Brilliant Planet Marine Microalgae Cultivation and Burial

Brilliant Planet uses marine algae in coastal deserts to capture and sequester CO₂. Locally sourced, GMO-free organisms are cultivated using seawater, which is pumped through a series of open, land-based ponds before being rapidly solar dried and buried underground. Brilliant Planet produces biomass at one tenth the cost of legacy systems as its operations facilitate natural algae bloom conditions year-round, utilizing deep upwelled ocean water as a nutrient source and energy from the sunlight entering the ponds to capture carbon.

Buried biomass has a ‘triple lock’ that prevents decomposition and the re-release of CO₂ or other greenhouse gases upon sequestration. It's extremely dry and highly salty, and becomes naturally acidic—meaning the sequestered carbon remains stable for upwards of 1,000 years. The process has taken a decade to develop and combines the cost-effectiveness of nature-based solutions with the measurability and dependability of engineered approaches.

​Brilliant Planet’s CO₂ removals are:

• Additional: additional Net Primary Productivity (NPP) is created in locations with little other biological activity.
• Measurable: thanks to operations on land rather than the open ocean, CO₂ removal can be directly monitored, reported, and verified in real time; all data, including seawater absorption of CO₂, is collected using direct measurement. 
• Durable: Brilliant Planet's dry, salty, acidic biomass is extremely difficult to decompose and provides 1,000+ year permanence; continuous measurements are performed on sequestered product to guarantee stability over time.
• Scalable: the world's vast areas of coastal desert with no other viable use case provide gigaton per year potential; Brilliant Planet doesn't compete with farmland or forest land, doesn't use fresh water to produce biomass, and doesn't bleed nutrients from the soil or ocean surface; additionally, its system has been designed so that it can be rapidly scaled.
• Affordable: credits are currently being sold from Brilliant Planet's demonstration site; though relatively expensive, prices are expected to drop significantly upon full-scale commercial rollout.

​Additional benefits include:

• Enhanced marine biodiversity: for every one unit of seawater that passes through Brilliant Planet's system, the equivalent of five units of seawater are de-acidified back to pre-industrial levels; this enables shell-forming organisms to grow and help restore local marine ecosystems.
• Climate justice: communities located at hot coastal deserts tend to be low income and amongst those most affected and disenfranchised by climate change; by creating sustainable value at these locations, local communities can participate meaningfully toward reversing climate change in an economically and socially sustainable manner.