How to capture 2 billion tonnes of CO2 AND fix our oceans.

you may remember a few months back i took a look at technologies that could convert algae into useful products like foods medicines nutritional supplements and even biofuels and bioplastics that could help replace the fossil fuel versions we found out that algae's ability to proliferate rapidly has made it one of the most successful organisms ever to have existed in nature and we looked at the very significant climate mitigation potential of growing large quantities of seaweed in ocean farms and sinking it to the seabed to lock away its carbon content more or less permanently it all sounded very encouraging indeed and now a uk company has taken the concept of algal carbon capture one giant step further with the introduction of managed algal blooms in enormous man-made ponds in coastal desert locations designed specifically to suck vast quantities of carbon dioxide back out of our atmosphere but of course like most things i talk about on this channel it's not quite as simple as it sounds hello and welcome to just ever think the company in question is called brilliant planet it was co-founded back in 2013 and now after several years of research and development in stealth mode it's emerged into the public realm with 12 million pounds of seed funding and a technology that they reckon has the potential to sequester 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year which is an awful lot of co2 i was fortunate enough to spend a bit of time on a web chat with ceo adam taylor and chief scientist rafael jovi recently and they gave me the lowdown on how their technology works the process involves pumping deep upwelling seawater rich in carbon and nutrients from the ocean into algae aquaculture facilities located at carefully selected coastal desert sites the first of which is already up and running on land owned by brilliant planet in morocco the carbon and nutrients in the sea water are used to feed local strains of algae as part of a greatly accelerated growth process that's taken brilliant planet many years of research and development to perfect that unique proprietary process allows the algae to double in biomass in less than a day without the need for all sorts of other expensive additives that's much faster than existing biofuel facilities which typically double biomass in 12 to 18 days brilliant planet's entire growth process only takes 30 days it starts with 10 days in an on-site laboratory where the algae grow from about the volume of a glass beaker up to a large trough size container after that the algae are transferred to greenhouses for a further 10 days where they continue their daily doubling in biomass through progressively larger and larger growth pools until at day 20 they're transferred to a set of outdoor open-air ponds to go through the final 10 days of the cycle 99 of the growth happens in that last 10 days once the algae have reproduced to fill up the largest outdoor pond they're filtered out of the water and dried out naturally under the desert sun after which the dried biomass is buried at a depth of between 1 and 4 meters below the desert surface that may sound quite shallow compared to other carbon sequestration methods but the objective here is simply to ensure the biomass doesn't get wet and start rotting the locations and processes that brilliant planet have chosen provide a kind of quadruple lock to avoid this ever happening firstly the desert sun gets the algae to a very high level of dryness in the first place during that process the proteins in the algae biomass cross-link with each other making them harder to break down through enzymatic digestion secondly the biomass is buried away from the watershed in an inherently arid desert environment brilliant planet have a lot of land 6100 hectares in morocco and 3 200 hectares in a man to be precise that's 61 square kilometers in morocco alone there's about 2 500 square kilometers of flat easily accessible coastal land unencumbered by infrastructure and with no other conflicting uses so there's no physical constraint requiring deeper sequestration sites deserts do very occasionally get rain though so the third element of the quadruple lock is to cover the biomass with a geo membrane liner so if there is a once in a century downpour the water would simply run off the side of the burial site last but not least the dry marine algae have about 40 salt content that means any water that did manage to seep into the storage site would be absorbed by the salt before it had a chance to act on the organic matter at the end of the process the seawater that's been used to grow the algae is now depleted of bicarbonate and co2 but it hasn't lost any of its alkalinity and because the outgoing water is slightly warmed and because it's put out to sea in shallow waters at the beach the operators can be confident it'll stay at the surface long enough to reabsorb co2 from the atmosphere if the operation was carried out in the middle of the ocean with cold water like some other ocean-based carbon dioxide removal strategies it'd be very difficult if not impossible to verify that co2 was genuinely being reabsorbed perhaps the most crucial advantage of the brilliant planet system is the use of locally sourced algae open air ponds are an inexpensive and simple way to achieve the final growth stages but the fact that they're exposed to the elements means other contaminants or even other strains of algae can infiltrate them and disrupt the process brilliant planet have identified four algae strains for their morocco operation three of them were isolated less than a kilometer away from the site and the fourth one was isolated just 10 kilometers away those local algae are already acclimatized to the environment and they've evolved their own built-in resiliency specific to that region that works both ways of course so if the open pond system ever leaked then it'll only be returning something to the ecosystem that was already there anyway rather than an invasive species that could cause damage essentially that's it in a nutshell a low density very fast very simple outdoor system that brilliant planet refers to as scaling down the ocean rather than trying to scale up the laboratory so if they're just pulling water out of the ocean and growing algae and then burying it in the desert how on earth can these guys be making any money to maintain a viable operation i hear you ask well good question and the answer is that they're able to trade their captured carbon on the rapidly growing global carbon credit markets now carbon offsetting is a somewhat contentious issue in the climate mitigation space there's no doubt many of you know in fact i made a video some time ago specifically looking at the potential