Microsoft is looking to lower its vast carbon footprint by pumping human waste 5,000 feet below the ground’s surface.
The tech giant hopes to offset its massive carbon footprint, only exacerbated by its ventures into artificial intelligence, by using an unusual greenhouse gas removal strategy.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep. The company’s “bioslurry,” or mix of human and farm waste, is injected deep underground – in exchange for carbon credits.
Microsoft’s purchase will span 12 years, starting next year. For each ton of carbon they shuttle deep underground, they will receive a carbon removal credit.
“We’re taking different types of organic waste,” Julia Reichelstein, the co-founder and chief executive of Vaulted Deep, told the Journal.
“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,” Reichelstein added.
The waste used by Vaulted Deep is typically a slurry, not quite solid, liquid, or gas. Traditionally, this type of waste is difficult to treat and often ends up being left in fields, leading to nutrient runoff and the spread of PFAS, or "forever chemicals," into water systems.
Vaulted Deep, however, takes the slurry and pipes it deep under natural rock formations. The company then sells carbon credits based on the amount of carbon it stores below the ground. They currently sell for about $350 a metric ton, according to the report.
Companies like Microsoft, which emitted 75.5 million tons of CO2 from 2020 to 2024, hope that storing organic waste thousands of feet underground will help them meet their emission targets.
Microsoft has a goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050, hopes to remove more greenhouse gases than the company has emitted since its founding.
To date, Microsoft has bought many carbon removal credits. It has acquired more than 83 million tons of carbon removal, of which 59 million tons have been bought so far this year, not including the deal with Vaulted Deep, according to the report.
Brian Marrs, the tech giant’s senior director of energy and carbon removal, touted the investment in Vaulted Deep as being mutually beneficial.
“They’re essentially taking biosolids, and much of that today is spread over fields,” he said. “It can create nutrient [runoff] and other pollutants for watersheds, and sealing out that biosolid where it can’t be a nuisance to the environment and where it will not repatriate carbon into the atmosphere – that approach, that co-benefits approach is very, very interesting to us.”
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