Test
Editor’s note: In honor of all the frying oil used this Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, on the possibilities and perils of using biowaste for biofuels. Since it was published in June 2022, there has been increasing investment in biofuels from oil majors, especially for sustainable aviation fuel.
Biomass. It’s the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic, and more. And you can engineer it to capture extra carbon dioxide and sequester it underground or at the bottom of the ocean.
The catch: The world has a finite capacity for biomass production, so every end use competes with another. If done improperly, these end uses could also compete with food production for arable land already in tight supply.
So which decarbonization solutions will get a slice of the biomass pie? Which ones should?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct. They cover biomass sources from municipal solid waste to kelp.
They also survey the potential end-uses, such as incineration to generate power, gasification to make hydrogen, and pyrolyzation to make biochar, as well as fuel production in a Fischer-Tropsch process.
In a report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Julio and his co-authors propose a new term called biomass carbon removal and storage, or ‘BiCRS’, as a way to describe capturing carbon in biomass and then sequestering it. Startups Charm Industrial and Running Tide are pursuing this approach. Julio and his co-authors think of BiCRS as an alternative pathway to bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
They then zoom in on a promising source of biomass: waste. Example projects include a ski hill built on an incinerator in Copenhagen and a planned waste-to-hydrogen plant in Lancaster, California.
Shayle and Julio also dig into questions like:
- How to procure and transport biomass, especially biowaste, at scale?
- How to avoid eco-colonialism, i.e. when wealthy countries exploit the resources of poorer countries to grow biomass without meaningful consent?
- If everyone wants it, when is biowaste no longer waste? And when there’s a shortage of waste — like corn stover, for example — what’s the risk of turning to raw feedstocks, like corn?
- How to pickle trees? (yes, you read that right)
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.
Transcript
Shayle Kann: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. This is Shayle. This week we are releasing an episode we recorded a while back with Julio Friedmann, talking about the opportunity of turning biowaste into “biogold.” I thought it might be apropos, given that you’re going to be thinking about deep-frying your turkey, I’m sure, this week. And what comes next but biowaste? So here’s my conversation with Julio.
Tag: Latitude Media, podcasts at the Frontier of Climate Technology. From the studios of Latitude Media.
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann and this is Catalyst.
Julio Friedmann: If you run a facility that converts biomass to jet fuel, you want to be sure that you have at least a 20-year supply of feedstock. And that’s true for anybody looking at the same landfill.
So there’s already some competition on who can get the offtake for the contract. And so again, this begs the question, is it really a waste if there’s people fighting over it?
Shayle Kann: This week, an attempt to reach the end of my impossible quest to make sense of the role of biomass in deep decarbonization.
I’m Shayle Kann. I’m a partner at the venture capital firm, Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. So if you’re a regular listener, you’ll already know that one of my recent obsessions has been biomass and its current and future role in decarbonization, and that’s because biomass plays or at least has the potential to play basically every role you can possibly imagine in this transition.
First of all, it’s a part of the natural carbon cycle as you well know, I’m sure. Plants are a big source of CO₂ sequestration, but of course they also release that CO₂ back into the atmosphere upon decomposition and for other reasons. Then there are also all the ways that humans have messed with that cycle, largely through the combination of cutting down forests and planting crops for nutrition.
So then we have this sort of distorted biomass ecosystem. And in addition to that, a whole bunch of other things that you can do with that biomass that have varying effects on emissions among other things, you can turn it into electricity, turn it into fuel, turn it into plastic, turn it into solid carbon. You can engineer it to sequester more CO₂, you can inject it underground or sink it to the bottom of the ocean and so on.
And every one of those options competes with each other for feedstock potentially and has implications on cost and land use and scalability and so on, which is all to say that it is complex and multifaceted and extremely important. So let’s discuss this conversation is with Julio Friedman, who’s also known I think appropriately as the Carbon Wrangler, and in his day job is the chief scientist at Carbon Direct. So here’s Julio.
