When weighing the positive potential of soil carbon sequestration and its effects on the environment, there’s some skepticism shared among energy industry leaders. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of optimism.
Proponents say it has the potential of capture a billion tons per year.
Jessica Monserrate, head of sustainability, North America with BASF, said she is "super excited" for BASF to take on the challenge of soil carbon sequestration, and "to figure out those next wave of innovations."
"When you think about agriculture and millions of agro-businesses across North America that have these sentinels which are constantly drawing down atmosphere carbon that’s an amazing amount of CO2 that can actually be measured," Monserrate said.
It’s time for industry to step up to the challenge of soil carbon sequestration, she said.
"What ends up happening in an agro-cultural cycle, is that a good amount of it does get mineralized, and goes back into CO2," Monserrate said. "So it becomes part of the cycle."
BASF: Soil carbon sequestration offers ‘unique opportunity’ to industry
Jessica Monserrate, head of sustainability, North America, with BASF
Discussing soil carbon sequestration on a panel at CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston, Monserrate shared that her professional background is in R&D, spending 15 years managing discovery operations.
"What that means is, we look for interesting opportunities to engineer plants, root systems and microbes to bring this into synergy below ground, potentially, and demonstrate this sequestration," she said. "We’ve never had to do this, and we’ve never been asked to do this, but I know that many of our scientific communities and experts around the world are really ready to address this. This is a unique opportunity where we’re creating demand, and we can demonstrate that carbon below ground, can not only be achieved, but is an important contribution to soil resilience."
Monserrate noted that BASF, as well as similar businesses, are keen on supporting farmers to embrace soil carbon sequestration.
"Some practices change the flow of what happens on a farm. We’d like to help them work through that practice by giving them additional support with technologies that help them achieve success so that they can successfully undertake that practice," she explained. "The value we actually get from here is that we understand what other components we can provide to help them continue to accumulate more, and faster."
"Agro-nomic understanding," Monserrate continued, "and understanding how different products fit into what is being called regenerative farming practices or sustainable agriculture practices is just the concept of making sure that biomaterial is getting incorporated into the soil."
Monserrate emphasized BASF’s dedication to advocating for the growers to ethanol plants and for O&G refiners.
"We say, ‘Hey, this is what the farmers have done, this is how we’ve captured it and we suggest this is how we should send a report to the growers to incentivize them,’" she said.
Additionally, Monserrate underscored the importance of providing growers with tools "to very quickly and accurately account for what they’re doing on their farm and provide a digital footprint of the carbon savings [they’re achieving]. And have that in a form that regulators will understand, see and support an agreed premium."
The success of the program is difficult to measure, Monserrate admitted, "as the policies haven’t been set into place."
She characterized that successes up to this point, "have sort of been missteps and successes we can pull from our carbon farming."
"What we’re trying to do is pull from those learnings to earn the opportunity for the farmer to want to engage in these types of biofield programs."
