A startup has received $41 million to build a power plant that will turn waste biomass into electricity, powering a Louisiana data center while sequestering carbon dioxide.
Arbor Energy will build its first commercial-scale plant, TechCrunch reported, after striking the multimillion-dollar deal with Frontier, an advance market commitment that aims to improve carbon-removal technologies. Frontier is backed by tech giants such as Google, Meta, and Stripe.
As part of the deal, Arbor Energy has committed to removing 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide by the end of this decade via its biomass carbon removal and storage technology, or BiCRS.
"One of the great things about BiCRS is that you get the (carbon) capture part for free because plants are drawing down the CO2, and all you have to do is strip it out and store it," Frontier head of deployment Hannah Bebbington told TechCrunch.
Waste biomass is any organic material that can be burned to create energy, and is created in thousands of ways, including beer brewing. In fact, up to 5 gigatons of waste biomass are made available every year, Bebbington said.
Arbor's plant will use only biomass that meets certain sustainability benchmarks. As highly pressurized carbon dioxide helps dissolve that biomass, hydrogen and carbon monoxide are released.
A subsequent burning process creates more gases and heat, which are then fed through machines to generate electricity. Part of the resulting carbon dioxide is then recycled for further use in the plant, while the remainder is transported to permanent storage.
In all, 99% of the carbon dioxide released by this process gets captured by the plant, causing Arbor Energy CEO Brad Hartwig to describe it as a "vegetarian power plant."
This process could have major environmental benefits.
By sequestering carbon, fewer toxic, heat-trapping emissions get released into our atmosphere. And generating clean power for data centers could prove consequential for our future, as such centers have proven to be huge users of electricity.
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Yes 💯 In this plant, Arbor will burn only biomass. But the way it is designed, future plants could theoretically burn other substances, including natural gas, and achieve the same result.
"The system is specifically designed to be fuel-flexible," Hartwig told TechCrunch. "... If any new fossil assets are built, we'd like those to all be zero-emission as well. Let's capture all of those emissions."
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