By Olivia Rogers
Tucked away off Lake Wheeler Road in Raleigh, North Carolina, sits NC State University’s Compost Facility and Research Cooperative, where Pablo Ortiz Paciello, a graduate student in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering’s Biocarbon Utilization and Sequestration (BUS) Lab, demonstrates a patent-pending technology to capture carbon emissions directly at the compost pile.
The facility is ripe with possibilities — it’s where the campus’s organic waste is carefully composted with product quality in mind, processing up to 1,200 tons of material annually.
Backed by funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Cotton Incorporated, Ortiz’s research and related technology aims to collect carbon dioxide before it can enter the atmosphere — and trap it inside mineral carbonate compounds as a value-added product used to clean wastewater.
Biomass carbon removal solutions prevent organic waste emissions from returning to the atmosphere by capturing the carbon and locking it into durable products, such as mineral carbonates, or permanent storage.
“If we can take biogenic carbon, convert it to a stable form, including a carbonate mineral, we can prevent carbon from returning to the atmosphere,” says Joe Sagues, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering who is supporting Ortiz’s work.
Source : ncsu.edu