Julian Sachs

Banyu Carbon is developing a light-driven approach to carbon capture that promises to be cheaper and require less energy than competing technologies. Decarbonizing the global economy is the Apollo Moon Shot of this century. Every serious plan to keep global temperatures below dangerous limits requires carbon removal at the scale of billions of tons of CO2 per year. But a giant gap exists between this pressing need and existing carbon removal capabilities that are costly, energy intensive, and have a capacity 10,000x too small. Unlike nature-based approaches to carbon capture, Banyu Carbon is developing a process that produces a pure stream of CO2 for easily verified carbon credits to companies and governments. The Banyu Carbon process uses the surface ocean as a vast collector for atmospheric CO2 and then removes the accumulated carbon through energy efficient photochemical reactions. Seawater naturally concentrates CO2 from the atmosphere. Removing this carbon from the surface ocean withdraws a commensurate amount of CO2 from the air because of rapid equilibration. Because the atmosphere rapidly mixes carbon emissions from across the globe and then the oceans readily absorb this extra carbon, the Banyu Carbon process would reduce atmospheric CO2 no matter where the emissions occurred. Banyu Carbon seeks to be a leader in a carbon capture market expected to grow to $100 billion by 2030.