Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions is critical to avoiding a climate disaster, but current carbon removal methods are proving to be inadequate and costly.
Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions is critical to avoiding a climate disaster, but current carbon removal methods are proving to be inadequate and costly. Now researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have proposed a scalable solution that uses simple, inexpensive technologies to remove carbon from our atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years.
As reported today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers propose growing biomass crops to capture carbon from the air, then burying the harvested vegetation in engineered dry biolandfills. This unique approach, which researchers call agro-sequestration, keeps the buried biomass dry with the aid of salt to suppress microbial activity and stave off decomposition, enabling stable sequestration of all the biomass carbon.
The result is carbon-negative, making this approach a potential game changer, according to Eli Yablonovitch, lead author and Professor in the Graduate School in UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Read more at: University of California - Berkeley
Harvesting miscanthus, a quickly-growing grass that can be used as a bioenergy crop or harvested, salted and buried to sequester the carbon it took in from the atmosphere. (Photo Credit: Erik Sacks, courtesy of Joint Genome Institute)
