Amy Feldman, Forbes senior editor covering industrial innovation and climate tech talks with Graphyte founder and CEO Barclay Rogers about biomass-based solutions to carbon removal.
There are a number of different technologies for carbon removal. What’s the advantage of biomass-based solutions?
I went and pulled the data. What you see is that biomass-based solutions are the dominant players with respect to volume. This is interesting to me because this isn’t the story that people are talking about. They are talking about direct air capture. But biomass-based approaches are getting to market faster. I call this the dark horse story. If you think about it as a horse race, we thought we had a clear winner, and, oh look, there’s a horse that no one thought was going to run that is running really hard.
Why is biomass gaining?
The hardest part is separating the CO2 from atmospheric air. That takes a lot of thermodynamic work. The biomass-based approaches let you do that for free. What that means is it’s a lot cheaper.
What is Graphyte doing?
Our project in Pine Bluff, Arkansas is one of the biggest or the biggest. It has the capacity of 15,000 tons of CO2 removed per year. We intend to commence construction in early 2025 to add 50,000 tons of removal capacity to take it collectively to 65,000 tons by the end of 2025. We went from company formation in February 2023 with an initial investment from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the Bill Gates climate-focused investment fund, to an operating facility with capacity of 15,000 tons a year 14 months after the company formation.
What does it cost?
Our sales price is $100 a ton. This is what everybody aspires to get to someday. We are there today.
How does it work?
This is what we call carbon casting. The issue is that the carbon captured by biomass is released back into the atmosphere primarily because it is left to decompose. A tree falls into the forest, rots and the carbon contained within it is released back into the atmosphere. We take the residuals from the agriculture and timber industry and that becomes the feedstock. Think about growing rice. The hulls or husks around the grain and the straw left in the field are generally left to decompose. We can take those products and use them as feedstock.
We take the biomass material. We grind it up to smaller particle size. We then drive it down to a certain moisture content, press it into blocks and encase those blocks in a long-lasting waterproof barrier. It’s all about keeping it dry. We essentially seal the biomass in that bag that’s intended to keep it dry for 1,000 years or more. It’s below the ground, and we put soil back on top of it.
Is it hard to get communities to agree that they want this biomass burial site underground?
The process is super land efficient. We store 40,000 tons of CO2 equivalent per acre of land. Our sequestration in Grant County, Arkansas is about 40 acres of operating area. Forty acres is not very big in a rural setting.
Who are your customers?
We have one customer that is public, and quite a few customers that have yet to be public though that will change in the second half. Our publicly disclosed customer is American Airlines. They’re interested in durable carbon removal, but all the solutions have been out of reach. They saw us at $100 a ton, and said they can do that.
How many customers total?
More than 10.
So what does that mean in terms of your capacity for carbon removal?
We plan to increase our removal capacity from 15,000 tons a year to 5 million tons by 2030.
Is that realistic?
Very much so. We have plenty of biomass, we have a workable technology today and projects literally in development. The only thing we need is customers willing to pay for it.
We would have to build a number of plants. Each one we start at 50,000 tons per year with the capacity of scaling to 500,000 tons. So if you go back to that 5-million-ton number, we’d need 10 projects. Among the advantages of carbon casting is that it is relatively capital efficient. We don’t need to raise $1 billion to build a plant. We can build a plant for a little over $10 million.
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