Julio, welcome.
Julio Friedmann: It’s a delight to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shayle Kann: I am excited, very excited. I will say for this one, because I’ve been wanting to talk about all the ins and outs of biomass with somebody who’s smarter than me about it for some time now, and you fit the bill.
So let’s start with the role the biomass plays in the carbon cycle before we talk about all the things that we want to do to mess with that, to try to decarbonize the world. So what’s the role of biomass in just the natural carbon cycle?
Julio Friedmann: So out of all the CO₂ that circulates through the carbon cycle, a relatively small fraction of it actually goes into and out of biomass. One of the things that people need to remember is that carbon goes into the biomass, but it also comes out of biomass, and it’s not just if it catches fire or dies, things respirate a very complicated system, but it still represents a pretty small fraction of the total carbon cycle.
It is, however, much larger than what is in the atmosphere. So the goal here is can you take some of the CO₂ that’s in the atmosphere, put it into biomass, and either keep it there or ultimately use the biomass like a conveyor belt to take it to the lockup, take it to geological storage.
Shayle Kann: In other words, you’re saying in the natural carbon cycle, biomass is a net sink, right?
Julio Friedmann: Not quite in a natural carbon cycle. Before human beings, biomass was a wash. Essentially, it was in equilibrium. Carbon would go in, carbon would go out. Human beings started chopping down trees a long time ago we started burning them for fuel.
We started deforesting for agriculture and so forth, that released those carbon stocks and put it into the atmosphere. But it is still the case that broadly the biosphere is a wash, carbon goes in and carbon goes out. It is our actions that take it out of the biosphere.
Shayle Kann: Got it. Okay. And then the other thing we should do just in setting this up, biomass is not monolithic. It’s in fact fairly complicated. There are many different types of plants and they’re used for different purposes once humans stepped onto the scene and started screwing with them. So how do you think about breaking down the categories of biomass? What are the right ways to think about that?
Julio Friedmann: Right, so people in their head have some ideal imagining of biomass when they say the word, typically some kind of a forest, and it might be a monoculture working forest where people harvest timber or it might be a tropical rainforest that is full of diversity of all kinds and point of fact, it represents those things and many other things.
It represents the fungi that are in soils. It represents kelp in the oceans, it represents diatoms and algae. It represents all kinds of stuff that moves through nature and that lives in nature. Mostly though, we’re talking about plants when we talk about biomass. And mostly, we’re talking about fairly big plants that are durable on a plant life cycle, but not necessarily durable on a geological time cycle.
So things like oak tree or things like chaperon scrub or things like grass and grasslands. These are the kinds of things that are in biomass and we use them in different ways and they represent different climates, ecosystems and so forth. That’s why it’s all complicated.
Shayle Kann: What about agricultural crops? Obviously, I think some people think you hear biomass and you think of forests, other people hear biomass and they think of corn, probably.
Julio Friedmann: Or soy.
Shayle Kann: Or soy.
Julio Friedmann: Or palm oil. Yes. So we also have what are called crops, and sometimes those crops are used for energy. Usually, crops are used to feed people or to feed animals, but in fact, sometimes crops are used to produce energy.
These can range from wood pellets coming out of the Southeast United States to palm oil coming out of Indonesia to corn coming out of the corn belt to soybeans in Brazil, and those today are grown for a combination of food and for energy.
Shayle Kann: And then the other breakdown that you hear about or should hear about a lot I think is, there’s a lot of solutions. We’ll talk about the things you can do with biomass in a minute, but a lot of the ideas that people have for things you could do with biomass, they say, well, we’re only going to use waste biomass.
So I guess two questions there. One, what is waste biomass and how much of it is there? And then two, what difference does it make if you’re using waste biomass versus a dedicated crop? Why are companies so focused on saying, well, we’ll only use waste biomass?
