AKA a tree
Yes but it’s wood that you are not allowed to burn or let rot, or the CO₂ gets released again. Basically, cut down trees and store them in oxygen-free water, salt mines, deserts or permafrost areas (or peat bogs, as nature did it over millions of years) where no bacteria/insects will feed on the wood and no humans come to scalp it. There is no way this can be economical, even with today’s carbon credits. Trees are “free” solar carbon capture devices but slow and inefficient, and need to be logged-and-stored continuously to work at all, as there is only a very limited space that we can cover in new forests in the next few decades.
I know they just want to find the best use for waste wood but I think there is too little of it in the first place.
I want to eat them. Capture all the pollution in the blocks and I’ll eat them. Call me jesus or whatever but really I’m just doing it to prove a point
The problem isn’t the inability to make something to do the job, but making it something that you can convince people they’ll make a profit from. Nobody wants to clean up pollution unless you either force them to do it or make it profitable.
I fail to see where those bricks are “LEGO like” in any way. They are rough bricks, not even sufficiently molded to appear regular.
Yeah, I am skeptical. What would be the energy expenditure of actually storing CO2 into those blocks and what about transporting them? I have a feeling this is like carbon capture plants, great for the headlines, but not really a practical solution.
taking plant waste from timber companies and farmers, drying it, compressing it, and wrapping it “into Lego-like bricks,” and storing it 10 feet underground.
So it’s effectively the astronaut ice cream version permafrost?
Immediately I wonder how much the process of transport -> drying -> compressing, wrapping, transporting, and storing + storage site prep and maintenance eats into savings.
Their first customer is American Airlines. The airline is paying Graphyte to capture 10,000 tons of CO2 to offset emissions from its planes.
Ah yes, the “We’ll pay someone else to be green for us without meaningfully improving our environmental policy” move.
Toss some money away, get a nice tax write-off, and don’t bother following up to make sure these supposed CO2 offset numbers are actually what they are advertised to be.
It’s a fantastic idea in principle. We’ve just neglected the most important ingredient: oversight
The frustrating part is that the whole idea is great on its face: pay to capture the co2 you generate where they can do so at scale, but this just… clearly doesn’t do that.
