The oil and gas industry is pumping billions into carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies in a bid to reduce carbon emissions while still producing fossil fuels. This is viewed by many as a mid-term approach to decarbonization while the global oil and gas demand remains strong. Now, scientists believe they may have uncovered a natural solution to carbon capture, using fungi. This is just one of many innovative decarbonization options being explored, in a bid to delay climate change until more long-term solutions can be rolled out.
In Australia, a start-up is experimenting with the use of fungi for carbon capture purposes. Loam Bio, alongside several other start-ups, has invested $100 million in a project, which looks to use soil to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. The company is asking farmers to sprinkle fungal spores onto their crops as they're sowed to capture carbon. The beauty of the project is that it does not require much extra work from the farmers, but it could help tackle climate change.
The project is taking place across 100,000 acres of agricultural land in Australia, with 250,000 acres expected to follow next year. The idea is to use the natural carbon-sucking powers of tiny subterranean fungus networks to extract CO2 from the air and store it underground. The researchers involved are uncertain exactly how much carbon the fungi will suck from the air, but the project is expected to have the knock-on benefit of boosting the health of the agricultural soil that has been degraded by several decades of intensive farming.
It is thought that the fungi will absorb the CO2 pulled from the air by plants during photosynthesis to store it underground and provide the nutrients that plants need to flourish. However, some experts suggest that this will only work if farmers apply the fungi to crops year after year to ensure the soil develops carbon-storing properties over several years. Loam Bio expects the fungi to store one to two tons of stable carbon within every 2.4 acres of land. Loam Bio's fungi spreading project is also being trialed in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil. As well as reducing carbon emissions and hopefully improving soil health, several farmers are participating in the project to access carbon tax credits and other financial incentives established by national climate policies.
If successful, the project could be trialed in other parts of the world to massively expand agricultural decarbonization practices. Soils hold around three times more carbon than the atmosphere, showing the huge role projects such as these could play in global decarbonization efforts. Soils have the potential to absorb over 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year, equivalent to one-seventh of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by humans, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Soil is the biggest natural absorber of carbon dioxide after oceans.
While the project shows promise, some scientists are less enthusiastic about the trial. Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University believes that soils will play a key role in decarbonization but emphasized, "We would need to touch billions of acres to make a real difference." He also noted that current agricultural practices play a significant role in the climate problem, contributing to around a quarter of greenhouse gases worldwide.
However, Loam Bio is not the only group of researchers looking into the potential for fungi to store carbon. Last year, a team of scientists at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. analyzed hundreds of studies looking at plant-soil processes to understand just how much carbon is being stored by fungi around the globe. The findings, published in Current Biology, estimate that around 13.12 gigatons of carbon dioxide is transferred from plants to fungi every year, to be stored in the soil. The researchers are calling for fungi to be included in biodiversity and conservation policies. This would not only help decarbonize agricultural activities but could also boost soil health, as around 90 percent of soils are expected to be degraded by 2050 if nothing is done to improve them.
Professor Katie Field, the co-author of the study, stated, "Mycorrhizal fungi represent a blind spot in carbon modeling, conservation, and restoration - the numbers we've uncovered are jaw-dropping, and when we're thinking about solutions for climate we should also be thinking about what we can harness that exists already." Field added, "Soil ecosystems are being destroyed at an alarming rate through agriculture, development, and other industries, but the wider impacts of disruption of soil communities are poorly understood. When we disrupt the ancient life support systems in the soil, we sabotage our efforts to limit global heating and undermine the ecosystems on which we depend." Therefore, "More needs to be done to protect these underground networks - we already knew that they were essential for biodiversity, and now we have even more evidence that they are crucial to the health of our planet."
By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com
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Felicity Bradstock is a freelance writer specialising in Energy and Finance. She has a Master’s in International Development from the University of Birmingham, UK. More
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