Photos: Windfall Bio; Getty Images.
In mid-September, the Tanager-1 satellite sent back its very first images from an altitude of 325 miles above the Earth's surface. A series of colorful images of Karachi, Pakistan came back first. But then Planet Labs, which developed the satellite together with Carbon Mapper and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, released images of Kendal, South Africa, and the Texas Permian Basin. The deceptively beautiful Texas images feature a deep blue plume, which is actually methane from oil and gas production.
Satellite image of the Texas Permian Basin, showing a blue plume of methane from oil and gas production. Photo: Courtesy Windfall Bio.
The second most abundant human-linked greenhouse gas behind carbon dioxide, methane is close to 30 times as potent at trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. It is a byproduct of industrial processes and agriculture, and is also generated from the decomposition of organic material, such as at a landfill.
Even so, methane has received significantly less attention from innovators in the carbon capture and removal space than carbon dioxide. But for San Mateo, California-based startup Windfall Bio, methane is the whole story.
"It is really rapidly rising to the top of the agenda, but not fast enough," says McKenzie Wilson, Windfall Bio director of carbon accounting. She says she considers it to be a "silent killer.'"
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But Windfall Bio has devised a method of capturing and converting methane into a product with real value: fertilizer. "Fertilizer is really the long-term vision and plan," Wilson says. "In the near term, carbon credits are certainly playing a role." She adds that some fertilizer will likely be sold initially, as well.
Windfall Bio uses what it calls "mems"–or methane-eating-microbes–to do its "dirty" work. Before it hits the atmosphere, methane from gas-capture systems at landfills, manure lagoons on farms or even flare gas can be pumped into a Windfall bioreactor, which contains the microbes. They consume methane as a means of reproduction, and as they reproduce, they become a nitrogen-rich biomass that can be used or sold as fertilizer. A Windfall spokesperson added that the "mems" can also be applied directly to a field and pull methane from the air.
Windfall Bio's methane-eating microbes appear as a pink liquid. Photo: Courtesy Windfall Bio.
"The vision is a distributed fertilizer production where you have concentrated sources of methane–farms and landfills, natural gas facilities–you can capture that gas, pump it into a bioreactor," Wilson says. Upon harvesting their growth, there is "local fertilizer production."
Windfall Bio announced a $28 million in a series A round of funding in April and counts Prelude Ventures, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, and Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures among its investors. The company also announced a new, state-of-the-art research and development facility in San Mateo, California, in July.
The broader context is serious: Global temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels–an internationally acknowledged benchmark for warming–for the full year from January 2023 to January 2024, according to a European climate authority. This increase has scientists, global leaders, and others scrambling to find technological solutions to address the warming. Many of these efforts have been focused on carbon dioxide, but methane is an area of increasing interest.
For example, at carbon removal company Climeworks' flagship Carbon Removal Summit at Climate Week NYC, Bezos Earth Fund director of tech acceleration Noël Bakhtian discussed a recently launched greenhouse gas removal initiative at the philanthropic fund. "It also is looking at some of the other gasses in this space. It's looking at, could we be advancing the science of methane removals and nitrous oxide removals, and figuring out if there is a role for them to play," she said.
