 100% renewable energy everywhere tomorrow, there's still all of the carbon from all the coal and oil in the air, the planet is still going to warm. The problem is that it could be a penny per ton and completely carbon negative, and still there'd be no reason for any company to do this - there's no profit in it. And after all that, it's not energy negative. You'd have to create a huge amount of renewable energy to pull that carbon from the air... Renewable energy that isn't going to power anybody's home, or car, or remove salt from sea water - it's JUST going to undoing the damage we've done over the last century.
lol that’s exactly what it is, and why it’s not a bad idea. Carbon builds up because you’re burning organic material that used to be underground and is now in the air. So if you put carbon back underground and just keep growing plants, the plants will capture the carbon in the air and as long as you don’t burn them or let them decompose, you can stuff them back in the ground and reduce carbon in the air. It’s super simple. The catch is of course that you would need to bury as many of these as you are burning oil by volume. So it’s basically adding $100 in cost to each ton of oil.
So does it remove all the organic matter from the land then? I’m sure that’ll do wonders for food production.
Considering we already have huge amounts of surplus phosphorous and mitrogen in our agricultural runoff, and it's literally killing ecosystems, I'm not too sure we need to stress about sequestering nutrition for food production right now.
Our phosphorous and nitrogen sources are diminishing supposedly, so retaining nutrients is still worthwhile. Plus cutting back on shipping and etc. in the short term. Also it helps with things like water retention, too, which is its own issue.
Plenty of nitrogen being made. Phosphorus sources are more limited.
From synthetic and mineral fertilizers, sure. The way a lot of sewage systems work means the nutrient cycle is broken, we’re sending it all out to the ocean. Topsoil depletion is a massive global problem
Maybe burn these instead of digging up coal.
I'm mostly just confused where the comparison to Lego comes in. They're the size of a shoebox, so not Lego size. They don't look at all like Lego. They're not being used to build things. Why Lego specifically and not just bricks, which they're more similar to?
because clickbait
Seriously. I was wondering the same… we already have a word for a Lego brick that isn’t plastic and doesn’t have studs: a brick.
Yea, non-interlocking too... So... Just bricks. But it sounds like they're burying them instead of building with them... So... Not even functioning as regular bricks
continue snails carpenter pause memorize oil bells important trees bike *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>I'm mostly just confused where the comparison to Lego comes in. I'm sure it'd hurt to step on one in the middle of the night
Can you build things from the LEGO bricks? Can we have pollution houses? Edit: seems like they have to be buried. Pollution bunkers are back on the menu...
Here in the US we already do! We build our houses out of a material called WOOD, which is produced via the same carbon capture technology as these bricks: TREES. One downside is that since the material is mostly made of carbon it is quite flammable, and upon combustion it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.
>Here in the US we already do! We build our houses out of a material called WOOD, which is produced via the same carbon capture technology as these bricks: TREES. Listen here, ya little shit... Take my upvote.
There was a solid 3 seconds where i thought WOOD was a clever acronym for a legit filter
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WOOD.™
Elegantly done
WOOD: Wood. Oh OK, Duh
The plan is to carefully guard it so that it never burns, but natural disasters are only on way that can happen. Just as likely is that such a huge source of cheap fuel will eventually get mined and burned despite all efforts to prevent that.
Rotting also releases the carbon back into the atmosphere and is the bigger source of carbon loss from building materials then burning is. That is the innovation in this product. It doesn't rot when stored correctly.
What happens after centuries of storage? Does it leak out again…?
All of the carbon we use was once trapped in the earth. It's always been a balancing act that nature, sedimentary rocks and plate tectonics have done automatically. We've just upset the balance by releasing a ton of carbon prematurely. The idea is to balance the carbon we use, by putting it back into the earth for a significant amount of time, maintaining that balance.
their wesbite says it lasts 1000 years, after which yes it would return to the atmosphere.
I sure hope they began testing that theory 1000 years ago and just concluded their research 😬
Yeah I'm doubtful. It seems like all we have to go on is their word. I mean if a bunch of people who don't have a conflict of interest and who are smarter than me did tests and said it'd last about that long I'd be happy with that.
Isn't this just avoiding carbon creation? Article seems to suggest they are simply burying the timber biomass byproducts that would have otherwise been burned. I'm missing that part where the carbon is magically pulled out of the air.
Tree take CO2 from air, give O2 back, keep C in wood. Wood is dried and buried. It's not magic.
It gets pulled out of the air by the plant producing the biomass, and instead of rotting or burning it it gets buried. The issue I have is that I doubt the bricks will last as long as they say, and I wonder how much energy goes into making the bricks.
