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 $1,000, 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.
The business of biomass
In addition to keeping production costs low, there still needs to be a buyer for the product. That’s where we get into the business of carbon credits.
Rogers said his target market is companies that have no choice but to use fossil fuels, like airlines.
"So, if an airplane is going to be carbon neutral, they need to somehow compensate for the emissions that are inherent to their activity, to that flying of the jet airplane, for example. They do so by purchasing carbon credits. So if they emit one ton of carbon dioxide, they then purchase one ton of carbon dioxide removal from us.”
Rogers believes in the carbon credit model, but says, in practice, it isn’t perfect. Right now, he says the industry suffers from an over-supply of credits.
"I think the critical piece there is understanding that we really need high-quality credits, and we need to have a mechanism to ensure that those credits are used quickly, so they don't just continue to accumulate.”
Lauren Napuck is with the Climate Action Reserve, a nonprofit that measures carbon emissions and works with companies to certify carbon credits.
"The state of the carbon market, I would say, is very much growing in terms of collaboration, as well as a movement towards building high-integrity and high-quality carbon credits,” said Napuck.
The voluntary carbon market has been around for a few decades, but confidence has fallen in recent years.
In early 2023, The Guardian reported the results of an investigation that found that more than 90% of rainforest offset credits sold by the company Verra were likely to be “phantom credits” that did not represent genuine carbon reductions. In June, Verra suspended its production of carbon credits following a raid by Brazilian federal agents.
Napuck says they have a handful of metrics to decide if a carbon credit is "high quality." Chiefly, the credit is real, or tangible; it is additional, meaning that exists outside the scope of normal operations; it's permanent, meaning it removes carbon on a timeline of at least 100 years; and it is owned by a single agency.
In May, the Biden administration released new principles to restore confidence in the market, and Napuck says she believes the guidelines represent an increasing commitment to the Voluntary Carbon Market by the federal government, which can have a further stabilizing effect.
"It has really represented the federal government stepping forward in support of the voluntary carbon market. It's recognizing the power of the voluntary carbon market and providing this private capital to fund these projects that really need it to ensure that we're utilizing the full impact of greenhouse gas emissions reductions.”
Rogers believes his company is poised to be highly competitive in the voluntary carbon credit marketplace, offering credits that meet these standards, produced at home, and at the lowest costs.
The long game
The working target to mitigate the worst effects of climate change has been that the global population needs to be carbon neutral by 2050. Rogers says that is a tall order based on current projections.
"We are at about 250,000 tons of carbon removal per year, okay? When you look at the scientific projections of where we need to be by 2030, it's about 350 million tons of carbon removal per year. Stated differently, we need to grow the market by about 3,000 times over a six-year window.”
He adds that Graphyte is ready to scale up its line of production quickly to bridge that gap, beginning at those 50,000 tons of removal per year beginning as early as 2025.
Rogers was clear he does not see Graphyte as the sole solution to climate change, but he does consider the model to be a significant piece of the puzzle, and he offered some considerations for others in the field.
“How much does it cost, how much energy does it use, and how quickly can it be deployed? I think those are sort of the key factors we should be considering as we look across different carbon removal technologies.”
