Modified Grass Offers Possible Solution to Global CO2 Problem

Dutch company Carbon-Alert is working in Colombia to solve the world's carbon problem by creating artificial peat.

August 30, 2022. By News Bureau

Dutch company Carbon-Alert is working in Colombia to solve the world's carbon problem by creating artificial peat. A new plant species is thought to be able to speed up this process to a very high degree, resulting in the storage of millions of tons of CO² underground.

Carbon-Alert plants so-called Juncao grass in Colombia. This plant, also called giant grass, comes from the African tropics and was modified in China.

It grows very quickly under warm conditions, up to 5 metres in 2 months. More importantly, it absorbs an extreme amount of CO², as discovered by Chinese researcher Lei Xuejun, director of the Carbon Cycle Research Centre at the Central South University of Forestry & Technology in Hunan.

Carbon-Alert wants to partially liquefy the plant and inject it under the groundwater. As a result, all the CO² the plant takes from the air disappears into the soil. This is an accelerated form of peat formation, as the Earth has purportedly been doing for 200 million years.

The injected CO² is seen as so-called CO² SINK, which can be converted into Certificates. These can be purchased by companies to offset their emissions.

The Netherlands currently sells about €1 billion worth of CO² certificates, without compensation.

By converting the giant grass CO² storage in tropical areas into certificates, we are able to actually convert these amounts into valuable CO² reductions. This generates revenue for governments and opportunities for business.

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