COP26 Aftermath: Carbon Capture Without Conflict — 11/14/21

Undesert Corporation launches nature based carbon capture and sequestration SmartFore.st platform. Utilizing a patented solar water desalination system, Undesert can afforest desert regions using only solar energy and plentiful salty water.

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP26, just concluded in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, on Saturday, November 13, 2021. “While the nearly 200 nations reached a climate agreement, with unprecedented reference to the role of fossil fuels in the climate crisis, the text doesn’t reflect the urgency expressed by international scientists in their “code red for humanity” climate report published in August,” CNN reports, “Rather, it defers more action on fossil fuel emissions to next year. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the world needs to roughly halve emissions over the next decade,” to remain below the key temperature threshold of 1.5°C.

“Glasgow has a massive credibility, action and commitment gap as the world is heading to at least 2.4 ̊C of warming, if not more,” the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) warned, in its annual global update at the COP26 climate talks. The CAT warned that the “good news” of the potential impact of announced net zero targets was bringing false hope to the reality of the warming resulting from government inaction. “With all target pledges, including those made in Glasgow, global greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 will still be around twice as high as necessary for the 1.5 limit” of temperature rise above pre-industrial levels.

The New York Times in their October 25, 2021 article “Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough,” by Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, used the CAT data to show that humankind has a ways to go to keep warming below 1.5°C (from +1.1°C today).

Image from New York Times “Yes, There Has Been Progress on Climate. No, It’s Not Nearly Enough,” by Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, 10/25/21

With all of this dire news, it would be reasonable to say that humanity is in big trouble, with mass migrations, starvations, natural disasters, and extinctions on the roadmap. However visionaries like Elon Musk and the X PRIZE Foundation have not given up hope. Their $100,000,000 moonshot challenge is attempting to capture carbon dioxide at the gigaton (billions of tons) level in order to keep global warming well below 1.5°C.

“We want to make a truly meaningful impact. Carbon negativity, not neutrality,” said Musk, in a written statement released by XPRIZE. “This is not a theoretical competition; we want teams that will build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level. Whatever it takes. Time is of the essence.”

“COP 26 fell victim to the same short-term political and budget constraints which have plagued the Paris process from the start,” said Hillery Kemp, cofounder and CTO of Undesert Corporation. “There is a critical need for a major intervention to lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that is not constrained by the vagaries of short-term political survival. Nature has provided us with that solution in trees, we just need to get it going.”

Undesert intends to capture carbon by afforesting the world’s deserts. Deserts cover approximately 33% of the global surface. Growing trees in only 2% of those deserts would be enough to capture 8 gigatonnes of CO2, restoring the delicate climate balance without competing for water or land with other vital uses. Trees would not only capture the carbon but sequester it in lumber, useful for construction or conversion to material like biochar. Undesert addresses the key hurdles with this plan:

1. Water — Undesert has patented, built, and demonstrated a solar-still capable of turning salty ocean or saline underground water into perfectly pure distilled water. This system has been deployed in the desert landscape of the United Arab Emirate’s Shajar province turning salty brine into water suitable for growing trees and plants in hydroponics.
2. Land — Undesert is using privately owned desert shrubland which is not usable for food production to achieve the first XPrize milestone demonstration objective. They have planted, and are watering, 50 pine trees in the desert scrubland of Alamogordo, New Mexico. 5 pine trees will capture a tonne of CO2 per year on average over their life.
3. Survival and Capture — Local communities will be engaged to manage the trees as a source of food and income. Once the trees have reached maturity, they will be harvested for lumber and the site replanted. The tailings will be converted to biochar for the next planting, which occurs on the same land to not disturb the soil carbon. Lumber in the form of construction material has a 100 year life span. Undesert envisions adjacent construction of housing for the new community that can now reside in the former desert and maintain the new forest.

Undesert Watered Aleppo Pines Growing in the Desert Scrubland of Alamogordo, NM

“This can really scale,” says Nicholas Seet, cofounder and CEO of Undesert, “Now that we have demonstrated our ability to aforest a desert we can link that to the need from large corporations of verified carbon offsets and aforest deserts globally. Our Giga SmartFore.st product is climate triage and can lower the trajectory of humankind’s global warming impact.”

Undesert Climate Triage plan shows lowering the best-case trajectory of warming scenarios.

Seet and Kemp are part of the XPrize+Avatar program of Avatar Innovations, Canada’s first CarbonTech Accelerator, designed to help early-stage climate solutions mature and scale. They have a carbon technology focused curriculum and partner the teams with the University of Calgary and industry leaders, like Shell and Enbridge, in order to mature the technology.

“We have a solution to this climate crisis,” Seet says, “We just need to get it out there and let it grow.”

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Undesert Corporation is a Delaware C corporation in good standing based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. Undesert’s award winning Solar Wastewater Purification (SWAP) technology is a combination of Suns River (SR) solar desalination modules that use saline/wastewater to produce electrical power, deionized water, and dry salt with no liquid waste — Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD). They are launching an equity crowdfunding campaign on the website Fundify.com. Contact: Nicholas Seet, 310–770–6450, nsseet@gmail.com