Big Tech’s Big Bet On A Controversial Carbon Removal Tactic

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage can scale faster than other approaches. But some experts are dubious about the climate benefits.

A pile of wood at a Drax facility in Mississippi, which converts biomass into pellets to power industrial facilities. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

Over the last century, much of the US pulp and paper industry crowded into the southeastern corner of the nation, setting up mills amid sprawling timber forests to strip the fibers from juvenile loblolly, long leaf, and slash pine trees.

Today, after the factories chip the softwood and digest it into pulp, the leftover lignin, spent chemicals, and remaining organic matter form a dark, syrupy by-product known as black liquor. It’s then concentrated into a biofuel and burned, which heats the towering boilers that power the facility—and releases carbon dioxide into the air.

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Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, and a tech company consortium that includes Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and Stripe have all recently struck multimillion-dollar deals to pay paper mill owners to capture at least hundreds of thousands of tons of this greenhouse gas by installing carbon scrubbing equipment in their facilities.

The captured carbon dioxide will then be piped down into saline aquifers more than a mile underground, where it should be sequestered permanently.

Big Tech is suddenly betting big on this form of carbon removal, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. The sector also includes biomass-fueled power plants, waste incinerators, and biofuel refineries that add carbon capturing equipment to their facilities.

Since trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and these factories will trap emissions that would have gone into the air, together they can theoretically remove more greenhouse gas from the atmosphere than was released, achieving what’s known as “negative emissions.”

The companies that pay for this removal can apply that reduction in carbon dioxide to cancel out a share of their own corporate pollution. BECCS now accounts for nearly 70% of the announced contracts in carbon removal, a popularity due largely to the fact that it can be tacked onto industrial facilities already operating on large scales.

“If we’re balancing cost, time to market, and ultimate scale potential, BECCS offers a really attractive value proposition across all three of those,” says Brian Marrs, senior director of energy and carbon removal at Microsoft, which has become by far the largest buyer of carbon removal credits as it races to balance out its ongoing emissions by the end of the decade.

But experts have raised a number of concerns about various approaches to BECCS, stressing they may inflate the climate benefits of the projects, conflate prevented emissions with carbon removal, and extend the life of facilities that pollute in other ways.

When greenhouse-gas sources and sinks are properly tallied across all the fields, forests, and factories involved, it’s highly difficult to achieve negative emissions with many approaches to BECCS, says Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University.

The Logic Of BECCS

For a biomass-fueled power plant, BECCS works like this: a tree captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it grows, sequestering the carbon in its bark, trunk, branches, and roots while releasing the oxygen. Someone then cuts it down, converts it into wood pellets, and delivers it to a power plant that, in turn, burns the wood to produce heat or electricity.

If that same power plant now captures a significant share of the greenhouse gas produced in the process and pumps it underground, the process can potentially go from carbon neutral to carbon negative.

Among other things, a proper analysis must also ask how much fossil fuel was burned in the process of cutting, collecting, and distributing the biomass and how long it will take to grow back the trees that would have otherwise continued capturing and storing carbon.

“If you’re harvesting wood, it’s essentially impossible to get negative emissions,” Searchinger says.

Preventing carbon dioxide emissions at a given factory may necessitate capturing certain other pollutants as well, notably sulfur dioxide. But it doesn’t necessarily filter out all the other pollution floating out of the flue stack, notes Emily Grubert, an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame.

Microsoft’s Big BECCS Bet

In 2020, Microsoft announced plans to become carbon negative by the end of this decade and, by midcentury, to remove all the emissions the company generated directly and from electricity use throughout its corporate history.

In April, the company announced it would purchase 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide through CO280, a startup based in Vancouver, British Columbia, forming joint ventures with paper and pulp mill companies in the US and Canada to finance, develop, and operate projects.

It was the biggest carbon removal purchase on record—until four days later, when Microsoft revealed it had agreed to buy 6.75 million tons of carbon removal from AtmosClear, a company building a biomass power plant at the Port of Greater Baton Rouge in Louisiana.

In earlier quarters, Microsoft also made substantial purchases from Ørsted, Gaia ProjectCo, and Arbor, whose plants are fueled by overgrown brush, crop residues, and food waste.

A 2019 report from the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the US could achieve more than 500 million tons of carbon removal a year through BECCS by 2040.

Roger Aines, chief scientist of the energy program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, argues we should be putting waste material to use rather than burning it or leaving it to decompose.

Last year Drax announced plans to launch a Houston-based division tasked with developing enough new BECCS projects to deliver 6 million tons of carbon removal per year in the US or elsewhere.

“It appears to me to be something that will be manageable but that we’ll always have to keep an eye on,” Aines says.

Even with all these carbon accounting complexities, BECCS projects can often deliver climate benefits, particularly for existing plants.