Summary
- Rocky Mountain Institute says BiCRS has potential to remove 5.5 gigtons of CO2 globally per year
- Biochar accounts for over 90% of carbon credits; IPCC says it has ‘signifiant mitigation’ potential
- Charm Industrial injecting bio-oil into abandoned oil wells, removing over 6,000 metric tons of CO2
- Puro.earth piloting woody biomass burials methodology; Zurich pre-paying for CO2 removal certificates
November 14 – Storing carbon in living biomass has long been touted as a solution to climate change, but as successive scandals and concerns about destruction by wildfires has dampened the market for tree-planting credits, many believe that storing carbon in biomass that is already dead is a safer bet.
Collectively known as biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS), the term covers a range of processes that use biomass from plants or algae to remove carbon dioxide from the air and then store it permanently, either underground or in long-lived products.
These approaches have the potential to remove around 5.5 gigatons of CO2 (GtCO2) globally per year, according to the U.S. nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). They can also lock this away for substantially longer periods of time than living tree-based projects, at an average of 100 years, though some techniques such as bio-oil have the potential for 1,000 years of storage, says Rudy Kahsar, RMI’s manager of climate-aligned industries.
Continue reading at Reuters