British Startup to Build Carbon Capture Farm in Morocco

Rabat – Brilliant Planet, a British startup specializing in carbon-capture technology, is setting up a 30-hectare farm to capture carbon from the air using seaweed, in Morocco’s Sahara desert.

Brilliant Plant will set up the carbon capture farm as a commercial demonstration facility, while maintaining its Research and Development (R&D) facility in London, according to a report from TechCrunch, a tech-focused news platform.

Brilliant Planet’s business model is simple; to bring the cost of carbon capture to less than $50 per CO2 ton using natural seaweed farms, the TechCrunch report said.

To set up the plant the company closed its second round of fundraising with $12 million.

Instead of using machines to capture carbon particles from the air, the farm relies on seaweed to clean the air.

Using a natural process the company replicates the growth conditions of a type of seaweed, producing large quantities of microalgae in open-air ponds on coastal desert land.

Powered with solar energy, the method does not require any freshwater, and it helps de-acidify ocean water that is eventually recycled back to the ocean.

“We have to move very large volumes of seawater around, and that uses energy, but we’ve done a lot of design work around running the system extremely energy-efficiently,” Adam Taylor, CEO at Brilliant Planet, told TechCrunch.

To ensure optimal energy efficiency, the startup is collaborating with Southampton University.

The partnership works on “optimizing every aspect of the paddle wheels and the ponds. A lot of time and effort has gone into minimizing that energy cost, but fundamentally, we do need to raise water from ocean level to a few meters above sea level,” Taylor explained.

“Per unit area, this approach sequesters up to 30 times more carbon per year than rainforests, while it also de-acidifies the local coastal seawater back to pre-industrial levels,” Raffael Jovine, chief scientist and co-founder of Brilliant Planet told the media.

Carbon Capture Technology

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that humanity is well beyond the point of reducing carbon emissions in a bid to save the planet.

Climate change is no longer a forecast of what will happen if we don’t reduce emissions; it is already here. The attention now has shifted to climate mitigation efforts, and carbon capture is at the heart of this strategy.

Carbon capture technology conventionally relies on heavy machinery to absorb carbon particles and store them deep underground. However, the technology remains expensive and limited in scale.

Some countries including Australia are banking on carbon capture technology to achieve net neutrality or to bring down CO2 emissions in the atmosphere to zero.

To reach net neutrality, companies will have to build machines with a capacity to absorb the same amount of CO2 as the amount they release annually.

Despite the obvious potential it holds, progress on the carbon capture front remains sluggish and modest at best. Currently, the world is home to 31 commercial carbon capture facilities in operation or under construction with a capacity to lock in 40 million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere every year, a far outcry from the 43 billion produced globally, according to some estimates.