Julio Friedmann:So a lot of questions in there. I’m really glad you asked them though, because waste biomass is where it’s happening these days and that’s where investors are focused and that’s where governments are focused. So it’s the right question to ask. First of all, people are interested in waste biomass because there is limit to land and ocean and nutrients and these other things.
So one of the challenges in biomass you kind of alluded to, there are trade-offs between the natural world and agriculture, and if you want to grow forests, they are in competition with where we grow food. And so that is a challenge that comes up. If you use waste, it sidesteps that whole issue.
Second of all, wastes are wastes. They are things that we are currently throwing away. So if you can use that, it is not a strain on natural ecosystems and many of those wastes end up in the atmosphere. So if you can keep them out of the atmosphere by using them in some way, they are automatically… They’re born purer than other kinds of biomass for our purposes.
And there’s basically three main categories of wastes. Forestry wastes, these are things like barks and twigs, what the forestry guys call slash dead trees. These are forestry wastes. There’s agricultural wastes, everything from almond pits to walnut husks to corn stover to waste straw. And then the last is municipal solid wastes, effectively trash, and that includes everything from the food you throw away to the plastics you throw away.
And all of those are considered biomass that is a waste today, and there’s a lot of it. A study we did is on the order of two and a half to five and a half billion tons of CO2 could be by just using that waste. So it’s a large volume that’s out there and it’s kind of around, it’s where people are.
Shayle Kann: That last point is one that I ask every time anybody brings me an idea that refers to waste biomass, which is where are you going to source this at scale? So every idea should be a gigaton scale idea. In order to have gigaton scale impact, you need a lot of waste biomass, and the waste biomass is generally not super concentrated, I think is the challenge, right?
So how do you source at scale? Does it necessarily result in anything that’s going to use waste? Biomass needs to be self-distributed because you’re going to have to capture the forestry waste from here and the corn stovers from this farm over there or attached to a municipal solid waste facility. Or is there a way to gather it in enough volume in one location that you could build a really big plant to do something with?
Julio Friedmann: So let me start by saying there are clear-cut ways to do this wrong. There’s lots of ways in which we could do this incorrectly. And so part of the goal here in thinking about biomass as a feedstock for energy or for CO₂ removal is to make sure we do it right. I’ll come back to how to do it wrong later, but let’s start by how do you do it?
So for starters, it’s more concentrated than you might think. And when I say then you might think working forests already have a lot of waste in them in California, because in part of climate change and other things, we have a hundred million dead trees that’s pretty concentrated bunch of dead trees. So you can actually think about how to use that.
In things like the Central Valley of California again, we actually have a lot of concentrated agricultural wastes from where the food is processed. So the food may be gathered like almond pits or husks or something like that, but when they’re processed, they’re all in one place. So in fact, they’re already aggregated in pretty large volumes.
The same thing is also true for municipal solid waste. There are huge volumes of trash in landfills. And in fact, companies like waste management are trying to figure out how to capitalize that waste, and that is already pre-concentrated, we’ve already brought there by trucks. The same thing is true in other parts of the world.
Even though biomass is broadly distributed, bio wastes are actually more concentrated, and so that creates an opportunity for us. One of the best opportunities is actually in a place like Denmark where today they actually have a municipal solid waste incinerator where they burn it to make electricity and then they have a ski slope on top of it. Denmark is notoriously flat, and so they built a ski facility on top of their concentrated bio waste.
So that’s the right way to do it. There are of course wrong ways to do it. One wrong way to do it, for example, is something we call eco-colonialism in which you pay a bunch of people to chop down a rainforest in some part of the world, grow a fuel crop, and then ship it back to a colonial economy. That’s not great. That is fraught and bad on all kinds of levels, so we need to make sure we don’t do stuff like that.
It is also the case though, that we can just create long supply chains and those long supply chains have fuels associated with them in their own duty cycles that makes it expensive and it also releases more carbon. So that’s not a great outcome either. There are ways to do this poorly in terms of how you contract the waste.
