In 2005, Steve McDaniel was on a research trip to the Arctic studying cold climates as an analog to Mars. One day, as he scanned the frosted landscape, a splash of bright orange crossed his vision. He trudged over the ice to investigate. “I thought the rock I walked up to was painted by a geological survey team,” he recalled. Instead it was a lichen-covered boulder, and it sparked McDaniel’s fascination with a lifeform so hardy it could survive anywhere. McDaniel is a Texas native and polymath. He holds a PhD in biochemistry. He also has a law degree and is a practicing patent attorney, as well as an entrepreneur. He and his wife Beth, also an attorney, founded Reactive Surfaces 24 years ago. The technology company bio-enhances coatings for specific purposes—using enzymes and peptides to inhibit mold or break down oils, for instance. The lichen he saw evoked the paints and coatings they worked with. Thirteen years later, the McDaniels were in their Austin home reading the first report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with deep focus. A coalition of scientists from around the world determined that burning fossil fuels was warming our atmosphere faster than previously thought and that keeping global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius would require transforming the world economy at a speed “that has no historic precedent.” The report hit them both hard, especially Steve. “Steve just laid on the couch for a few days, which is not like him,” Beth McDaniel recalled. “It was like a depression. He was sunk for a while.” “I was catatonic,” he admitted. He felt as if he had failed his children, as if we all had failed our children. “I just started thinking, where are we seeing great gobs of carbon dioxide captured and sequestered?” In the forests and oceans through photosynthesis, he reasoned. The natural world is able to absorb about half the more than 35 billion tons of CO2 humans emit. That led him to think about the surface area needed for more photosynthesis to take place. And that’s when he remembered the bright orange lichen in the Arctic. [Photo: Reactive Surfaces] Lichen, an organism made up of the symbiotic relationship between an algae and fungus, is a significant carbon sink. Various studies have estimated that lichen and other cryptogams like moss—which synthesize food from inorganic substances, use sunlight as energy, and reproduce with spores—absorb a quarter of the earth’s CO2. A 2012 study by the Max Planck Institute in Germany found that “algae, mosses, and lichens take up approximately 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide and fix approximately 50 million tons of nitrogen per year.” Lichen is also ubiquitous. It grows everywhere, and, as Steve McDaniel witnessed that day in the Arctic, across all climates. He wondered if it could be applied in a coating. As suddenly as it hit him, his existential dread lifted. “He came out of it and said ‘I think we gotta do this thing,’” Beth remembered. “This thing” was to manufacture paints that mimic lichen and cover massive amounts of surface area with it. The next week they met with their team of scientists at Reactive Surfaces and began the planning process. “We’re a small company. Less than 20 employees,” Beth explained. “But a lot of PhDs.” And scientists like to tackle the big problems. During the COVID outbreak, they developed a non-toxic, non-polluting biocide coating that killed the virus on contact. After September 11, they developed a coating that neutralized nerve agents that can be applied to military equipment. “The Reactive Surfaces team was all on board when we brought up the concept of developing Carbon Capture Coatings,” Beth said. “When Steve explained his idea of mimicking lichen in nature to the team, they could see that the concept of growing up algae in a paint was within our expertise and our reach.” That initial concept evolved. Instead of a coating, they pivoted to embedding the algae in cellulose mats to better mimic its natural structure. The sheets hang in aluminum-framed three-by-four foot polypropylene boxes, called intermediate bulk containers, that simply sit outside absorbing sunlight. The carbon-holding algae are periodically harvested, then heated and dried to a powder. Permanent carbon sequestration is achieved through pyrolysis, running the powder through a machine that heats it at a high temperature with no oxygen to create a bio char that can then be stored. (Steve is also experimenting with using the powder, which is edible, as cattle feed.)  “We’re trying to emulate nature as much as possible,” Steve said. “Nature cycles carbon through trees, bugs, lizards, you, me.” In other words, the carbon moves from one biomass to another until that biomass disintegrates and releases it. [Source Photos: Ed Reschke/Getty Images, chaluk/iStock/Getty Images Plus] Nine months ago, they deployed the first modules at a testing facility in North Central California. Currently there are 100 modules on site, in a single layer taking up about a tenth of an acre, which Steve estimates will capture about 10 tons of carbon a year, based on a lab analysis they performed, as well as a study they cooperated with at Colorado State University. The modules are stackable and the lichen are tolerant of shade as well as direct sunlight. “Using our modular approach, it’s easy to expand, wherever we need to expand it,” Steve said. And it’s low impact. “We don’t need water, we can use water in ambient air. We can use solar power.” The McDaniels have funded the project so far. But the work was similar to what they were already doing. “It was in our wheelhouse,” Beth said, adding that they’re looking for investors. As Team Lichen, they were semifinalists in the global $100 million XPrize Carbon Removal competition, making the list of “Top 100 most promising carbon removal innovators competing,” but they didn’t make the top 20 finalists. That’s OK, Beth said. “Our business plan was never to win a competition.” Instead, the plan is to enter the carbon offset market and get their technology listed on a carbon registry. This is currently a mostly voluntary marketplace, where CO2-emitting companies can offset their emissions by paying for credits from entities that remove carbon from the atmosphere. It’s nascent, but growing. Analysts at the London Stock Exchange Group reported the value of the trade in global carbon permits reached $949 billion in 2023, up 2% from the previous year, representing about 12 billion tons of carbon being traded. Whether that translates to 12 billion tons being removed isn’t as clear. Without strict government oversight, there are concerns about accountability and measuring the outcomes. “The voluntary market is growing and I think there is a lot of attention being paid to making sure the market can be effective,” Kasey White, climate policy director at the Niskanen Center, a market-oriented D.C. think tank, said. “But there isn’t a uniform standard yet and you can list just about anything on a voluntary market.” In addition, many scientists warn that removal technologies aren’t sophisticated enough nor coming online fast enough to reduce emissions to the level we need them to. “It’s so much harder to capture carbon than it is to just not emit it to begin with,” Charles Harvey, an MIT engineering professor who studies sequestration, told the school’s Climate Portal website. “When your bathtub is overflowing, you don’t reach for the gold-plated mop—you just turn off the faucet.” Plus, the technology is limited by land area, a finite resource. But the McDaniels believe land is the one thing going for them. In a mature market, farmers all over the world could get paid to house their modules on unused land. Even MIT’s Harvey admitted that given the amount of CO2 that must be reduced, there’s a place for carbon capture technologies as an augment to reducing fossil fuel emissions. That’s White’s take as well. “I think in general, offsets have a role to play in decarbonization efforts. I don’t think they are a panacea, but they are an important pathway to reducing emissions,” she said. The McDaniels are eyeing a 100-acre plot near their current array to continue the experiment. Filled with their modules they could be sequestering thousands of tons. But the tens of billions of tons that need to be removed from our atmosphere? “It’s going to take a massive effort and a lot of money,” Steve said. “But what it can’t take is time. We have to scale up now. And that’s what we’ve done, we’ve created a system that is modular and can scale.”

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