Carbon Quest

Carbon Quest, Inc is a CA-registered Benefit Corporation that has designed an energy efficient advanced wastewater treatment process to permanently sequester carbon dioxide. The patent-pending and carbon-negative process can reverse unsustainable trends by simultaneously recovering wastewater nutrients that lead to eutrophication of marine ecosystems (i.e. “dead zones”), destroy toxic chemicals of emerging concern (CEC) typically found in wastewater before release into waterways, permanently sequester carbon dioxide, and produce an algal biochar product used as a fertilizer that reduces the need for Haber-Bosch nitrogen and phosphate mine depletion. This is important because a “large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period” (IPCC SPM 2.4 p. 16, 2014). Moreover, planetary boundaries for biochemical flows (e.g. nitrogen and phosphorus) and biosphere integrity (i.e. biodiversity) have already been exceeded and will soon be passed for climate change (e.g. greenhouse gas emissions) (Rockström, 2009). Carbon Quest seeks funding to pilot test its patent-pending process at the Water Resource Recovery Center (San Luis Obispo, CA) under the guidance algae wastewater expert Dr. Tryg Lundquist (California Polytechnic Institute).