pitfalls of carbon offset schemes around the world some of which have questionable practices that don't necessarily provide a net benefit in terms of global atmospheric carbon dioxide removal now that's an issue that the folks at brilliant planet are acutely aware of and it's precisely why they believe their technology has an edge over many of the other competitors in the market for a carbon removal method to be genuinely effective apart from the obvious imperative of not having any negative impacts it also needs to tick these six fundamental boxes some of the better methods in existence today tick four or five of those boxes but brilliant planets say their technology is one of only a very few that tick all six their credits are sold into what's known as the voluntary carbon market which can be divided into three categories of buyer two or three percent of the market is made up of leading companies like microsoft amazon facebook and others who are willing to pay very high prices to support the industry they've got their own in-house teams with a deep knowledge of what makes sense and what doesn't and they're not risk-averse which means they're willing to back newer technologies the next 20 or so of the market is made up of other large reputable corporations who've typically made a net zero commitment mainly because it's being demanded of them by shareholders and customers their first priority is quite rightly to look for ways to reduce the company's emissions that's obviously the best solution for all of us and those emissions reductions often bring long-term cost savings through reduced energy and materials consumption costs but they're often expensive up front and very difficult to implement in large organizations so to stay on course in the shorter term they have to buy carbon credits on the open market the biggest risk for those companies is reputational if they back a project that gets exposed as fraudulent or has other problems like trees dying two years after they were planted or indigenous people being displaced to facilitate the project or whatever then it could blow up in the media and become a big embarrassment for them so these companies really need high quality projects that have been certified and tick all the criteria boxes we just looked at prices for projects in this sector tend to be between one and two hundred dollars per metric ton of carbon dioxide captured and it's in these top two sectors that brilliant planet operates most competitively sadly the remaining 75 to 80 percent of the voluntary carbon market is populated by companies with no real insight into quality and you just want credits at the lowest possible price thankfully though it's the high quality sector that's growing at the fastest pace almost quarter by quarter because as everybody including customers employees shareholders and board members get more and more knowledgeable about the vital importance of quality and all the other criteria companies are rapidly jumping away from cheapest option and moving towards high quality the brilliant planet folks retain the carbon they sequester they bury it on their own land rather than dumping it out at sea so companies buying credits from them can physically come and see the space where their carbon credits are stored and if they really want to they can literally stick probes in the ground and verify for themselves that the carbon content is there on top of all that the decarbonized water that comes out of the brilliant planet algae farms can de-acidify enormous tracts of ocean water which helps local ecosystems to thrive the global strategy for brilliant planet is to license their technology to local operators in areas of the world where the right conditions exist they estimate that there are about five hundred thousand square kilometers of land around the world that could be used for this technology brilliant planet will provide all the tools to other countries including finding locally suitable algae strains plus satellite data analysis to search out remote areas with precisely the right topography and oceanography and of course all the other support necessary to get the systems up and running in what a typically remote desert locations whose local economies stand to benefit significantly from job opportunities and a general income boost as biologists first and foremost brilliant planet are acutely conscious that they need to structure their system very much in the context of ecosystem stability and restoration the intergovernmental panel on climate change or ipcc it's very clear that we're not going to decarbonize fast enough simply by reducing our current level of emissions we'll need to physically remove co2 from our atmosphere as well if we're to stand any chance of hitting the 1.5 or 2 degrees celsius targets the resources are there the underutilized sea water is there the local algae are there the sunshine is there and even the renewable energy is there because the geographical conditions in these places make them all favorable locations for wind and solar and if brilliant planet do manage to reach their goal of 2 billion tons of carbon capture per year through an environmentally beneficial process then they really will be making an enormous contribution to our global climate mitigation challenge so what's your view can we get there through technologies like this let me know what you think in the comment section below that's it for this week though a massive thank you as always to our fantastic patreon supporters who keep these videos completely independent and ad-free and a special thank you to the folks whose names are scrolling up the screen beside me here all of whom celebrated an anniversary of patreon support in july if you feel you could support the channel for about the price of a coffee each month and keep me posting these videos every sunday then you can find out how to do just that by visiting patreon.com forward slash just ever think and of course the easiest way to support us via youtube completely for free is by clicking that subscribe button and hitting the notification bell all you need to do is click on that little icon in the corner there or on that icon there as always thanks very much for watching have a great week and remember to just have a think see you next week

Channel: Just Have a Think

Views: 193,488

Keywords: algae biofuel, algae fuel, algaecide pool treatment, algae in pool, algae farm, algae bloom, algae battery, brilliant planet algae, brilliant planet carbon capture, brilliant planet ceo, brilliant planet morocco, brilliant planet algae farm

Id: zr6CYS9ie5E

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Simmery]

Seems like more potential than DAC, which I predict will be a waste of time. Hopefully, this scales better.