There’s ways to think about this in terms of releasing more CO₂ through the diversion of wastes and a question of when is a waste not a waste anymore, is actually a pretty complicated and vexing topic. So as we’re grappling with these, I think it’s helpful to keep your eyes on doing it right. What’s the goal? Why are we doing all of this and how do we optimize towards that goal?
Shayle Kann: Do you worry at all about solutions that start by using exclusively waste but hit a ceiling in terms of feedstock availability, either locally or wherever they’re producing or because they’re competing for feedstock with other solutions for whatever reason, they run out of feedstock availability of waste and then it turns into no longer utilizing waste and the incentive is there to grow crops?
So say, you start using corn stovers, but at some point at scale it turns out you can just use corn and we start growing more corn like we did with ethanol instead of for food for some other purpose.
Julio Friedmann: Like I said, there’s lots of ways to do this poorly. So yes, in fact, we worry about these things. And the near term, I’m less worried about the biomass supply, but I do mean that in the near term, in the next 10 years or so.
I think it’s possible to put together long-term offtakes, that it’s possible for those long-term offtakes to really be focused on specific facilities so that they are able to get a return on their investment from building them, and you’re able to make product that is sustained and that will have an offtake for 10 years and all these other kinds of things.
I do think that that is possible and likely. It is the case though that you begin to scale and these challenges become more challenging. One of the questions that comes up when you talk about biomass and energy or in carbon removal is what’s the preferred use? So a lot of people, for example, think that burning it for electricity ain’t a great use. We have lots of options for electricity.
Perhaps we should focus instead on things like sustainable aviation fuels where we have much fewer options and where biomass can provide a greater benefit for something that’s harder to decarbonize. And so we will ultimately start hitting limits of feedstocks and land we need to ensure and work against things like food fuel competition. And so being mindful is the solution there.
Shayle Kann: So you just alluded to the next topic, which is to talk through. Okay, so now we know we have these sources of biomass. They come from a number of different places. Ideally, at least in the near term, we’re talking about waste biomass predominantly. So then the question is what do we do with that biomass?
And you mentioned already a couple of things that people are doing or thinking about doing. One is produce energy, often electricity, one has produced fuels, which you mentioned as well. There’s also use it to do carbon removal. There is use the biomass to produce plastics, bioplastics or other consumer goods. These things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
There’s categories that cross these boundaries like BEX, which is using biomass to produce energy and do carbon removal. So let’s talk through them one by one and the sort of trade-offs inherent in them. I think maybe we start with energy using biomass for energy because tell me if you feel differently.
It feels like the most mature, we’ve been doing it for some time now. You just, I guess, mentioned it. Why not just take all of the waste biomass and turn it into baseload reliable electricity?
Julio Friedmann: Sure. And by the way, this tees up a question that we’ll come back to, how does technologies thread through this? Because some technologies are able to work across many different kinds of feedstocks or many different kinds of products, but some are really very restricted. So let’s start with electricity generation.
Everyone has a canonical picture in their head where you grow a tree, you chop down a tree, you throw it into a boiler and you make electricity. And that’s a Russian tractor way of going about it. It works, but it’s not very sophisticated and it actually delivers a pretty low value product. Electricity is not a great business these days. It’s pretty tough.
And at the end of the day, it’s competing with lots of different things. It’s competing with natural gas, with or without carbon capture. It’s competing with renewables, onshore and offshore wind and solar and geothermal and the rest. And so that is a space where we have many different options. The value product is low. It is also though a place where a lot of people started.
Many of the facilities where people are burning biomass today started their life as a coal plant and they’ve retrofit the coal plant to work biomass. In some ways that’s better than for the environment. So in other ways, not so much. But that’s a straightforward thing to do. You can also take biomass and throw it into a device called a gasifier.
