https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-wants-your-poop-to-lower-its-emissions-0d83cdb8
The tech giant is investing in increasingly innovative methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere in an effort to offset the climate impact of its AI data centers
The tech giant’s insatiable appetite for power to feed its AI habit is causing a rise in its emissions. To stop its carbon footprint from ballooning, the company is betting on a variety of greenhouse-gas-removal technologies.
One of these involves buying human and farm waste and piping it thousands of feet underground through a pump that acts like giant syringe.
“We’re taking different types of organic waste,” said Julia Reichelstein, co-founder and chief executive of Vaulted Deep, the company Microsoft is investing in. “It’s sludgy, often contaminated organic waste that today causes problems above ground, and instead we take the waste and put it really deep underground for permanent carbon removal.”
Microsoft on Thursday announced a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep over 12 years, starting from next year. One ton of carbon sequestered equates to a carbon removal credit.
It is just one of a number of new ways of offsetting carbon that Microsoft is backing, betting that these technologies will help to combat climate change by stopping carbon dioxide and methane from entering the atmosphere.
Other unusual carbon-removal projects to have piqued the interest of Microsoft include regrowing former rainforests in Panama—and inadvertently creating cattle ranchers out of financiers in the process—and collecting the emissions generated during the incineration of swaths of trash from a Norwegian city and burying the gases deep under the North Sea in former oil wells.
How it works
Vaulted Deep collects what it calls “bioslurry”—which could be human waste from a city’s sewage system, excess manure from farm fields or sludge left over from paper mills. It then grinds it up before injecting it some 5,000 feet underground.
While most waste comes in the form of solids, liquids or gases—slurries sit in an inbetween state, which makes them harder to treat. Often they are dumped on cheap land or spread over agricultural fields, leading to nutrient runoff and the leaching of harmful chemicals such as PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, into the water system.
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Microsoft is aiming to be carbon negative by 2030, and is seeking by 2050 to remove from the environment more greenhouse gases than the company has emitted since its founding. Between 2020-24, Microsoft emitted a total of 75.5 million tons of CO2 equivalent, according to its sustainability reports.
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