There is no way around it. Even with immediate emissions reductions, by 2050, an estimated 10Gt of CO₂ per annum needs to be removed from the atmosphere to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement which aims to keep temperature rise below 1.5 degrees. However, currently scalable solutions to meet this challenge are in their infancy.
The Carbon Technology Research Foundation (CTRF) is finding and fund cutting-edge innovation into the application of biotechnology to deliver enhanced, scalable solutions for carbon removal and sequestration, having identified a gap in support for complex, cutting-edge and novel research which has the potential to be deployed globally at scale.
Founder of CTRF, Stig Arff explains:
“Scientists in laboratories around the world are leading the way in pioneering exciting research to supercharge natural processes, booting photosynthesis, turbo-powering the soil microbiome and engineering cyanobacteria into carbon capturing power houses.
We received more than 80 applications this year and have selected research which promises cost effective and scalable solutions.
However more investment is urgently needed to support this this type of fundamental research. There’s no shortage of brilliant people and brilliant ideas but without more funding we risk missing a once in a generation opportunity to realise this potential and turn the clock back on climate challenge.”
Two projects have been added to CTRF’s portfolio this year after a robust, peer reviewed process. Each was chosen due to the depth of experience of the core research team, the novel scientific approach and the significant potential for future scaling.
Cyanobacteria show great promise as a bio-based carbon capture utilisation and storage technology and offer considerable potential for reducing CO₂ emissions in hard-to-abate sectors. Professor Alistair McCormick, who is Professor of Plant Engineering Biology at the University of Edinburgh explains that his team are developing the fastest growing and highest biomass accruing cyanobacterial species recorded to date, as commercially viable bio-based carbon capture utilisation and storage for the capture and sequestration of CO₂ and NOx emissions.
“Cyanobacteria changed the planet’s atmosphere once before in our evolutionary past, perhaps they could help us out again. The massive diversity of different cyanobacteria offers us a treasure trove of biology to explore, from which we can find new products and solutions. For me the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how cyanobacteria work and engineering them to address real world problems is really exciting.”
A second project led aims to supercharge the power of the soil microbiome to capture CO₂ faster and more cost effectively by speeding up the process of enhanced rock weathering. Professor David Beerling, from the Leverhulme Centre of Climate Change Mitigation at the University of Sheffield says that this is the first breakthrough in Enhanced Rock Weathering research with scope for increasing EW and carbon dioxide removal within agriculture in a way that can be scaled to gigaton levels,
“The potential is huge. If the top ten nations of the world implemented Enhanced Rock Weathering on approximately 50% of their croplands, you could capture about 2 billion tons of CO₂ net, which is equivalent to all the CO₂ emitted through aviation and shipping.”.
These projects build on CTRF’s portfolio, which includes work by world renowned experts to scale nature’s solution to methane uptake by engineering methanotrophic bacteria with at least a 10-fold enhanced consumption rate at near-ambient concentrations.
A further project, led by a consortium of leading international scientists in the UK and US, leverages 13 years of successful collaborative research focused on understanding how algae removes CO₂ so efficiently from the atmosphere and engineering this into plants to create super-hoovers.
Another project led by a team from the University of Illinois is designing crops to sequester more CO₂ and store it more durably in the soil.