Keeling Curve

Primary Project Category:

Secondary Project Category:

Project Summary / Description:

Our project started in 2020, responding to a WWF Malaysia open innovation call for problem solvers to help them improve capabilities and lower costs associated to responding to wildfires in Malaysia, especially peatland fires. We progressed through 3 levels of that open innovation call, from technical concept submission, to prototyping, to field testing, and were granted an award at the end of the competition. Our waterless technology uses common containers of liquid CO2 and some custom extendable pipes and nozzle for injecting expanding, cooling and smothering CO2 gas underground into peatfire hotspots smouldering under the surface. These are very carbon emission intensive fires, without flame, and are very hard to put out currently. Typically there is not enough water available to put out these fires, and they have to be manually dug up by crews to extinguish. Our first prototype field tests indicated promising results we can build on.

Country or Countries of Operation:

Regions of Operations:

How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

Peatlands represent one of the largest natural land based carbon sink types [1] [2]. Peatland fires are a typically long burning, hard to extinguish, underground smouldering fire type, and can produce very large releases of CO2 [3] [4]. To protect communities from fire and particulate emissions [5], and protect these vast carbon sinks, we want to provide opportunity for firefighting teams and communities to achieve better and faster response for extinguishing these fires. Our technology is being designed to be hand carried into remote off-road areas where water is scarce or unavailable [6], supporting teams to suppress and extinguish peat fires with more than just shovels. We are designing towards using common and globally available, refillable, consumer liquid CO2 canisters, and a lightweight system to feed and expand that CO2 into a gas about 500 times the liquid volume, deployed to the underground void spaces where the fire smoulders. Since CO2 is heavier than air, and can suppress fire through 3 mechanisms including pushing fire off the fuel, dramatically cooling the fuel, and pushing out available oxygen that enables the fire to burn, it is an ideal and effective means to address underground peat fires. Even though we are using CO2 as the extinguishing agent, and it is a greenhouse gas, the amount used for firefighting is small compared to the amount released from the uncontrolled burning, and the CO2 can be sourced from low impact sources.
[1] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/peatlands-store-twice-much-carbon-all-worlds-forests
[2] https://www.nature.scot/doc/peatland-action-case-study-whats-connection-between-peat-and-carbon-storage
[3] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/climate-change-adapting-impacts-and-reducing-emissions/climate-change-impacts-forests/forest-carbon/peatland-fires-carbon-emissions/13103
[4] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13034-peatland-destruction-is-releasing-vast-amounts-of-co2/
[5] https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-022-00872-w
[6] https://www.iawfonline.org/article/challenges-and-hopes-peat-fire-management-in-borneo-island/

Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Sustainable Development Goals:

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

Our project is about empowering local and often underdeveloped communities in South East Asia, and other parts of the world with peat fire issues, such as in South America, Africa, Canada, Europe, and more, to better suppress and extinguish underground smouldering peat fires at low cost and less effort, without relying on often unavailable nearby water sources. These communities often suffer the worst of the particulate and toxic gas emissions from long burning nearby peat fires. Less directly, but just as importantly, these fires contribute massively to the annual CO2 emissions from the land, with for instance the 2015 Indonesian peat fires releasing more daily CO2 over one season than all of the United States economy [1]. To address climate change, and mitigate damaging effects on climate vulnerable communities worldwide, we need innovation like ours to better address peat fire suppression and extinguishment.
[1] https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/peatlands-and-climate-change

Sub-Categories: