At the moment, the cost of direct air capture (DAC) is too high — but London-based Brilliant Planet says it can achieve large-scale carbon capture at one-tenth the price, using engineered algae in ponds near the desert coastline, New Atlas reported.
As humanity struggles to keep the planet from becoming desolate, much of the focus will be right on decarbonizing everything we can actually do. But this is not enough. Direct air capture will need to be part of the equation, it will require massive scalability, energy efficiency and much cheaper than today's technology, so it can quickly become profitable when carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes are launched globally.
London-based startup Brilliant Planet believes it has an all-qualified carbon capture and storage model that promises to scale to billions of tons per year, has near-zero energy requirements and costs about one-tenth of current direct air capture technology. It relies on natural processes, uses low-cost coastal desert land, and has a side effect of deacidifying seawater during the process, so the ocean itself can become a more efficient carbon sink.
The idea is to collect and harness the carbon-absorbing capacity of algae, replicating and maintaining the conditions that cause algae to multiply in large, low-density outdoor ponds filled with seawater. As Adam Taylor, CEO of Brilliant Planet, told Climate Tech VC, seaweed is an inherently more efficient carbon-trapping biological "machine" than trees or plants because its entire surface area is used for photosynthesis, and it doesn't waste resources creating trunks, roots, or branches. What's more, under the right conditions, it grows and multiplies extremely quickly.
Algal blooms in nature respond relatively frequently to environmental conditions. Brilliant Planet's goal is to replicate these phenomena in a controlled environment, then harvest and bury the resulting carbon-rich biomass.
The company's process goes something like this: select a site on flat desert land near the coast, while a bioprospecting team begins filtering samples of thousands of local algae strains to select the algae that best meet the company's criteria. As a result, there are no introduced species, and these algae have adapted well to the local climate and conditions.
Next, the company set up a series of pumps to channel seawater into a series of vessels and ponds. The inlet is located about 2 to 3 km from the coast to obtain "upwelling" water. These seawater pumps make up most of the energy needed for the system, and Brilliant Planet says they can easily be powered by solar panels on site.
The water flows through a series of fences that grow exponentially. The "inoculated" algae in a single beaker in the first step reproduce rapidly under the right conditions to fill four ponds of 12,000 m2. The company says it is able to create and maintain these optimal conditions, using its own sensing technology, daily satellite imagery, public weather information and proprietary software based on simulating cell-level organisms and "upwelling" to monitor settings. From there, it can maintain the growth of algae using low-cost, rich additives, and AI-enhanced operational oversight will work to increase yields.
Once mature, the algae are harvested from the largest ponds using fine mesh filters. It is dried in open desert air, and then this dry, salty, carbon-rich biomass is sent to a shallow desert "grave", about 1 to 4 meters below the surface. There, it was effectively sealed in its arid new home for thousands of years. At the same time, the seawater is sent back to the ocean. It has been stripped of nutrients, but also stripped of acidity.
Taylor told Climate Tech VC: "For every unit of water passed, we can deacidify the equivalent of 5.1 units of water back to pre-industrial pH levels." ”
This is great for shelled organisms such as corals, clams, mollusks, etc., and the low-carbon, high-pH water that returns to the ocean absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere without acidification once it enters the ocean.
To date, Brilliant Planet has been able to find suitable local algae strains in every place it looks for, and in terms of scalability, Taylor said the company has identified a "short list" of about 500,000 square kilometers of suitable flat coastal desert land. This represents the potential for carbon capture and storage of about 2 billion tonnes per year.
In other words, it could offset more than 5.5% of human annual global carbon dioxide emissions and about half of the total emissions of the road transport sector today. It goes without saying that this will be a huge contribution.
Talyor said the company has successfully tested its approach in its current 3-hectare facilities in Oman, South Africa and Morocco, and with the support of a recent $12 million Series A funding round led by Union Square Ventures and Toyota Ventures, it is preparing a 30-hectare demonstration facility that it plans to complete in 2023. There, it will build the first commercial-scale operation, about 1,000 hectares, which will begin to remove about 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
As for the price issue, Talyor appears cautious. "I expect we to have a good position in the high-quality credit market of $50-100/mt. This would significantly weaken current businesses, such as Switzerland's Climeworks. As far as we know, the company's cost in 2021 is between 600-1000 US$/ton and will be close to 250 US$/ton by 2025. ”
The only previous solution that claimed to target a scale of $50-100 was Israel's High Hopes, which uses high-altitude technology for stratospheric hydrogen balloons. Brilliant Planet needs more land to operate at scale, but it won't be expensive, its technology looks much simpler than running thousands of high-altitude balloons, and from an environmental perspective, the side effects of deacidification can bring some important additional benefits to this algae approach.
The video below is from the UK's National Research and Innovation Agency, a government-funded agency that supports Brilliant Planet.