And a gasifier is an important piece of technology was invented by Siemens, the original Siemens in 1850. So this takes us way back. We’ve been using gasifiers in industry forever, and we know that we can take biomass, throw it into a gasifier and make basically a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
This gives you two options, one that can be run through a gas turbine. They do that today in Germany, about 6% of the electricity is generated by biomass into a gasifier to a syngas to a turbine. You can also take that and make hydrogen with it. You can separate the carbon out and either emit it or store it, but you can just upgrade the syngas to pure hydrogen.
In a world in which suddenly hydrogen is important as a decarbonizing technology, this has a lot of interest and our friends at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have been strong proponents of this because you get a very high value product, hydrogen as opposed to a low value product electricity, and you can get all the carbon out of it before you use it, which is a plus.
You can also though take that syngas and run it through something called a Fischer-Tropsch unit and make fuels. You can make diesel fuel, you can make gasoline, you can make jet fuels, you can make all kinds of chemicals. So in fact, you can use that biomass to syngas and then as a feedstock to whatever you want.
And at that point, you’re haggling over price. What gives you the best carbon footprint and what gives you the best product value at a price so that you can finance the whole thing. Last but not least, there’s a kind of technology called a pyrolyzer. And basically, a pyrolyzer is like a big roaster. It’s sometimes called torrefaction.
It’s the same thing you do to coffee. You roast it and it makes it into something different and it exhales different gases. But that pyrolyzer can make all kinds of stuff. It can make electricity, it can make gases, it can make liquid fuels, and it can make a product called biochar. And biochar is its own thing. And depending on how you run your pyrolyzer, you can make different kinds of biochar.
Those biochar can be used itself as a fuel, but most people these days like biochar as a soil amendment because that can improve crop yields under the right circumstances and it can also store carbon under the right circumstances by putting it back in the soils.
So people are now looking at this whole bank of technologies, boilers, turbines, gasifiers, pyrolyzers, as lots of different ways to go about the business of using biomass. There’s one last thing you can do with biomass, we’ll come back to this later, I’m sure. You can just bury it. You can just take a tree, chop it down and bury it in a way that it doesn’t come back to the atmosphere.
There’s lots of ways to do that, but you can do the same thing with all kinds of biomass. In fact, and this is sometimes called biomass, carbon removal and storage or bikers. So something like Beck’s is a subset of bikers, but something like growing algae in the ocean and then sinking it to the abyssal plane or something like putting it in a big Cuisinart and making oils that you can inject in the subsurface.
There’s no energy produced at all. You’re just converting the biomass into a disposal form, that also now has a lot of value in a carbon-constrained world.
Shayle Kann: So it feels to me like because you see different people pursuing all these different things to do with the biomass, that at least in some places where there are good concentrated sources of biomass, there will be some competition for, what are we going to do with this biomass?
Are we going to gasify it? And if we gasify it, what are we going to turn it into? Are we going to literally bury it underground and new bikers? Are we going to turn into energy and so on? So what’s the right way to think about both the question of what will win out, but also what should win out? Is it the highest value end product?
Is it the highest greenhouse gas mitigation, like you said, sustainable aviation fuel maybe being the winner there? We don’t have a lot of other solutions ready at hand. What are the factors we should be thinking about and what makes sense to do with that limited supply of waste biomass?
Julio Friedmann: So let’s talk about competition in all its forms and that helps drive some of this discussion. I think it’s helpful to start by saying, what can you do instead of what should you do? Because we got to get going on biomass and we can get going on some good stuff that we know is good today.
Just as one example of that city of Lancaster in California is running the entire city on waste biomass. They’re putting into a plasma gasifier and they’re running their trucks and they’re running their power systems and they’re running their heating entirely on waste biomass. So that seems like a pretty good thing to do.
Shayle Kann: And that means when you say they’re putting it into a gasifier, they’re then taking, they’re diverting some of that, turning it into electricity, some of it, turning it into fuel, powering trucks and so on?
Julio Friedmann: Yes, exactly. And that sounds pretty cool. And they’re not competing with anything. They run their own trash heap. They have their own gasifier, they have their own utilities, so they’re just doing it all themselves. So let’s talk about, first of all, just the competition for the stuff for the feedstock itself.
