Frequently Asked Questions

What is Living Carbon?

Living Carbon is a public benefit corporation (PBC) with a mission to responsibly balance the planet’s carbon cycle using the power of plants.

We are developing the biotechnology needed to meet the urgency of the climate crisis, and we are developing an ecosystem of investors, dedicated net zero companies, and land stewards to grow these plants where they can deliver the most positive impact.

Why Living Carbon?

Now is the launch window for large-scale carbon removal solutions. Our focus is on solutions that work with billions of years of evolution to responsibly rebalance the climate of our planet in the timeframe we have.

Leveraging biological carbon drawdown enables us to avoid the conflicting incentives, high starting costs, and requirement for ongoing and intensive management seen in methods such as direct air capture.

Trees already produce a useful form of stored carbon (wood) that fits directly into a highly established industry.

Who are your investors?

We’re backed by leading investors in the climate tech space including Felicis Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Goat Capital, Prelude Ventures, Floodgate, MCJ Collective, Homebrew Ventures and EQT Foundation as well as many prominent angel investors including Kimball & Christiana Musk, Sam Altman, Scott Belsky, Albert Wenger & Susan Danziger, and Matt Brezina.

How much money have you raised?

We have raised $15 million to date.

Is this just theoretical or do you have trees in the ground?

We’ve planted over 600 photosynthesis-enhanced trees as part of a four-year partnership with Oregon State University (OSU), and have over 3,000 acres of carbon projects secured with private landowners across the Southeast and Appalachia.

We are currently taking on new partners, working with private landowners to plant trees on underperforming land, such as abandoned mine land. See if your land qualifies here.

Why did you choose to work with trees first?

We believe in working alongside billions of years of evolution. Trees have a system for absorbing carbon dioxide that is far more efficient and less energy intensive than human-made solutions. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air using photosynthesis and transform it into food for themselves and a variety of other species. Unlike other plants, trees can capture CO₂ for decades and treated wood products can store carbon for even longer.

Living Carbon aims to demonstrate how advanced biotechnology can be utilized to increase carbon dioxide removal, restore degraded land and increase biodiversity. Trees capture the minds and hearts of many. Trees are also responsible for generating and maintaining the most complex and diverse ecological systems on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of other organisms depending on the physical structures and ecological services they build and continually perform. Trees are naturally used to clean up water and improve soil health. They also prevent erosion, detoxify polluted soils, and generate their own weather through transpiration flow –– preventing desertification and restoring abandoned pastureland and degraded streambanks.

If trees are so powerful, why do they need to be enhanced?

Trees have proven incredibly adept at restabilizing the climate over eons. However, to continue to sustainably inhabit the earth as a species, we need to address the imbalance of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions over the scale of a human lifetime.

We’ve developed a photosynthesis enhancement trait to increase plants’ growth rate and carbon sequestration potential. Some plants have naturally developed a similar method of photosynthesis efficiency increase, known as C4 photosynthesis, which relies on anatomical changes that are only possible in a certain group of plants. Our method achieves similar carbon capture results without requiring elaborate anatomical changes.

We’ve found our seedlings can accumulate 50% more biomass and capture more than twice the carbon per acre than control seedlings.

Additionally, while trees sequester an enormous amount of carbon, they also release it back into the air through decomposition. We are developing a range of tree species, with characteristics similar to a slow-decomposing spruce, that are able to keep carbon stored in the high-quality wood for longer.

So, you’re not creating a C4 plant?

That’s right. Most plants are C3 plants, which refers to the process the plants use to fix carbon from the air during photosynthesis. C4 plants use a more energy efficient approach, avoiding the photorespiration necessary in C3 plants (see "How do you enhance photosynthesis?" for more detail).

C4 plants evolved when CO₂ partial pressure was low and there was a higher partial pressure of oxygen in the air, which is the opposite of the trajectory we see today. Therefore, we have reduced the selection pressure on C4 plants.

Rather than try to go against this evolutionary process, we have incorporated natural processes from other plants and algae to achieve the same effect of avoiding photorespiration.