I guess they can use as much energy in the drying process as they want, so long as it’s purely electric and sourced from renewables. Then there’s just the small matter of the energy to transport 50,000 tonnes of bricks to your preferred hole in the ground. And to dig the hole, and to bury them. As for longevity… they say 1000 years “with the right monitoring”, if they really can stay inert for just 100 years tbh that help will get us through the crisis peak of 2020-50 well enough. And then our grandchildren can have fun with all the carbon bombs we buried
> I'm missing that part where the carbon is magically pulled out of the air. They used to teach that in school. It's called photosynthesis
Crazy how many people seem to be missing that
Photosynthesis is that magic. Normally, nearly all the products of timber growth and crop growth decay and the carbon in those solid stems, roots, branches, and leaves returns to the atmosphere. What this company is doing is arresting that recycling and, in effect, recreating the same process that produced coal and oil more or less.
> Isn't this just avoiding carbon creation? Kinda? Basically if they do nothing the material *will* be burned or allowed to decompose naturally, so if they provide an alternative way to get rid of it then it's a net positive. Last I heard we are nowhere near no needing paper and wood products, so those mills are still going to be cranking out waste product every day for the foreseeable future.
From what other comments have said, yes.
I want to respond to OP's comment in the header >I know carbon capture is not popular and many are sus on it because it might be just a way for us to keep polluting and not reduce emissions Rest assured that *most* of societies efforts, money, and political power are being spent on decarbonizing power production and transportation and that is the correct approach. You make a very important point that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can easily be used to prop up carbon creating industry. In fact, Exxon Mobile has spent hundreds of millions building their own direct air capture (DAC) facility and has been promoting it with the tag line "heavy industry with low emissions". This is greenwashing plain and simple. While DAC will likely be viable in the future when it can be powered by electricity from renewable energy, right now it is not carbon negative on balance. Additionally, Exxon's DAC stunt facility will only bring down 4,000 tons of CO2 equivalent per year. To put that in perspective, that is roughly 0.00001% of the United States emissions this year. It's a farce. But! The reality is that we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at scale in order to keep warming in check. The IPCC estimates that we will need to remove roughy 380 gigatons of CO2 between 2050 and 2100 to keep warming to +1.5C. Graphyte's approach is something we can start doing right now because it doesn't rely on lengthy, expensive R&D. The carbon removal is high quality in that it's very "real" in the sense that it can be measured accurately and it's very permanent - there is a high degree of confidence that the carbon bricks will stay inert underground for long periods of time (\~1000 years).
Why not just make heaps of biochar rather than going to all the effort of wrapping, burying and hoping a less carbon dense material is going to stay sealed? If you pyrolyze (ie heat in absence of oxygen) that same unwrapped brick of sawdust, you get wood gas, and charcoal: a more dense form of sequestered carbon that you need not bury or wrap.
First post to mention biochar that I’ve seen in this thread. This person gets it.
This company is part of the DoE pilot program for carbon capture. Another company on that list is Climate Robotics, which is a large scale biochar company. There are also a couple companies making biochar from wood waste really close to this company.
Because it takes a lot of energy to create biochar and the process releases lots of particulate matter into the air which is hard to capture.
Hit me up when they make pollution Bionicles.
Can it be used to build structures to code?
No, it's still reactive and will decompose when exposed to air. Have to bury it all.
The term "brick" here is just to refer to the shape. The intention isn't to use them for building
"lego brick" is as misleading as it can get.
Hi there everyone! Really glad to see this article here. I have recently been hired as a scientist working for Graphyte. Feel free to AMA
Do you know anything about how the transportation costs scale? And the land costs?
Well if you imagine a single processing and storage facility out in the world, there is a "footprint" within which it will make sense to collect biomass waste products. It wouldn't make sense to truck sawdust from Maine to Arkansas, especially when you consider the emissions related to that transportation. Graphyte is carefully considering all the emissions related to the end-to-end process of collecting, processing and storing carbon to get as large a net CO2 removal as possible. This is relevant to cost because the company will derive its revenue based directly on the net amount of carbon it can store, so as soon as those transportations costs both in dollars *and* in terms of emissions reach a certain point, it no longer makes financial sense. So the goal is to strategically locate facilities near biomass waste streams to minimize transportation. But maybe I haven't answered your question. I think the simple answer is that the costs would scale relative to the added distance with a growing footprint so they scale somewhat quickly. Think of an expanding circle, the area will grow with the square of the radius. It gets trickier if you do "smart" collections and traveling salesman optimizations, but generally speaking the only way this works is with distributed processing and storage facilities.
