A nature-community partnership to remove atmospheric carbon!
A simple way to permanently remove carbon from the air
Global carbon emissions continue to rise. The climate continues to change with worsening extreme and disastrous weather events. Earth's ice continues to melt; its oceans rising. And climate change feedbacks are accelerating these changes.
Its not enough to simply reduce fossil fuel use and reduce carbon emissions. We need to remove legacy carbon from our atmosphere.
The Carbon Trap Project (CTP) works in harmony with nature to enhance permanent carbon sequestration.
Nature has the plants
The number of plants on Earth is vast. Earth has 3 trillion trees and over 320,000 different plant species. This represents an unimaginably large surface area for scrubbing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. According to NASA plants convert 231 gigatons of carbon dioxide into biomass each year: leaves, twigs, husks, seeds, crops, etc.
However, nature is not so good at keeping that carbon, releasing 95% of it as carbon dioxide and methane each year via natural decomposition. This is where the community comes in.
We have the numbers
After nature traps carbon dioxide in plant biomass, we humans convert some of this biomass waste into charcoal which permanently traps 50% of plant biomass for permanent storage.
Charcoal has been around a long time and is being used in some commercial processes for carbon trapping and storage as biochar. But none of the current methods of making charcoal are suitable to backyard climate enthusiasts.
The Carbon Trap Project's charcoal making method is quite simple and carbon negative. We show you how to use an off-the-shelf solar concentrating cooker (parabolic mirror) to concentrate sunlight onto a covered cast iron Dutch oven (the kiln).
The process takes only a few hours and traps 50% of the plant material's biomass carbon in the resulting charcoal. This charcoal is then sent to the landfill where it is buried for permanent storage.
So far we've created charcoal from twigs, grass, and coffee grounds. Each charring process removes a few pounds of carbon dioxide from the air which isn't a lot. But there are 8 billion people on the planet. Together we can make a difference. There is strength in numbers!
2023 Goals
Last year was exploratory. We established proof-of-concept feasibility of the system using 1 quart and half gallon kilns. We know about how long the charring process takes and established performance characteristics. This year our goals include:
Promotion
We'll begin promoting the carbon trap project through videos and social media. Our goal is to get 75,000 people to join the cause. With 75,000 participants we can remove more carbon dioxide than the commercial Climeworks' Orca carbon removal plant located in Iceland!
Website Restructuring
We'll be rebuilding our website to make it more user friendly and supportive, and for use as a repository of the carbon trapped by the Carbon Trap Project community.
Performance optimization
Last year we found that charring used coffee grounds was most efficient for trapping carbon.
Used coffee grounds were the densest biomass we tested and yielded a charcoal that sequestered 55% of the available carbon for permanent storage. Further we found half gallon kiln worked better than the 1 quart kiln.
Our goal this year is to optimize the used coffee ground charring process. We'll gather detailed temperature and chemical data for kilns of various sizes in order to discover which kiln is the most efficient. These data will be shared on this website.
Each year humans produce over 23 billion pounds of coffee. Conversion of all of these used grounds into charcoal (a lofty goal) would permanently remove 11.5 megatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And remember that Starbucks gives their used grounds away free via their Grounds for your Garden program.