by Matt Simon
Whatever the end product, biomass removal cleverly exploits nature’s own photosynthesis to sequester and then bury carbon. “The genius in this business model, in many ways, is letting nature do most of the work,” says climate economist Gernot Wagner of the Columbia Business School. “This is a natural process that’s been perfected over millions of years, so why not take advantage of it?”
In reality, though, things are more complicated, Wagner says. When fossil fuel companies remove coal or oil from the earth, they’re tapping into huge deposits that are relatively easy to exploit on the cheap, hence the prices of those fuels remain low. But there’s only so much biomass waste available above ground, and it’s distributed across the planet. (Though this is a potential strength of this kind of carbon removal, in that each municipality could process its own biomass waste for storage.) “The more demand there is for biochar, or for this kind of carbon removal technology, the more startups are out there clamoring for the same food waste, corn husk waste, and so on,” says Wagner. “Suddenly, the prices increase, rather than decrease.”
The other potential issue, Wagner says, is the “moral hazard”: If humanity is able to delete carbon from the atmosphere, that’s less incentive to slash emissions. There’s still so much money to be made in fossil fuels, and indeed, oil companies like Occidental Petroleum are investing heavily in carbon removal technologies like direct air capture, in which machines scrub the air of CO2. That way, they can keep on drilling. “There is always this moral hazard aspect,” says Wagner. “The big, big topic in the background behind any of these carbon removal conversations is: OK, well, we could—or should, frankly—be doing more to reduce emissions in the first place, as opposed to let’s suck it back out after the fact.”
Quoted in: “Why Humans Are Putting a Bunch of ‘Coal’ and ‘Oil’ Back in the Ground” by Matt Simon, WIRED (10 January 2024).