2022: Advancing Energy-Efficient Hybrid Pathways for Accelerated Carbon Removal
The world’s agricultural soils have lost the carbon equivalent to at least 487 gigatons of CO2. This project aims to develop innovative and economic pathways to rapidly increase soil carbon while harnessing synergistic bio-geo-chemical feedbacks and address the challenge of putting carbon back into the soils to enhance crop fertility. Rapid increases in carbon drawdown require the synergistic coupling of several natural and engineered strategies. Researchers will investigate the coupled influences of enhanced weathering, biochar use, and genetic engineering of plants for enhanced soil carbon storage coupled with distributed processing of bio-waste to co-produce H2, biochar, and carbonates to transform carbon farming.
Investigators: Greeshma Gadikota, Civil & Environmental Engineering; Benjamin Houlton, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; Yiqi Luo, School of Integrative Plant Science; Johannes Lehmann, Soil & Crop Sciences; Daniel Buckley, Soil and Crop Sciences