When we first started telling people about Kairos, I expected to get the obvious question:

Why is this technology  the best way to do carbon removal?

When compared to other major carbon removal methods, our solution stands out because:

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✅ It requires no energy input

✅ It’s permanent and measurable

✅ It’s highly scalable

✅ It uses no water

✅ Our co-products can enable us to sell credits at <$100 - and hopefully even <$50 - per tonne at scale

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That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be developing other direct air capture, mineralization, or other biomass-based approaches. After all, the IPCC estimates that by 2050, we’ll need 5-16 billion tonnes of carbon removal annually, and so far, the industry has collectively achieved a fraction of that. It’s clear there are no “winners” yet. But we’re excited to contribute with a complementary solution that tackles the challenge from a new angle, effectively hedging risk across the space.

The question we do get asked often is one that surprised me at first: Why is our process the best use of waste biomass?

On first glance it seems pretty obvious that doing anything useful with waste would be a good thing.  But biomass waste can be a valuable resource when used right, and plenty of people are working hard on finding new ways to realize that potential.

To understand why that is, we need to revisit why biomass is a valuable resource in the first place. Biomass is essentially solar energy stored via photosynthesis. Plants use the sun’s energy to pull carbon out of the air and build sugars, proteins, and other complex molecules. We tap into this energy by consuming those plants, burning them for power, or chemically converting them into fuels like ethanol.

The beauty of biomass is that nature does all this using the sun’s energy - in theory, achieving some of the same things as DAC but without drawing on grid resources. The downside, of course, is that plants take up a lot more land area than DAC to absorb the same amount of carbon dioxide. Since land use change is a significant source of emissions, cultivating new crops solely for carbon removal would be counterproductive.

That’s where waste biomass comes in. Rather than growing new crops for carbon removal—and adding to the problems associated with land use change—valorizing waste biomass (things like the husks, stems, and branches from food crops) lets us maximize what we get out of the plants we’re already growing. Historically, the most common way to do that has been to burn waste biomass for energy. But there are other options: converting it into packaging or clothing, or using it for pure carbon removal. A lot has been written about what the “best” way to use biomass is, from a financial as well as climate perspective. But there’s an angle that doesn’t always get enough attention.

Not all biomass is created equal. In fact, there’s a rough hierarchy for how valuable waste biomass is. Generally speaking, things that are dry, homogeneous, and uncontaminated are the easiest to work with. That’s why there’s so much demand for corn stover, sugarcane bagasse, and forestry trimmings. Turning them into value is a no brainer. But a lot of waste is less cooperative with our efforts to extract value. Things like sewage sludge, manure, and municipal waste are too wet, heterogeneous, and often contaminated for the majority of processing routes to work. There are a few technologies targeting this type of waste, like anaerobic digestion and various hydrothermal processes.. But so far, most have struggled to scale profitably (that’s a topic for a future post). So why do we think our technology can achieve rapid scale and profitability where others have failed?

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✅ It’s a chemical process rather than biological - making it easier to scale and less sensitive to feedstock variability. That’s crucial when targeting the low-quality feedstocks we’re looking to address.

✅ It can recover value beyond just energy and carbon, meaning we can squeeze the most value (and climate impact!) out of every tonne of waste we process. That stands in contrast to most hydrothermal processes, which focus on converting the carbon content of a feedstock into fuels, leaving the non-carbon components of the feedstock to go to waste.

✅ It’s resource-light, with no need for expensive inputs like electricity, water, or specialized chemicals. 

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These factors keep our costs exceptionally low, reduce dependence on external supply chains, and create multiple revenue streams. They also allow us to be flexible about the feedstocks we use and the products we choose to focus on, adapting to a changing landscape of competing technology. 

We’ll be diving into how our tech stacks up to those other technologies in a future post. In the meantime, reach out if you’re interested in learning more about what we’re working on.

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