Much energy and effort is spent on reducing carbon emissions in the fight against global warming, but methane, while less abundant, is more destructive to the planet. It is far more efficient than carbon at trapping heat. Getting rid of it is essential to reaching global climate goals.
Methane is emitted from, among other things, agriculture, landfills and oil production. While some companies are trying to reduce methane emissions, others are trying to capture and remove it as it’s produced. A California-based startup called Windfall Bio has come up with a method that sounds slightly disgusting but could take a lead in cleaning up the atmosphere of methane.
Windfall uses “mems” — methane-eating microbes. These naturally occurring microscopic organisms live in the soil and eat methane as food for survival. Much like yeast that eats sugar in bread and produces substances that make it rise, mems eat methane and produce fertilizer. They’re commonly found in soils and wetlands where decaying organic matter is present and methane is abundant. But mems will eat methane wherever they find it. That’s where Windfall comes in.
“We provide those packets of mems, and then whoever has access to that methane can capture the methane themselves, turn it into fertilizer and create the value from it,” said Josh Silverman, CEO of Windfall Bio.
“Our customers can be farmers, they can be dairy farmers who have access to cows [think cow farts], and they need to make fertilizer themselves. But we also work with customers in the oil and gas space who have waste methane from their day to day operations. We can work with landfills and waste management.”
If a farmer is using the mems, they can turn around and use the fertilizer themselves. If it’s an oil producer or a landfill, Windfall will buy the fertilizer back from them, so they get paid for capturing methane.
Traditional fertilizer production requires a lot of energy and produces huge carbon emissions, especially in making ammonia fertilizer. The use of mems would be a truly “clean” fertilizer.
Windfall researched the use of these microbes for a decade and launched it to clients two years ago.
“I’ve actually been honestly fairly shocked at how high the demand is,” said Silverman. “So it has far exceeded our best projections, and we have customers now on basically every continent, and we have more inbound interest than we can even supply.”
While there is competition in the fertilizer industry, and there are other emerging technologies for methane capture, the mem method appears to be unique to Windfall. Investors say they aren’t concerned about it scaling quickly.
“We’ve seen the data and feel very compelled by what we’ve seen thus far. And we’ll continue to progress this in a number of pilots across a number of different industries going forward,” said Brett Morris, managing director with Cavallo Ventures, a Windfall Bio investor. “They don’t have all the solutions, being an early-stage company at this point, but they are, I think, rapidly doing everything they can to meet that growing customer demand that’s really global.”
Windfall Bio is planning a pilot program with Whole Foods Market dairy suppliers. This would mitigate methane emissions and enable the grocery company to make climate-friendly claims for their milk and other products.
In addition to Cavallo Ventures, Windfall is backed by Prelude Ventures, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Mayfield. The company has raised $37 million in funding to date.
CNBC climate producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.