By Nathan Treece, KUAR
A company billed as the ‘world’s largest carbon removal plant’ is located in Pine Bluff. It’s called Graphyte, and it’s home to Arkansas native and CEO Barclay Rogers’ proprietary carbon sequestration process, known as Carbon Casting.
In July, the plant cleared its last hurdle to begin production. Rogers said he hopes harnessing the power of plants can quickly reduce the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
"Plants naturally capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we're going through a series of engineering steps that are essentially securing the carbon captured by the plants, keeping it out of the atmosphere forever,” he said.
The process is deceptively simple. Collectively, the waste byproduct of agricultural industries is called biomass. This biomass would normally be burned or left to decompose, releasing the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Instead, Rogers plans to gather it, pulverize it, shape it into a brick, and bury it underground, stowing away the captured carbon.
To be effective, though, Rogers has to completely stop the natural decomposition process.
"Microbes need water to survive," said Rogers. "By drying the biomass below a certain moisture content, we are able to halt microbial activity, and therefore, keep the carbon preserved.”
If you think of biomass like a sponge soaking up the carbon, this method stops that carbon from ever being squeezed back out. The biomass blocks are sealed in a waterproof barrier and then will be entombed inside a secondary waterproof underground storage site.
Rogers says Pine Bluff was a natural starting point for his company. The startup site is called the Loblolly Project and sits at the intersection of the timber and rice industries in Arkansas, providing ample biomass for the facility to process.
Biomass as biofuel
Biomass is not without its applications; it can be converted into alternative fuels and burned alongside coal in co-fired power plants, for example, and can be burned to meet heat and electricity needs. Some types can also be converted into components for cosmetics or cleaning products.
But none of these uses completely stop the carbon from being released back into the atmosphere. Rogers says Graphyte’s largest advantage is that it can sequester the carbon quickly, and is currently at the industry’s lowest price point, at just $100 per metric ton. Other methods currently on the market range between $600 to $1000, according to Bloomberg News.
"When we look across the globe, we could remove on the order of 3.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, given the available biomass residual resources,” Rogers projects.
Those numbers are possible if Graphyte’s expansion plans become realized. Here at home, Rogers plans to have around 50,000 tons of carbon sequestered underground in Arkansas in 2025.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that Arkansas’s energy production produced 62 million tons of carbon in 2021. To put that all into perspective, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say we need to sequester at least 20 billion tons of carbon each year to fully cancel out global carbon emissions.
Read more on KUAR.