FAQs

Carbon Casting is Graphyte’s highly-efficient 5-step process. We start by collecting natural biomass like low-value crop residues or wood by-products from timber production. These materials are inexpensive, readily available around the world, and would typically be left to decompose, releasing carbon into the atmosphere.  

We then dry the biomass, removing microbes and the water they depend on, stopping decomposition. We turn this biomass into dense carbon blocks, and wrap them in an environmentally-safe, impermeable barrier to ensure that decomposition does not restart. The blocks are stored in state-of-the-art sites with sensors and tracers, enabling robust long-term monitoring. Storage sites can then be used as solar farms, native grasslands, or working agricultural land.

Result: The world’s first carbon removal solution that is affordable, permanent, and immediately scalable.

No. The science here is very clear. We need gigatons of carbon removal to meet the targets laid out by the IPCC. These must be a complement to aggressive emissions reductions. Graphyte is focused on working with partners responsibly to ensure our solution is not used as a replacement for direct emissions reduction strategies. 

Graphyte’s Carbon Casting process provides an immediate pathway for billions of tons of low-cost carbon removal with durability over 1,000 years. We can scale quickly because of a few key features of our process: 

• Low technology risk: the Carbon Casting process uses existing, off-the-shelf equipment. These components are already manufactured at scale and have robust supply chains that Graphyte can leverage to quickly deploy our solution. 

• Geographic flexibility: Carbon Casting projects can be sited anywhere in the world. These projects do not require specific geologies, temperature and humidity conditions, or novel permitting regimes. This flexibility allows Graphyte to optimize project deployments around availability of biomass supply. 

• Cost and capital requirements: Graphyte’s approach requires low capital expenditures and generates carbon removal credits at a price the market is able to afford today.

Graphyte is the only solution that offers high durability, low cost, and scalability today. While the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) landscape is nuanced, the existing landscape faces challenges across a few dimensions: 

• Durability: most carbon projects deployed to date, including nature-based solutions, do not remove carbon for climate relevant timescales of 1000+ years. While these projects can provide benefits, they do not address the need for permanent carbon removal. 

• Cost: many processes are expensive, and require a lot of energy. Carbon Casting is the most effective carbon removal technology for electricity constrained markets, including the Global South.

• Scalability: many approaches require key technological breakthroughs before they are ready to scale, or are limited to certain regions. Carbon Casting is ready to scale today and can be deployed in nearly any location with available biomass.

Graphyte uses natural biomass like wood by-products from timber production or low-value crop residues. Foresters and farmers all over the world create these materials, and they are often left to decompose and release carbon back into the atmosphere. By deploying our cost-effective carbon casting approach, we enable farmers and foresters to become part of the climate solution.

Absolutely not. We use biomass by-products that have no or only low-value alternative use and would typically be left to decompose. Graphyte uses a standards developed by the Sustainable Biomass Program to ensure there is no indirect land use impact from our process. We work with timber by-product suppliers to meet best-in-class standards around forestry. 

Graphyte sources materials that have no other high-value uses today and where the carbon dioxide stored in the biomass would otherwise re-enter the carbon cycle on short-time scales in the form of methane or CO2. 

The vast majority of biomass leveraged in Graphyte’s process is either burned or left to decompose. In Arkansas, unused wood by-products are major issue for timber companies and pile up at their facilities. They are able to sell a portion of this wood waste today to burn in boilers at pulp/paper mills, but significant volumes remain and create a waste management issue. 

Graphyte’s straight-forward approach preserves nearly all the carbon in the plant material, resulting in lower costs and faster progress towards addressing climate change. It also requires roughly 10% of the energy needed for other carbon removal approaches, thus enabling Graphyte’s process to be deployed across the globe and preserving scarce renewable energy resources for emission reduction applications like electric vehicles.

Graphyte’s levelized cost of production is under $100/ton today, less than any other permanent carbon removal option currently on the market.

Carbon Casting is the world’s first carbon removal solution that is affordable, permanent, and immediately scalable. It’s also the only permanent negative-emissions technology that can be deployed in electricity constrained markets, including the Global South. With financial backing from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Graphyte’s Carbon Casting process is set to play a critical role in combating climate change.

Graphite is the most stable form of carbon. Once we developed the technology to create an extremely stable and permanent form of carbon removal, we made a nod to that in the company name. We combined it with “-phyte” because plants are at the heart of the Carbon Casting process, while the hexagonal structure of graphite inspired our logo.