Carbon is one of the main building blocks for life on Earth. It’s the element from which proteins and DNA are formed, and every living organism depends on it to survive. Carbon provides balance to all ecosystems and without that balance, life would not be able to sustain itself.
While the amount of carbon that exists on Earth will never change, it’s an element that is in continuous movement. Animals release carbon dioxide through respiration, while plants capture carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. There are carbon reservoirs all over the planet and they exchange carbon back and forth. Living organisms act as reservoirs and when they die, the decomposition process releases carbon as gas or into the sediment underground.
From there, it transforms from rock into fossil fuels. Carbon is also found in the ocean and the atmosphere. The constant transfer of carbon is known as the carbon cycle and it’s one of several biogeochemical cycles that support life. Because all organic compounds are made from carbon, the carbon cycle is one of the most important natural processes on Earth.
How Humans Impacted the Carbon Cycle
When the industrial revolution introduced new machinery in the 18th century, it began a reliance on fossil fuel combustion at a large scale. As technology developed and the global population increased, the persistent burning of fossil fuels introduced unprecedented levels of carbon to Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon emissions via machinery became an additional factor within the carbon cycle. Today the concentration of atmospheric carbon sits at 417ppm, more than 40% higher than its pre-industrial level. As carbon emissions continue to rise due to human activity, it causes disruption to a balance that has existed for millions of years.
The oil and gas industries contribute to a large amount of carbon emissions. As a way to combat this pollution, Oil & Gas with CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) is a process that captures and stores the emissions from these industries. However, Oil & Gas with CCS does not remove any existing carbon from the atmosphere. At best, it produces net zero emissions by capturing the carbon produced by the burning of oil and gas. This does not contribute to the removal of excess carbon emissions that are already in the atmosphere.
The Solution
Restoring the carbon cycle is a global effort that will take many forms. Of those, carbon removal is especially crucial by returning gaseous carbon to its long-term reservoirs. BECCS, DAC, ocean capture, and terrestrial capture are methods for capturing and storing carbon emissions.
BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage) technology, in particular, offers a solution that integrates carbon removal into existing infrastructures. One of the advantages of BECCS is that it can be implemented across multiple industrial processes. By sourcing waste biomass from pulp, ethanol, biogas, and CHP plants, BECCS technology takes the carbon emitted from these plants and permanently stores it thousands of meters below the Earth’s surface. In any setting where there are biogenic emissions of CO2 in large quantities, BECCS can be utilized to capture and sequester those carbon emissions.
Incorporating BECCS can be thought of as assisting in the natural process of the carbon cycle. It accelerates the cycle by returning excess carbon back to underground reservoirs where it once was. Within the carbon cycle, there are fast and slow processes. The carbon exchange between living organisms and the atmosphere is a fast cycle, while the exchange of carbon between other reservoirs is a slower cycle.
In fact, carbon can take 100-200 million years to transfer between rocks, the ocean, and the atmosphere.
At the rate humans are burning through fossil fuels, the natural cycle can not keep up with circulating carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean. BECCS technology compensates for the limits of the natural carbon cycle by capturing the emissions that can’t circulate back into the ocean quickly enough.
A Hopeful Future
Because a balanced carbon cycle is imperative for supporting life on Earth, carbon will always be a vital part of our planet. It regulates the global temperature and supports the biosphere that all living organisms rely on. While carbon removal is a relatively new addition to the Earth’s carbon cycle, its potential impact is significant. With the help of technologies like BECCS, hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon per year can return back underground and continue its long journey within the cycle.