As people start developing projects, in particular things like waste to power or waste to jet fuel, there is already starting to see competition around the contract for the offtake. So if you run a facility that converts biomass to jet fuel, you want to be sure that you have at least a 20-year supply of feedstock.
And that’s true for anybody looking at the same landfill. So there’s already some competition on who can get the offtake for the contract. And so again, this begs the question, is it really a waste if there’s people fighting over it? At that point, it’s something else, but for now, let’s call it a waste still. That’s one kind of competition.
There is a separate kind of competition, which is what’s the best use for it? And here, reasonable people disagree. And this is fundamentally a policy question. Some people would say the best benefit is to maximize economic growth. Other people say the best benefit is to reduce and remove carbon. Others say the best benefit is to serve the communities where this stuff is. There are no clean answers to those questions.
And so when you try to figure that out, we have not yet come close to the limits of the supplies or the kind of investment we need to get there. So it is going to be philosophical for a while, but only for a while. Pretty soon, there’s going to be some loading order priority, which a government, a municipal government or a state government or a federal government comes out and says, first use of biomass is for X, second use of biomass for Y.
And when that happens, it’s really going to shake up the market because people have contracts and they’re going to want to make sure that they are made whole.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, and I think the other thing I think about sometimes is some of these end uses, if you want biomass to be a substantial portion of the ultimate solution from a decarbonization perspective, that has ramifications for the total amount that you’re going to need. Sustainable aviation fuel is the easiest example of this.
If we believe that bio-based sustainable aviation fuel will play a prominent role in decarbonizing aviation, 20% of aviation fuel in 20 years or whatever the number may be before that has to be, you draw that back to how much biomass is going to be required to get to that much jet fuel. And it’s a ton, not a ton. It is millions and millions and millions of tons-
Julio Friedmann: And tens of billions of gallons.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, right, exactly. And so as a result of that, if you draw that back to, well, I can build one sustainable aviation fuel plant that turns municipal solid waste or whatever it is into jet fuel, and maybe I can sign my 20-year offtake for that feedstock, challenging enough on its own, but say I do that, from a systemic perspective, this really only matters and works if somebody can rinse and repeat that process hundreds, thousands of times.
But if that can’t happen, then do you think that… Or if that is going to be challenged by virtue of competing uses for the feedstocks, does that mean that we’re going down a rabbit hole on bio-based SAF that we shouldn’t be in? Maybe what we should be doing is focusing on uses that are less scaled by necessity.
Julio Friedmann: Right. So I don’t see it that way. And again, I think reasonable people can disagree. What I see for sustainable aviation fuel is that there are already 42,000 airports around the world and they all have fuel depots and there’s trash near all of them. So on that level, it’s scalable. Also, we make jet fuel in many facilities around the world and ship it to other facilities.
So you can imagine, again, production in someplace like Singapore or the Gulf of Mexico and then moving it around, which is a whole lot cheaper and energy-intensive. From a climate and energy intensive perspective, it’s a whole lot cheaper than say, moving the biomass because when you’re moving biomass, you’re moving a lot of water and it’s a mess.
So the idea of converting this stuff locally in a handful of places and then shipping it is totally in bounds with our existing infrastructure. So I don’t see that as a problem either. And we do need huge volumes of biomass to make huge volumes of sustainable aviation fuel.
But in point of fact, there is way more waste biomass than that. So we’re not going to hit the limit just on sustainable aviation fuel, there’s still other things you can do. And so I don’t see it that way. But again, different communities, different markets may have a very different aspect to this.
An important one here is Europe, which buys a lot of sustainable aviation fuel and has very little land and is not currently converting waste to that. So there’s a risk that by Europe going forward fast on sustainable aviation fuels that may lead to eco-colonialism or may lead to deforestation and bad outcomes even though they’re chasing something virtuous.