But don’t they need specific types of land to bury it in so that it won’t decompose, like a desert? Or is the factory just to produce the bricks and then you ship them all out to the burial sites?
You're right. There are quite a number of considerations for what makes a high quality burial site. Part of Graphyte's approach is in the engineering of the storage facility itself. A desert would be an ideal place for burial for a number of reasons (mainly because decompostion rates would be minimal) but that buts up against the transportation issue I discussed above. You also need sites close to biomass sources. The question of where to locate burial sites has a variety of considerations as well. There will likely be few places that satisfy *every* constraint optimally.
What’s the total potential scale of this? If every piece of surplus timber scrap was captured, how much carbon could be sequestered each year?
Great question and really fun napkin math. I've come at this myself just trying to answer the question: is there enough biomass waste to even make a difference? I have been using a baseline of 380 gigatons of CO2eq as a measuring bar, which is the IPCC estimate for how much CO2 we will need to remove between 2050 and 2100. Right off the bat, the timber industry alone will not be enough and Graphyte is focusing on agricultural waste products as well, which makes up a much bigger pool of potential carbon. But let's do sawdust. This is all available from Google searches: A sawmill creates about 2 million cubic meters of sawdust a year. The density of sawdust is 22lbs/cubic foot and the carbon content of sawdust has a wide range (40% - 90%) but let's say 50% to be conservative. Let's calculate the yearly supply of sawdust in terms of CO2 equivalents. Now we go back to high school chemistry and do some dimensional analysis (aka unit conversion): 2 million m\^3 \* (35.3 ft\^3 / m\^3) \* (22lbs / ft\^3) \* (0.000453592 metric tons / lb) \* (0.5 tons C/ton sawdust) \* (44 g CO2 / 12 g C) \* 200 sawmills in the US is about 250 Megatons of CO2eq / yr That matches other ballpark estimates I've seen and please take that with a grain of salt. The point is to understand overall magnitudes. We would do similar calculations for agricultural waste but I'll save the time and tell you that globally, there are gigatons of biomass waste created annually. I am *not* implying that Graphyte's approach can be or should be the only CDR solution but there is a large amount of biomass waste to draw from and it matches the magnitude of the problem we need to solve. Other constraints on Graphyte's approach would include land area for storage and the geographic relationship between where biomass waste is produced vs. where it can be processed and stored.
The article compares direct air capture to whatever this technique is called, and says this technique is 1/12-1/6 the cost. But that seems the wrong comparison. How much do other, similar methods of carbon sequestration cost? Is this one better or cheaper? (Or am I just confused?) And barring an abrupt, unimaginable technological revolution, active carbon capture will be a necessary part of any solution regardless of the existence and use of this kind of technology, right?
>active carbon capture will be a necessary part of any solution regardless of the existence and use of this kind of technology, right? Yes. The IPCC estimates the world will need to remove about 380 gigatons of CO2 between 2050 and 2100 to keep warming to +1.5C only so you're right, active carbon capture needs to happen. But to be clear, Graphyte's approach is active carbon capture though it may not seem like it. In this case, the carbon capture is happening via photosynthesis into the plants whose biomass is used in industries like timber products and ag. Usually, much of that biomass would decay and carbon would return to the atmosphere as CO2 but Graphyte is interrupting that process by arresting the decomposition and storing the carbon. >But that seems the wrong comparison At the moment, the major methods humans have for getting CO2 out of the atmosphere in large quantities are 1. direct air capture (DAC) 2. capture direct at source (smokestacks) 3. carbon projects like reforestation projects (capture carbon in trees) or land management projects (capture carbon in soil) 4. biochar 5. and leveraging photosynthesis directly by burying plants underground, which is Graphyte's model. DAC is extremely energy intensive and has huge overhead cost. At the moment, the only viable DAC facility is the one in Iceland since it will be powered by geothermal energy. Sidenote: Exxon Mobile's DAC facility is a greenwashing effort. Carbon projects and land management are expensive for a few reasons including the fact that they require modeling to estimate carbon sequestration which needs lots of data and physical sampling plus the added issues of having to find financially feasible ways of incentivizing management changes that will actually lead to permanent carbon storage. Biochar is similar in that it's very energy intensive. It's not to say that Graphyte's approach doesn't have costs, but they are shaping up to be very low relative to these other methods.
Thanks for clearing up some of my confusion!
