(Credit: Pixabay)Sempra Energy and the Salk Institute today announced a new project to advance plant-based carbon capture and sequestration research, education, and implementation to help address the climate crisis. Sempra Energy is donating $2 million to the Salk Institute to help fund the five-year project.
According to the Salk Institute, this project has the potential to help remove significant amounts of carbon from entering our atmosphere and aligns with Sempra Energy's portfolio to advance the global energy transition to lower-carbon energy sources.
Sempra Energy will be the lead sponsor of the Salk Institute's "Sequestering Carbon Through Climate Adapted Sorghum" project, part of the Institute's Harnessing Plants Initiative (HPI). HPI is an approach to fight climate change by optimizing a plant's natural ability to capture and store carbon and adapt to diverse climate conditions. Salk researchers aim to develop these Salk Ideal Plants to mitigate the disastrous effects of climate change by drawing down significant amounts of the excess carbon in our atmosphere while also providing more food, fuel, and fiber for a growing population. With Sempra Energy's funding, over the next five years Salk scientists will work to develop a drought-tolerant, carbon-sequestering grass (sorghum) variety designed to grow on land in Southern California and store carbon in the soil for use with grain production, grazing, or bio-energy feed stocks.
HPI aims to develop crop plants that have significant global acreages to store long-lasting carbon in the soil. Crop plants that are engineered to store more carbon in the soil for longer can lead to a potentially enormous reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). The six crops that HPI is developing (including sorghum) can have a global impact on carbon levels. HPI estimates that if, worldwide, 70% of the target crops are converted into carbon-sequestration-enhanced crop plants, 1.5 to 6 gigatons of CO2 can be sequestered per year.
