We are delighted to receive one of the first-ever methane removal grants from Spark Climate Solutions! Over the next two years, we'll explore how a plant-based technology we conceived as a new way to cut methane emissions from cattle could not only do that, but also suck methane right out of the air! We're very excited to be working on the world-changing potential of this project with a great team as well as our frequent collaborator Professor Aram Mikaelyan and the community of the N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative. Huge thanks to everyone involved: Swathi Barampuram, Prateek Jain, Daniel Yanke, Kurt Tsuo, Ajeet H., W Dwight Armstrong, Jacqueline (Jackie) Olich, PhD, Jen Greenstein, Ph.D., Kathleen Denya, Activate, Andrés Ochoa C.
Spark is excited to announce four research awards from the first round of our Exploratory Grants for Atmospheric Methane Research funding opportunity, enabling research into two entirely new biological approaches and further core atmospheric chemistry research to improve our understanding of current oxidation dynamics and inform future development of additional methane removal approaches. Grantees include: — Arlene Fiore (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will explore how the capacity of the atmosphere to breakdown methane will change as the composition of the atmosphere responds to perturbations such as decreasing fossil fuel burning, increasing use of hydrogen as a fuel source, climate change, and other anthropogenic and natural trends. — Vincent Gauci (University of Birmingham) will advance understanding of the contribution from tree-based methane-consuming microbes to the global methane sink, and investigate approaches to enhance that sink, potentially unlocking new pathways to address growing atmospheric methane concentrations. — Jesse Kroll (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will explore the potential for chlorinated compounds to serve as marker species to quantify existing atmospheric methane oxidation pathways. If successful, this research could lead to a transformational new measurement approach to improve our understanding of atmospheric processes that breakdown methane and other pollutants. — Eli Hornstein (Elysia Creative Biology) will explore the possibility of expressing the enzyme that methane-consuming bacteria use to break down methane in crop plants, enabling plants to break down methane in the air. In addition to priority work that must happen to reduce anthropogenic methane removals, methane removal could be a critical tool to reduce near-term warming and address potential increases in natural methane emissions. The field is still in its early stages and no approaches are yet ready for deployment. In the last few years there has been growing interest and engagement from the scientific community. There was an even more ambitious response from the scientific community to the second round of Spark’s Exploratory Grants funding opportunity, and awards for the second round, which closed in June 2024, will be announced later this summer. Read more about the newly funded research projects: https://lnkd.in/gHuCKbNK