Shayle Kann: So, so far I think we’ve been focused mostly on the turn biomass into some useful product category, which could include energy or sustainable aviation fuel. What about the just sequester, the CO₂, somehow sink kelp to the bottom of the ocean, turn biomass to bio-oil and inject it underground, bury trees underground, do nothing with it that has any economic value except the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere.
How do you think about that as a use of the feedstock as compared to these other options where you’re turning the biomass into something to displace emissions from another category?
Julio Friedmann: Right. So this is why we wrote our report on bikers because we started to see a lot of this, and one of the co-authors, our colleague, Roger Aines, conceived of something we now call the Aines principle named after him. And the Aines principle is basically, biomass is pretty crappy energy, but pretty good carbon.
So at almost any reasonable carbon price, it is more valuable to remove the CO₂ than turn it into energy. That carbon removal is actually more valuable than most energy products. That’s particularly true for something like power generation.
As you start moving into higher value things like jet fuel or hydrogen and so forth, it’s less true, but still at any given carbon price, there’s a crossover and it’s not that high. For some of these systems, it’s $60 a ton. It’s just cheaper to bury the carbon instead of making something.
Shayle Kann: And anything above $60 a ton, even more so.
Julio Friedmann: Yes, exactly. And at a carbon price of say, a hundred bucks or 120 bucks, that’s pretty much everything. So we are seeing companies now coming forward that are really committed to the biomass removal concept, just the removal. And I’m not talking about a company like Drax that is trying to do carbon capture or Moat that is trying to do biohydrogen with CCS, just talking strictly removal.
A lot of money has gone into this, among other things, a huge grant to Yale Forestry school to look at this and to try to figure out how to do just bikers as a thing. They’re looking mostly at plankton in the oceans. But again, there’s lots of ways to do this. One of my favorite little companies is one called Charm Industrial based out of San Francisco.
And again, they basically put it into a pyrolyzer. To simplify for your audience, I say they just put it into a Cuisinart, they make oil and then they inject the oil back in an oil field, ta-da, done. And they think that they can do this at a price that is cheaper than direct air capture. They think they’ll be able to do this at a price that is cheaper than a lot of policies out there, like the low carbon fuel standard or European carbon taxes.
If that’s the case, then great. They shouldn’t make energy. They should just get paid to remove CO2. And then again, the question becomes, well, if we have supply chains for fuels, should we be doing that at all? Shouldn’t we just be reversing it? And again, I say it’s more helpful to think about what we could do than what we should do on this. Because if we can do bikers, we should, if we can do sustainable aviation fuels, we should, because those are both really vexing problems.
We need a lot more CDR, CO2 removal, and we need a lot more sustainable fuels. So let’s do both of those and sort that out in the mail. But there’s other ways you can do it. Another company, Running Tide, based in Maine basically just grows kelp on strings and their kelp sinks. So after a while they just detonate the buoy, the kelp sinks to the bottom of the ocean and they’re done.
There are companies now that are burying trees, what they call pickling biomass. Basically they’re burying it in brines, and that keeps it from degrading and returning to the atmosphere. There have been paper studies on this stuff for a long time, but now we’re actually seeing companies getting into this space and companies like Stripe or the Frontier Initiative are paying them to do it. Now, that’s different. And again, that looks like we’ll learn enough to figure out whether or not these are truly scalable.
Shayle Kann: The one category of uses for this biomass that we have not talked about is turning it into plastic or other consumer goods, but I think particularly bioplastic, because that’s been a bunch of attention paid to that space of late, what do you make of that pathway?
Julio Friedmann: Again, reasonable people can disagree. Let me give you my take. First of all, again, if you can do it, you should. That’s good. We should be thinking about price. We should be thinking about life cycle, full life cycle, not just carbon, but other environmental impacts. You got to think about all that stuff.
But in full transparency, one of our companies, Soligen, an investment we made at Carbon Direct does exactly that. They turn biomass in all kinds of chemicals and products including plastics. So that’s great, and if you can use that to displace a Fossil feedstock, then in fact you’re doing something positive for climate.
