In the Sahara Desert along the coastline in Morocco, more than 300 miles from the nearest city, a green pond now sits in the middle of the sand.
“The difference is, when a rainforest tree falls down, it returns 97% of the carbon back to the atmosphere, whereas we can sequester all of it.” The production at the test site varies, as the company runs different trials.
It’s one example of something that climate science says is necessary: Tackling climate change involves not only moving away from fossil fuels and eliminating other emissions, but also removing CO2 from the air.
The algae facility costs less than $50 per ton of captured CO2 to operate; direct air capture can cost 10 times as much.
The approach also has advantages to carbon removal in nature—it’s hard to measure exactly how much CO2 a forest is storing, or to know that the trees might not later be cut down or lost in a fire.
Companies that have goals to reach net zero emissions or to become “carbon negative,” like Microsoft, are looking for high-quality carbon credits to buy—solutions that are permanent, scalable, affordable, and proven to add a new benefit rather than double-counting something that would have happened anyway.
The startup has been running its test site in Morocco, leased from the government, for nearly five years to prove that the system works, following earlier pilots in South Africa and Oman.
There are half a million square kilometers of flat, coastal desert land in the world—from Africa to South America to Australia—that the company says could be ideally suited to this work.