World’s Largest Carbon Removal Plant

Bill Gates is backing a new startup called Graphyte, located in Arkansas that could be the largest carbon removal facility on the planet; a remarkable achievement for a firm that is only one year old. E&E News reported that it plans to open its operation this Friday, February 9, 2024. The facility relies on biomass matter like sawdust and farming waste. When these decompose they release a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. Graphyte plans to stop this decomposition process by drying the waste out, shaping it into bricks and burying the bricks in the ground for many years, thus keeping this carbon from being released into the atmosphere.

Graphyte’s CEO claims the company’s process keeps the cost of carbon removal below $100 per ton, a key benchmark for scalability. Graphyte hopes to remove 15,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the end of 2024 and to continue scaling quickly from there.

The companies process is relatively simple. It relies on photosynthesis to do the hard work of pulling carbon from the atmosphere. Graphyte takes papermaking waste products and then dries and buries them. CEO Barclay Rogers said, “Our sales price is $100 a ton. We are selling at that price profitably.”

There is now intense competition to develop technologies that can filter massive quantities of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the air and oceans.

Climate scientists say scaling up carbon removal will be necessary, along with decreasing greenhouse gas emssions, is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. As a result, the industry is benefiting from billions of dollars of policy support in the U.S. and other countries.