Getty Images
"There is too much Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Our soil and food systems are broken," said Henrietta Kekäläinen, CEO, Carbo Culture. "None of us will stay alive without topsoil."
Globally, we grow 95% of our food in the top layer of soil. But that layer of soil is being depleted after hundred of conventional farming, so we need more topsoil to grow food.
In 2019, The Week reported that a Cornell Study showed soil in the US disappears ten times faster than it can be naturally replenished. That costs the American economy $37 billion in productivity annually from soil loss.
Kekäläinen says science shows us that nature has stored and used carbon in the soil for more than a millennia.
“Making biocarbon and putting them in the soil is the obvious biomimicry answer to both CO2 issues and soil depletion,” said Kekäläinen. “It can replenish soils by promoting nutrient and water storage, as well as improving microbial activity.”
Carbo Culture is a carbon tech company founded in Finland and headquartered in San Francisco. Since 2018, Carbo Culture has raised €550K in pre-seed investment. The company believes that profitable carbon sequestration is possible by turning biomass waste into biochar to repair the soil.
But they aren't alone. The growing carbon market - with a compounded annual growth rate of 11.22% from 2020 to 2028 - has its share of established players already, including Pacific Biochar.
Josiah Hunt, CEO of Pacific Biochar, has been in the biochar industry for the past decade. He started Pacific Biochar six years ago, and the company is funded by revenues and a small amount of seed funding. The company makes five different biochar products for farmers.
Both companies sit squarely in the regenerative agriculture space.
Let’s talk about carbon
Carbon is the fuel source for microbial activity in the soil, which digests nutrients for plants. And, the stable form of carbon that can amend the soil is called biochar, or charcoal.
A 2015 study from the University of Washington reported that the use of biochar in the soil had increased soil carbon levels between 32-33%.
Hunt says that the value of biochar is currently not well understood.
"Biochar is a relatively new term that essentially describes biomass charcoal when used or found in soil," said Hunt. "Language barriers compound this misunderstanding; for instance, in Japan, the tradition of using charcoal in agriculture has a long history that continues to this day [..], but most of this market activity does not use the word biochar."
Kekäläinen says biochar works like a coral reef in the ocean - it fosters soil life in its surface, and enables the soil to use nutrients better and be healthier. It's a way of boosting resilience in the face of changing weather and grows long-term yields.
"It's very, very difficult to capture parts per million out of the atmosphere, So we let photosynthesis do the work for us into plant matter," said Kekäläinen. "Instead of letting it decay, we turn it into solid carbon - which stays stable for hundreds to thousands of years and doesn't re-enter the atmosphere. This is how we accelerate natural carbon sequestration by 50x."
Carbo Culture is converting worthless agricultural and forestry residues into a high-value product. The company says it has plans to sequester three tons of atmospheric CO2 into each ton of their biochar which will be integrated back into the earth.
"In the future, I think we won't have such a thing as waste - all material in the future will be upcycled and converted to our benefit," added Kekäläinen.
It's absurd that we treat matter as single-use or disposable today. There's always a second - and sometimes higher value life.
Transitioning to biochar
Hunt believes it will take time for farmers to adopt the biochar approach.
"Money can shorten the time, but it takes a lot of time to build trust within farming communities, and trust is essential to widespread adoption,” said Hunt.
“Lots and lots of wisely applied field trials in every region of interest would quicken the curve, and that's where the money could be helpful," added Hunt. "Biochar can last for centuries, so it is only a matter of time until it can provide a positive return on investment."
If there were payment programs in place where a farmer could apply biochar in year one, then pay for it between years five and 10, it could dramatically open markets by allowing the biochar to pay for itself.
"This would be particularly useful in tree and vine crops where the first harvest is a few years after planting," said Hunt.
But Hunt says that there is another way to look at the adoption of biochar.
"Put a price on carbon! If farmers had [..] simple ways to get paid for building soil carbon and taking it out of the atmosphere, an amazing power would be revealed," said Hunt.
Biochar is a very stable carbon, and [..] can be viewed as some blue-chip carbon drawdown, a carbon sequestration approach with very low risk of being released back into the atmosphere.
Hunt believes this can and should provide certain markets where biochar may be traded at a higher value than simple offsets or carbon sequestration methods with a higher risk of release.
According to Kekäläinen, their high-temperature biochar is excellent for binding with nutrients.
Turning biomass into biochar
Carbo Culture has a demo scale facility with a 500 lbs/h capacity in the Central Valley of California that processes multiple types of forestry waste, dry plant matter waste (woody plants, nutshells, etc.) into high-quality carbon. They constructed the facility from grant and VC money and Kekäläinen's co-founder and CTO, Christopher Carstens, along with a handful of external engineering consultants, helped build the facility.
Central Valley has millions of tons of agricultural and forestry waste (biomass). This includes forestry thinnings for fire safety that are either left to decompose or burned openly in fields or in biomass incinerators, which contributes to the Valley's high air pollution score.
According to Kekäläinen, their high-temperature biochar is excellent for binding with nutrients.
"Nutrient leaching is a major problem for water pollution in many parts of the world. The carbon helps the nutrients to form bonds, stopping it from running off with rainwater or oxidizing to form air pollution," added Kekäläinen.
Survival in soil
"Biochar offers great potential for safely sequestering atmospheric carbon (climate change mitigation), but biochar also offers great potential for helping us with food security and water conservation (climate change adaptation) as recognized by the IPCC,” said Hunt.
Biochar is listed as one of the top five natural climate solutions for climate change mitigation in a 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate Change and Land report.
Hunt says we should also be looking at the value of human survival.
"What is the value of mitigating climate change when the fecundity of our species is at stake?” said Hunt.
The question is what do we need to do to change markets and incentives to make it easier for farmers to adopt regenerative soil-building farming practices? What sort of infrastructure would helpful in supporting a transition to farming practices that support long term soil health, food security, and soil carbon building?
Like Hunt, Kekäläinen believes that carbon sequestering is the way forward to help reverse soil depletion.
"The bottom line is that we need to bring the carbon down from the atmosphere and put it to better use," said Kekäläinen.
