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Carbon Negative Chemicals and Fuels

Produced from cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, sugars or starches

How do you achieve carbon negative emissions and what is that?
We use waste biomass and convert it to water soluble chemicals and CO2. The chemicals can be sold, they can be converted to transportation fuels or they can be burned directly to generate electricity. Carbon negative is when you use biomass to produce carbon neutral chemicals or fuels and then capture and store the CO2 that's also produced in our process. This means that as the chemicals and fuels are produced CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. This is called Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage or BECCS (pronounced becks).
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Why is carbon negative technology needed?
This figure is from a report by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The figure shows that California can achieve its 2050 goal and become carbon neutral by the year 2045. The report requires 125 million tons per year of negative carbon emission by 2045 for California to become carbon neutral. The negative emissions are represented by the green area in the graph. Negative carbon emissions are now seen as a necessary part of solving the global warming problem.
Does carbon capture and storage really work?
Yes, but not carbon capture from the smokestacks of electrical generation facilities, which is a technology still being developed. This map is from a Department of Energy report showing the extensive infrastructure for carbon capture and storage used by the oil industry. This shows the 4,500 miles of CO2 pipelines (the black lines) and the industrial facilities where they capture CO2 (the purple squares). The oil industry uses CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. For long term storage of the CO2, the same equipment and techniques are used but all the surrounding oil wells are capped to ensure the CO2 remains underground. Like the CO2 stream produced in our process, these industrial facilities all produce good CO2 streams that can be easily captured.
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There's a carbon seqestration atlas.
The Department of Energy has published an atlas showing "the carbon capture and storage potential across the United States and other portions of North America". This is the 5th edition of the Atlas and it contains a large amount of information on carbon capture and storage. The report identifies storage capacity in North America alone that can store enough CO2 to address the climate change problem.