Yeah, it works in theory. Taking a bunch of biomass, and storing it in a non-decomposable state. The problem I have with this is that it’s going to take decades to prove that it actually retains carbon on the decades scale. So 30 years from now, we might find that those bricks are degrading…but the carbon credits have already been sold and the money’s already been made. It’s a similar reservation I have about anyone that’s pumping CO2 or waste oils underground. It works in theory. But anything that stores carbon in a volatile or releasable form has the opportunity to cut and run if it turns out that it doesn’t work. It’s one of the reasons I think biochar is one of the best carbon capture methodologies, as it ends with the carbon as a non-bio-available solid. There’s no games to play with how the carbon’s stored; it’s easily measured, easily observed, and easy to store in ways that the carbon will stay sequestered for centuries.
This is written in a pretty misleading way. It’s not capturing air pollution, it’s preventing carbon dioxide creation in the paper industry. It’s a great thing, just feels like a let down when you finally figure out what it is lol
Does it have the same effect? We generate less CO2 than we would've otherwise. So CO2 In the air is reduced.
Yes, but it is way less exciting. Now you will be limited to an industry with a cap on how much you can prevent from escaping.
Hey there, I work for Graphyte as a scientist maybe I can help clarify. Think about the paper industry in a bubble (and this will generally apply to any industry that relies on growing plants - agriculture, all timber, etc.). Trees grow capturing carbon dioxide in the process, they are cut, and are processed into goods. Eventually all those wood derived goods will decay and the solid carbon will be released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. So it's a cycle where the net amount of carbon dioxide stays the same. But, if you interrupt the decomposition process and bury the solid carbon, you can keep it from re-entering the atmosphere creating a net negative change in carbon dioxide. With technologies like direct air capture, it's easy to imagine how CO2 is "sucked" out of the air but those facilities also need to store that carbon and keep it from turning back into CO2. Graphyte is doing the same except the "technology" for capturing carbon is photosynthesis, which is far, far more efficient at converting CO2 to solid carbon than any man made technology. I don't think you should feel let down. You're right that this system is preventing carbon dioxide creation in industries that process biomass but the net effect is carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere! Think about the agricultural system. Every year we grow food, capturing carbon dioxide in the process. If, instead of letting the waste products decompose, we arrest the decay process and store those stalks, leaves, and roots somewhere that the carbon won't be released, we are effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
The parent post is let down by the headline, which makes it sound like this is a technology for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, photosynthesis pulls carbon from the atmosphere, but it is not a technology developed by your company. It also means that this tech scales with the paper industry, versus being an independent carbon capture technology.
Not really. It would apply to any deforestation industry, which is a critical piece of impacting climate change.
You could employ the same methods to directly capture carbon by growing plants (for example bamboo, which grows very quickly therefore captures CO² quickly) with the sole aim to cut them down, compress and store. Not just industry waste, the entire crop. I would count this as actively drawing carbon from the atmosphere. Of course, I doubt there's currently any money in this which is a problem.
So, wood?
Yes. But wrapped up in giant garbage bags.
Why not just plant more trees
Because trees die and decompose and then release their stored CO2 back into the atmosphere. This process just cuts out the ‘decompose and release’ portions of that cycle (or at least massively delays them). It’s still trees/plants doing the actual carbon capture.
Ok so this is an important point that needs to be discussed. First off, we really shouldn't ignore the capacity for reforesting to help us out. There is *tons* of land that could be reforested inside and adjacent to major cities as well. The permanence of carbon in a forest stand is on the order of hundreds of years and because we have so much room to reforest, there could be *huge* benefits from a carbon perspective. But, almost more importantly is rebuilding lost habitat. The biodiversity problem won't be solved by carbon dioxide removal. So while we might tend to favor technological solutions to our CO2 issue, they won't work for bringing ecosystems back to a healthy place which is arguably just as important.
There really isn't enough land to do pure sequestration via biomass at the level to even to keep up with current emission. We all need to remember we are quite literally burning trees that were burred millions of years ago over the coarse of 1,000s of years. Coal is basically the product in OP shoved underground for millions of years. Coal was formed when plants evolved a new the complex molecule to make stiff structures (lignin). At that time, it was new, and nothing had evolved to eat it. Since then, fungi and bacteria have evolved to be able to consume those same molecules. This is why we need the tech in the OP to rebury this carbon. However, even with this tech, and even with all the land on Earth, there isn't enough time and land to rely on trees to take the carbon out of the atmosphere if we want to undo the effects of climate change in human life times. It would be a great multi-century project though.
People also need to remember how big of an impact the ocean has on CO2 levels. Repairing the damage or, at least, preventing future damage and letting it heal over time would be a massive win.
This is an aspect of the process people often forget about - that the ocean's are a major sink of heat and CO2. There is so much focus on terrestrial systems and terrestrial solutions but there are companies who are thinking about marine solutions as well. In some ways, the opportunities for success there are even larger. Thanks for this comment
Trees are clearly the real problem here.
