Carbon capturing algae ponds in the Sahara

"Along the coastline in Morocco, more than 300 miles from the nearest city, a green pond now sits in the middle of the sand . . . a test site for Brilliant Planet, a startup that plans to fight climate change by growing vast quantities of carbon-capturing algae in the world’s deserts . . . 'Per unit area, we can fix as much carbon—or more carbon, depending on where we are in the seasonality — as a rainforest,' says Raffael Jovine, cofounder and chief scientist at Brilliant Planet. 'The difference is, when a rainforest tree falls down, it returns 97% of the carbon back to the atmosphere, whereas we can sequester all of it.' The production at the test site varies, as the company runs different trials. But when it builds the first commercial-scale plant, covering 1,000 acres, it expects to remove 40,000 tons of CO2 per year, roughly the equivalent emissions of using 92,000 barrels of oil."