To scale or not to scale? That’s the 1000$ question. During our last I4N marketplace in Morges (CH), we challenged Christian Baertschi, co-founder of Real Carbon Capture to the question. This is his answer.
Today from 100 projects in the field of climate improvement only 4% actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. That means 96% are only avoidance projects, meaning they break the trend of still rising emissions. The problem that we need to solve is how do we take CO2 back out from the atmosphere?
The first thing Real Carbon Capture is focusing on is the removal of CO2. The second thing is, we have a severe problem with degraded land. A lot of land has been compromised through extensive agriculture, through cutting down forests and then, the resulting droughts. So that land needs to be renaturated in order to be able, at some point, to grow new crops on it. So we combine the renaturation of these areas with carbon capture.
The carbon capture part is what initiates investment into areas that are very difficult to attract investment in because they're just simply not fruitful enough by standard definitions. So we use the carbon sequestration performance and the certificates that we can generate for that to generate an initial investment into those areas. But the whole point is not this initial investment, it's just to kickstart eventually a more circular economy by building up those plantations. Then, within a time range of 36 to 48 months , the plantation starts to generate plant yields. It generates oil, it generates protein, and it generates pellets. All of these are interesting products to sell because they're in markets that are still growing. That generates an income that sustains the longer lasting process of renaturation. It has been scientifically proven that over the course of 15 to 20 years the soil quality in these areas improves significantly, eventually allowing other crops to grow in these soils.
Our next plan is to do a pilot series of a commercial farm of 2500 hectares. The reason why we look at that scale is because our core mission is to renaturate earth barren land for the benefit of mankind. And we want to do that profitably, not just for us, but for all the stakeholders involved. We believe that if our solution is not working with a business model, it is basically philanthropy. And I have nothing against philanthropy, but it's not going to help to renaturate the scale of land that we need to renaurate.
We need to fight off the expansion of further deserts and that's just not done on 5 hectare farms. We don't want 5, we want 500, because then it really has an impact. So despite the fact that people are always worried about scalability, when you look at renaturation, I think there's an interest to renaturate significantly.
I fully understand that we don't need another super scale in existing areas of agriculture. But when we look at renaturating we actually need that scale to move quickly forward.
Christian Baertschi, November 2022
Real Carbon Capture is a for profit organisation committed to boost nature-based carbon capture solutions on a global scale by providing farmers of non-arable land with a comprehensive business model that provides long-term economic incentives to build and maintain an intact and sustainable environment.