Sustainability Accelerator showcases 18 innovations to tackle greenhouse gas removal

“Dangerous territory” lies ahead if the world continues on its path toward global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to Professor Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and former U.S. Secretary of Energy. 

Chu was among more than a dozen researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors who presented during a recent event on campus hosted by Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator. 

Chu, who delivered the keynote address, described increased risks of extreme weather events, sea-level rise, and impacts on ecosystems and human health from climate change. Oceans to date have provided a buffer by absorbing most of the excess heat trapped in Earth’s climate system. “It’s like you’ve been chain smoking cigarettes for 30 years – you’ve started a bunch of mutations that invariably might give you heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, but you don’t see it now,” he said.

But crises can also present opportunities, said Arun Majumdar, dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. We are at an inflection point for climate, artificial intelligence, and government engagement, he said, describing sustainability as this century’s defining challenge and opportunity.

“Our ambition in education, research, innovation, and impact has to match the scale, complexity, and urgency of the issues in sustainability,” Majumdar said. “The Accelerator is a big piece of that.” 

Both scholars spoke at the “Accelerator Showcase,” a daylong event held on March 18 that brought to life a new ecosystem that has blossomed around the Sustainability Accelerator’s Greenhouse Gas Removal Flagship Destination over the past year. The center of the ecosystem is the cohort of over 80 students, postdocs, and faculty working together across disciplines to advance their projects and the field. The cohort focuses on thought leadership; technical, business, and policy innovation; and developing the skills needed to achieve the Flaghip’s gigaton removals goal.      

Scaling impact

In addition to panel discussions, three-minute talks about projects supported by the Accelerator, and Chu’s keynote, the day included time for researchers and the more than 300 attendees to talk in small groups about ideas and progress toward a common goal: annual removal of greenhouse gases equivalent to billions of tons, or “gigatons,” of carbon dioxide annually from the atmosphere by midcentury, one of the Accelerator’s goals or “Flagship Destinations.” 

During his opening remarks, Majumdar emphasized the importance of thinking about scale from the beginning of a research project, which is unusual in academia. The Accelerator is structured to change that and reverse engineer pathways, he said.

Scale was a recurring theme. Currently, more than 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions are added to the atmosphere each year, mostly through burning fossil fuels. Globally, scientists estimate that up to 10 gigatons of CO2 will need to be removed annually from the atmosphere by 2050, with potential for increased removal capacity up to 20 GtCO2 per year by 2100.

Limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, a global goal to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, requires reducing concentrations of heat-trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere. To make this happen, experts from around the world in policy, technology, nature-based solutions, and other fields will need to work together, according to Jeffrey Brown, managing director of the Accelerator’s greenhouse gas removal and water programs. The Accelerator is “truly special,” he added, because it pairs development of innovative climate technologies with efforts to build markets and inform policies.

In his keynote, Chu also emphasized a need to bring down costs and develop new solutions. “I’ve often heard over the last couple of decades that we have all the technologies, we just need the political will,” he said. “I interpret that as meaning we don’t have all the technologies.”

From earthworms to fuel cells

The three-minute project presentations during the Accelerator Showcase were grouped according to the type of removal – atmospheric, forest and soil, terrestrial, and oceanic. At the start of Associate Professor Jane Willenbring’s talk, a crinkling sound filled the room: earthworms burrowing through the soil. She explained how worms sequester carbon and why she believes the project can scale, using the fishing industry’s worm production for bait as a successful model that could be emulated. Another presentation revealed a new low-cost sensor no larger than a quarter that’s designed to accurately measure carbon emissions from agricultural soil.

When Professor Thomas Jaramillo took the stage, he jokingly asked audience members if they would like to pay for something they can’t touch for a million years, referring to the concept of selling credits for sequestered carbon dioxide. He then presented his work testing an electrolyzer and fuel cell components for reducing ocean acidity while removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and producing a chemical useful for generating electricity. Other projects featured electrochemistry, fungal communities, rocks, kelp, and more.

Cost, collaboration, and magnitude

Professor Yi Cui, the inaugural faculty director of the Sustainability Accelerator, moderated a panel discussion with entrepreneurs and investors on “Scaling to Impact.” They outlined how the greenhouse gas removal industry can approach obstacles as it works to dramatically scale up operations by focusing on economic viability, standardized measurements, and data transparency.

“We need to go to gigaton scale of capture,” said Cui, who has founded five companies to commercialize technologies developed by his research group at Stanford. “Looking at gigaton scale, if you calibrate yourself, this might mean a hundred billion to trillion-dollar market.”

In a panel discussion moderated by Michael Wara, senior director for policy at the Sustainability Accelerator, venture capitalists urged researchers working to scale greenhouse gas removal technologies to focus on cost and seek common ground with a wide range of prospective partners.

Charlotte Pera, executive director of the Sustainability Accelerator, concluded the presentations by describing the Accelerator’s mission, structure, and future plans. She encouraged attendees to talk with each other and make connections during the reception that followed.

“We know we can do more and move faster working together, and a day like today shows just how much opportunity there is in this space,” Pera said.