It is also the case that the total mass of plastics produced every year is about 1 billion tons. So the entire plastics market is barely climate relevant. So if you’re thinking about something that can deliver a big climate solution, it you cannot balance the atmosphere’s needs on making yoga pants and hoodies. It’s just not going to work that way, but that’s okay.
It is positive not just for climate, if you can do that a little bit, it’s also positive to get people in the game. If people want to start virtue signaling by buying plastic bottles made out of recycled plastic or out of bioplastics made from the air, that’s a way for them to start paying attention to this topic overall and growing interest. It’s a bank shot. It’s not directly tackling climate challenges, but I do think these things matter at the end of the day, so it’s good to take it on.
Shayle Kann: Do you see in general, I suspect I know the answer to this, but in waste biomass, is there price discovery? Is there liquidity in the sense that if I’m the owner of a forest or say, I’m a big agricultural operation, I’ve got a bunch of waste biomass, is there a standard price I will be able to charge to sell my offtake to any one of these new solutions out there, whether it is going to be turning it into energy or SAF or plastic or bio oil and injecting it underground or whatever it might be? Or is it all so location-specific and so distributed at this point that there’s no real market for waste biomass?
Julio Friedmann: Yes. So by that, I mean, in some places it really is going to be highly localized. Whether you can get the hundred million dead trees out of the Sierra, Nevada is something that matters. In terms of price discovery, in terms of facility construction, all that stuff that is not a globally fungible good. You could put it on a ship and you could send it to Korea to burn in a boiler.
But at that point, you start asking yourself, what are we really doing here? But it is the case that we already move enormous volumes of biomass all over the globe. There is ethanol trade today. We make biofuels and we ship them, and there is price discovery, and there is standardization and commoditization. So we are currently trying to balance these two sensibilities as we think about investments.
In some cases, the answer is highly localized. In that highly localized market though, you could have a total deal. You could get tipping fees, you could get paid to take the waste away, or you could be solving a major environmental problem like forest fires, while you’re also delivering an additional economic and environmental benefit.
In those cases, things stack up and suddenly it’s like, oh, hey, we’ve got a project here and that’s good. Ultimately though, we are going to need to have some kind of global standards for sustainable biomass. We don’t have those yet, which makes it a little hard to have global commodities exchanges on it because we’re still not quite sure. We’re talking about the same thing.
We know what gold and platinum are. There are standard definitions for that. There is some standard definitions for wood, which is traded as trees and forest and lumber and timber, but we don’t actually have standard definitions for biomass or how it’s harvested or how it’s converted in ways that can undergird a market today.
So we are evolving both of these systems at the same time. And I say game on. I think that’s right. It means that the smart actor and investor can get in on the ground floor and some wicked good stuff that’s hard to find. But also the future traders can rest assured that they’ll have a job in this space because there will be these global exchanges.
Shayle Kann: Julio, thank you so much for doing this. You’ve at least semi-illuminated the darkness in my mind that was the complexities of biomass. And also, I think that my newborn son is telling me that we need to wrap up. So thank you again for the time.
Julio Friedmann: I’m glad to be a 10 watt bulb in your dark world.
Shayle Kann: Well put.
Julio “the Carbon Wrangler” Friedmann is the chief scientist at Carbon Direct. So what did you think? If you liked the show today, go over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review. We appreciate that.
This show is a co-production of Postscript Media and Canary Media. You can find the show on Twitter at CatalystPot. You can also find me, Postscript and Canary there. If you want to know more about today’s topics, head over to Canarymedia.com for links and more info.
Postscript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors, including advanced energy, food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing, and advanced computing, and probably biomass.
This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Our executive producer is Stephen Lacey. Mixing by Greg Vilfrank and Sean Markwand. Theme song by Sean Markwand. Our managing producer is Cecily Meza-Martinez. I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
