The tech giant’s insatiable appetite for power to feed its
AI habit is causing a rise in its emissions. To stop its
carbon footprint from ballooning, the company is betting on a variety of
greenhouse-gas-removal technologies.
One of these involves buying human and farm waste and piping it thousands of feet underground through a pump that acts like giant syringe.
“We’re taking different types of organic waste,” said Julia Reichelstein, co-founder and chief executive of Vaulted Deep, the company Microsoft is investing in. “It’s sludgy, often contaminated organic waste that today causes problems above ground, and instead we take the waste and put it really deep underground for permanent carbon removal.”
Microsoft on Thursday announced a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep over 12 years, starting from next year. One ton of carbon sequestered equates to a carbon removal credit.
And here I thought they believed fracking was bad.
Any problems with the ground water after the giant syringing of toxic poo sludge?
But hey, I'll send Eddy right over. 
Human waste is sanitized in our municipal sewerage systems. Some systems burn the gases as fuel. Animal manures are badly needed as fertilizers. Sadly, much is wasted or become a pollutant.
To demonstrate how fucked up our thinking is, we have a large lake into which farm chemicals including manure and chemical fertilizer runoff flows, both over ground and through percolation below ground.
This causes huge algae blooms and aquatic weed growth. Aquatic weeds 'capture' this excess fertility in their growth forming huge 'crops' of lake weeds.
There is a lake weed harvesting program, but much of these huge weed beds are left as protective cover for prey fish which are a food source for gamefish, thus the DNR has deemed them "no-harvest" zones.
These huge weed beds die off annually adding their fertility to the sediments and to the water column, so the lake never improves in water quality, instead the same pollution problems persist year after year. Beach closings are common because of dangerous blue-green algae blooms.
It seems that those in charge are satisfied to sequester this excess carbon in the lake sediments so they can maintain a 'trophy northern pike fishery'.
The irony is that those pike never have to leave the weed beds for open water as they have all they need without the risk of being caught by trophy seeking anglers.
The weeds can be vigorously harvested and used for compost, which will improve water quality, while still affording a bounty of prey species for the pike. If the weeds are cut to a depth of six or eight feet enough cover would still be there for the prey species. The pike would feed above the weeds in open water, which would improve the anglers' chances of catching them, as well as improving boating in general.