How do you enhance photosynthesis?

First, let’s start with some context: all of the carbon in our bodies was originally fixed from the atmosphere by plants and other photosynthetic life forms. At the heart of this process is the enzyme RuBisCO, which takes inorganic carbon (CO₂) and fixes it into sugar for plants and other photosynthetic organisms to use. RuBisCO is essential, abundant, and curious in practice. Fairly often, RuBisCO will place the similarly shaped oxygen molecule in place of carbon dioxide, producing a faulty sugar chain. The plant cell must then undergo a complex and energy intensive process, called photorespiration, which uses what it can from this faulty byproduct and releases the rest as CO₂.

We engineer a photorespiration bypass pathway to channel this byproduct into tree growth, thus increasing biomass accumulation. Usually, waste products of photorespiration are exported from the chloroplast and broken down in the peroxisomes, and finally in mitochondria. Our biotechnology enables the chloroplast to break down these waste products internally.

How do your seedlings clean soil and produce more durable wood products?

We are working with plants that already exhibit the ability to improve soil by accumulating excess metals. Larrea tridentata (creosote bush) is a copper accumulator that is capable of surviving for thousands of years in the extremely harsh environment of the North American deserts. Creosote wood shows decomposition resistance, and the wood of the closely related species Guiacum officinale is the most durable and dense of all woods, known as lignum vitae, or the wood of life. Psychotria gabriellae is a plant capable of accumulating nickel from toxic soils.

Our trees use metal accumulation to naturally slow decay and clean soils made toxic by industrial activity. These metals play a key role in increasing the durability of wood products by acting as a natural resistance to fungal decay. Our seedlings are unique in their ability to grow on land with high nickel and copper concentration found on reclamation and abandoned mine sites.

Are there other applications of this technology?

Yes, our photosynthesis enhancement technology is transferable between many different species. This allows us to take a local, ecological approach to increasing carbon drawdown and biomass accumulation.

For example, across the globe, drained peatlands are emitting billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. We have the capability to increase the growth rate of Sphagnum moss which will increase carbon drawdown and support a faster restoration rate for wetlands degraded by peat extraction.

Are you genetically engineering organisms?

Yes. We seek to use plant biotechnology to help solve our climate crisis. We use plant-derived genes to enhance the process of photosynthesis so that plants can accumulate biomass faster and draw down carbon.

Are you concerned about unintended consequences?

First, our methods at Living Carbon were chosen to avoid unintended consequences. For example, we’re growing plants that can capture more carbon by using a metabolic change that addresses the same issue (energy loss through photorespiration) as C4 photosynthesis. C4 photosynthesis is a natural process, which currently relies on anatomical changes that are only possible in a certain group of plants. Our method achieves similar carbon capture results without requiring elaborate anatomical changes.

Second, any consequences that occur will be an extension of the observations we see in our field trial and pilot projects, which will include recording of data on plant morphology and growth characteristics. This will enable us to identify consequences during the research phase.

Third, our research and findings will be verified by third parties as an extra layer of verification.

Fourth and finally, we’re intentionally planting trees on land that other plants cannot grow well - such as abandoned minelands. Our goal is to draw down 1GT of carbon in lands where trees don’t currently thrive; therefore we’re working to restore ecosystems that have already faced the consequences of human intervention, rather than integrating our trees into already-thriving wild forests.

Are the trees sterile?

All our current poplar trees are female and do not produce pollen, thus instilling a low fertility rate while maintaining the integrity of the tree to integrate with local ecosystems.

How will trees integrate with the local ecosystem?

We take an ecosystem approach to everything we do. This includes understanding the interrelationships among species in a given location as well as understanding the economics to help local land stewards thrive. With access to over 17,000 tree variations, we are focused on identifying the most helpful species for a given local area.

We focus on carbon projects that create true additionality. We focus on restoring land that has been degraded or is underperforming. We are specifically interested in abandoned mine land, reclamation land, former range land or farm land. We also work with farmers to plant trees alongside agricultural crops for shade management, riparian buffers and windbreaks.

Where can I buy one?