The Newest Carbon Removal Technology

The 421 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is turning the earth into a pizza that's been forgotten in the oven while taking the dog for a walk. You can see the results all around you, rain, hail, heat, drought, somewhere, all over the world. 

Finding a remedy for this before it's too late is a crucial goal for mankind. Some remedies have been proposed and even adopted to some extent but they all have the same drawback, expense. The energy needed to isolate and dispose of carbon dioxide is prohibitively expensive. 

One company has developed a process that's significantly cheaper and very effective. The Graphyte Company plans to use "carbon casting" to isolate CO2 at its source, biomass. 

The dregs of the timber industry and agriculture are composed of carbon, which microbes and H20 convert into gaseous CO2. Graphyte plans to gather these substances, compress them into hard bricks, wrap them in an impervious layer and then bury them forever. They feel that's the cheapest and most effective way to remove the  5 to 10 billion tons of the carbon dioxide needed to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050.

 According to them the 5 step process goes like this: 

      1.We use by-products of the timber and agriculture industries, which would otherwise be burned or left to decompose.

     2.We dry this biomass, to eliminate microbes and the water they depend on, stopping decomposition.

     3. The inert biomass is condensed into dense blocks, enabling effective storage.

     4.  Carbon blocks are protected by an environmentally-safe, impermeable barrier to ensure that decomposition does not restart.

     5. Blocks are stored in state-of-the-art sites with sensors and tracers, enabling robust long-term monitoring. Storage sites can then be used as solar farms or working agricultural land.

An observation: Neutralizing biomass doesn't "remove" CO2 from anywhere, it could maybe prevent it from forming but any already existing CO2 would be unaffected. 

The questions: 

1.The by-products of timber and agriculture are scattered all over the world. How are they transported to the locations where they are to be processed? Isn't a serious amount of energy involved in that? And expensive human labor?

2.Drying the various forms of biomass will inevitably mean the use of heat, which is also an expense. Will non-CO2 producing heat be used to accomplish the drying. What's the economics of that?

3.Compressing the inert blocks of biomass into dense bricks requires expensive energy, too. Probably lots of it. Will the biomass in the bricks require some kind of binder additive to allow them to retain their shape?

4. What exactly is the impermeable product used to wrap the bricks and how much does it cost? The process will be heavily mechanized but humans will be involved. It won't be free.

5. The storage sites . . . state of what art? Where and how big. Won't they need to be excavated with big, expensive machinery? If this product is so dangerous that it needs to be sequestered in this way it brings to mind nuclear waste storage, a problem that hasn't been resolved in over 50 years. Bill Gates may be a certifiable genius but it's questionable that his enthusiasm for this project means anything for its practicality, even if massive federal subsidies will add to his fortune.

Update: They're soon going into actual operation!