Forests sequester vast amounts of carbon dioxide but grow very slowly. What if we could grow a mature forest in a few weeks, permanently sequester all the carbon it captures, then return a fortnight later and grow another mature forest on the same plot of land? This is the dream of Brilliant Planet, a UK company commercializing a scalable nature-enhancing solution using forests of algae, a powerful tool for carbon sequestration that can pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere fifty times faster than trees.
Brilliant Planet’s co-founder, Dr. Raffael Jovine, is a thought leader in the use of algae for carbon dioxide removal. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale, researched algal genetics at MIT, earned a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara, and conducted postdoc research at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. After leaving academia, he worked as a Booz Allen consultant and raised money for a European start-up before acquiring a patent for a method of drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide using algae.
Jovine’s algae cultivation technology has been honed over the course of several iterations over the past 12 years. He began testing in South Africa, grew algae for animal feed in Oman, then tested Brilliant Planet’s approach to carbon dioxide removal in Morocco.
Brilliant Planet collaborates with academic institutions in the UK and Morocco and has received over £5.5 million in grants from Innovate UK and more than $20 million from notable investors such as Union Square Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Future Positive Capital, AiiM Partners, S2G Ventures, Grantham Foundation, and Hatch. This funding allowed Jovine to hire the executive team now building Brilliant Planet’s first commercial-scale facility.
The company will generate revenues by selling high-quality carbon removal credits derived by cultivating and desiccating algae, then sequestering the carbon stored within it by burying it deep underground. After proving its commercial model by building its own facilities, Brilliant Planet plans to scale up its solution by licensing its technology to partners worldwide.
Brilliant Planet pumps nutrient-dense seawater into a series of onshore ponds seeded with immature algae. The algae move from one pond to another as they grow, undergoing exponential growth and acquiring nearly 90% of their total biomass in the last two days before harvesting.
The mature algae are harvested, dried like salted jerky, and buried in underground vaults where cool temperatures prevent decay. The buried biomass is about 40% pure carbon, so every ton of dried algae represents the equivalent of 1.6 metric tons of CO₂.
Jovine estimates that the salt-cured, carbon-rich biomass will remain safely sequestered in the cool rock for over 10,000 years.
The first Brilliant Planet commercial facility will be a test prototype, but full-sized production models will draw down 260,000 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent every year. Assuming the subsidy rate of $180/ton paid to direct air capture projects in the U.S., this drawdown volume would generate revenues of $46.8 million annually.
In addition to drawing down carbon dioxide, Brilliant Planet’s process also deacidifies large volumes of coastal seawater, restoring it to its pre-industrial acidity without adding supplemental alkalis or stripping nutrients from the water.
Recent scandals involving nature-based solution carbon credits have prompted companies to seek high-quality credits like those generated by Brilliant Planet.
Demand for high-quality carbon credits—those that are demonstrably additional, have co-benefits, are certified and credible, and possess high durability—is rapidly increasing. Jovine thinks that changes to international regulations allowing entities to buy high-quality credits from private issuers like Brilliant Planet may provide a strong tailwind to the business.
Brilliant Planet’s current pilot scale cost of removing a metric ton of CO₂ is approximately $850 per metric ton. Jovine aims to reduce this cost to around $250 by the firm’s first commercial-scale phase in 2025/2026. He plans to raise another round of financing to build Brilliant Planet’s first full-sized commercial facility in 2027/2028, when he expects scaled costs to drop to around $100 per ton.
The two main approaches to carbon dioxide removal are mechanical removal via direct air capture and nature-based approaches like forestry and land-use projects. DAC companies have raised significant funds, and the two most-developed solutions—Occidental Petroleum’s Climate Engineering and Climeworks—are building out large-scale projects.
Despite being the first to market, DAC companies’ removal costs are high and will likely remain so for some time. Jovine says that Brilliant Planet’s process uses roughly a third of the energy required by DAC facilities to sequester the same amount of carbon, so his company will have a substantial cost advantage.
Nature-based solutions (e.g., afforestation or re-forestation) have garnered bad press lately, and verifying and setting aside forested acreage in case of fires or infestations reduces their efficiency.
Sequestering atmospheric carbon by burying desiccated algae is an unusual and revolutionary idea, but our civilization cannot dig its way out of the environmental hole we are in using the same thinking that got us here. Jovine is leveraging his expertise in the biology of algae to help save our biosphere.
Intelligent investors take note.
Virginia Mugo, Martha Martins, and Jon Kostiner contributed to this report.