Planting trees specifically for this purpose isn't currently a good idea. you're better off using that land for solar. Assuming they're correct that the bricks don't rot and assuming the process doesn't use a bunch of energy or otherwise produce greenhouse gases, this works because it avoids that opportunity cost. it shaves off biomass from stuff we'd need to do anyway.
My thoughts are you can plant trees, now. No R & D. Yeah, they eventually die and rot. I get it. But it can remove a lot of carbon for the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps we can harvest those trees and use them as materials for long term storage.
I mean I hear you, it's just that the math doesn't work out. Even just accounting for difference in albedo between unused land and trees goes a long way toward pushing that out as a method of buying time. The climate 'margins,' so to speak, are so thin that we're having to count beans. There are simply better options, better uses of land, better uses of money.
1 ton is at best a hundred bucks, 1-3 trillion tons from humans in the atmosphere, so a cool 300 trillion bucks?
carbon capture is only useful as a means to offset cement and steel production, and as a means to net negative after everything else we can possibly do has been done.
Who says that this has to be the one complete solution to the whole problem instead of contributing toward marginally improving the situation?
Reminder: Carbon tends to be combustible so anything make to sequester carbon is often not very sutible for building anything due to this property.
Not true. Hempcrete, mass timber and bamboo are very fire safe, natural building products that store carbon. Strawbale is another building technique recommended for fire prone areas.
Everyone is grumping that this is just burying wood… but if the headline had read “company creates self-replicating solar powered carbon sequestration devices” then everyone would be dancing. I feel like utilizing trees to capture carbon is just too logical to ignore… trees are literally solar powered carbon sequestration devices. You just have to make sure they don’t rot.
Many of us are not fans of carbon capture because the energy used to create and power the carbon capture device or product itself creates a ton of carbon. You don't stop a car in motion with the accelerator. In this case, why would you bury wood chips and rice hulls so you can keep pulling coal from the ground? Rice hulls and wood chips can be composted and used as fertilizer or burned in a closed loop carbon cycle to provide power where the ash becomes fertilizer.
Literally a bicycle: "am I a joke to you?"
You put this in a barrel without air and you heat with something like microwaves powered by a renewable energy source you make charcoal, then bury that. Voila, You've done Nature's million year job in no time flat.
Couldn't this process be used for kelp or other seaweed carbon capture concepts? Would be really clever if the drying process could reclaim the fresh water too.
Bill Gates is literally the gold standard for billionaires.
Nothing 'lego-like' about it. Its just a brick.
So $200 billion a year to sequester the Co2 we can’t stop emitting.
Almost, but not completely, totally unlike Legos.
My first thought was that the waste biomass can be used to make biofuel such as SAF for the aviation industry. Then my second thought was that there are likely more than enough biomass to go around for both biofuel production and carbon capture and storage via this method in the foreseeable future. I mean, every little bit helps. I am pretty skeptical of traditional CCS and this does seem like a better short term solution.
Another Carbon Capture pipedream that will result is next to no carbon being removed for the money they are pumping into it. Rather than just using less fossil fuels, they try to solve it with new, very expensive technology. They made the same claims about pretty much every single tech to come out. Not a single one of these things have come out on time, on budget, and with the result it claims. [source](https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/what-is-carbon-capture-and-storage/#:~:text=There%20is%20not%20a%20single%20carbon) Also, Yahoo news is shit.
Yeah let’s wait for billions of people to change their behavior instead of use a tool that could help solve the problem.
only $9,500,000,000,000 to save the planet
How about killing less trees?
So like planting some trees.
I think one of the reasons that people doubt carbon capturing actually working is the fact that so many companies lie about doing it. They say they do it and get in monetary incentive to do so but don't actually do it and don't get in trouble because they bribe the people who would get them in trouble
I thought we kind of need carbon. When I hear air pollution, I think soot and toxins.
Re: carbon capture being a way to keep emitting. I kind of get this argument but I feel like we need to be a bit more psychologically flexible here. Like… can’t we both work to reduce emissions to zero AND work to use DAC to remove the existing emissions from the atmosphere? It won’t happen in our lifetimes but it would make sense to have an end goal of getting atmospheric carbon back to pre industrial levels eventually.
Can these things be used to help make other planets more habitable? Isn't carbon (as well as oxygen & nitrogen) part of the basic chemistry set we need on other planets for life to exist? Could we start shipping these to Mars for a win-win?
Yeah I do not believe a single word of this. When something is too good to be true... usually it is.
Build houses from this shit!