Produced from cellulose, hemicellulose,
lignin, sugars or starches
How do you achieve carbon
negative emissions and what is that?
We use waste biomass and convert it
to water soluble chemicals and CO2. The chemicals can be sold,
they can be converted to transportation fuels or they can be
burned directly to generate electricity. Carbon negative is when
you use biomass to produce carbon neutral chemicals or fuels and
then capture and store the CO2 that's also produced in our
process. This means that as the chemicals and fuels are produced
CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. This is called Bioenergy
Carbon Capture and Storage or BECCS (pronounced becks).
Why is carbon
negative technology needed?
This figure is
from a report
by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The figure shows that
California can achieve its 2050
goal and become carbon neutral by the year 2045. The
report requires 125 million tons per year of negative carbon
emission by 2045 for California to become carbon neutral. The
negative emissions are represented by the green area in the
graph. Negative carbon emissions are now seen as a necessary
part of solving the global warming problem.
Does carbon capture and
storage really work?
Yes, but not
carbon capture from the smokestacks of electrical generation
facilities, which is a technology still being developed. This
map is from a Department of Energy report
showing the extensive infrastructure for carbon capture and
storage used by the oil industry. This shows the 4,500 miles of
CO2 pipelines (the black lines) and the industrial facilities
where they capture CO2 (the purple squares). The oil industry
uses CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. For long term storage of the
CO2, the same equipment and techniques are used but all the
surrounding oil wells are capped to ensure the CO2 remains
underground. Like the CO2 stream produced in our process, these
industrial facilities all produce good CO2 streams that can be
easily captured.
There's a carbon
seqestration atlas.
The Department
of Energy has published an atlas
showing "the carbon capture and storage potential across the
United States and other portions of North America". This is the
5th edition of the Atlas and it contains a large amount of
information on carbon capture and storage. The report identifies
storage capacity in North America alone that can store enough
CO2 to address the climate change problem.