SequestStar Turning Microalgae into Calcium Carbonate
In this video University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) Professor Elizabeth North and her research team, SequestStar, discuss sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using microalgae, and turning it into calcium carbonate. “The idea for this process came about when I was doom scrolling when my son was two years old,” she says. “I was just thinking about the impact of climate change on his life, and I thought we need to figure out how to pull carbon dioxide out of the sky and I thought, well, what does the Earth do?
“One of the processes that I came across was whiting events that happen in lakes and oceans when calcium carbonate precipitates in little bits into the water and it changes the color of the water, whitening it. SequestStar is the name of the biomanufacturing process that we’re trying to create and the name of our team.