It's incredibly easy to release carbon into the atmosphere and accelerate climate change. But it's much harder to remove it. Startups are experimenting with large-scale industrial systems to remove pollutants from the air, facilities that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
So some other founders are thinking, why not let plants do the heavy lifting?
For Jason Aramburu and Morgan Williams, the answer was clear. But while some founders burn plant waste to fuel power plants and then capture the carbon, Aramburu and Williams turned to the centuries-old method of turning waste biomass into biochar, a charcoal-like substance that can store carbon for decades or even centuries. Done properly, this could sequester up to 2 billion tons of carbon each year while also helping farms increase crop yields.
“We both believe in biochar as a solution for carbon removal,” Aramburu told TechCrunch. But as he and Williams worked on the problem over beers at a bar in Oakland, California, they quickly ran into a problem: How do we actually scale it?
Biochar has a long history. South Americans have been producing it to improve soils in the Amazon basin for over 2,000 years. Today, about 10% of the region's soils still show signs of biochar amendments. However, production was labor-intensive and primarily carried out in situ.
One of biochar's biggest challenges remains logistics: finding enough plant waste, transporting it to a biochar facility, and then transporting the biochar to farms to be applied as a soil amendment, which is costly and energy intensive and can negate much of the carbon reduction benefits of biochar.
“It's going to be really difficult to move that material around,” Aramburu said.
So Aramburu and Williams decided to change the process from the ground up: Instead of hauling agricultural waste from farms to a biochar facility, they would bring the facility to the farm. “Identifying that problem was the first step in founding the company,” Aramburu says. The company became Applied Carbon (formerly Climate Robotics), with Aramburu as CEO and Williams as COO.
“The agricultural industry has spent over a century building large herbivorous animals that run around in fields and harvest materials,” Aramburu says. “It suddenly occurred to me that the best way to do something with agricultural residues was to mimic that working model.”
The result is a farm implement that will make any steampunk fan grin. The implement is pulled by a tractor and fed by a harvester, which dumps crop residue into a hopper where it is chopped into small pieces. It is then dried using recycled hot gases from a pyrolysis reactor, the next step in the process, where it is converted into biochar and syngas, which is used to power the farm implement. The biochar is quenched with water and spread on the soil, where it is mixed in using a disc harrow.
While the machine sounds relatively complicated, Aramburu said it could simplify biochar production and logistics, resulting in both cost savings and reduced carbon emissions.
Applied Carbon has built five prototypes in the four years since it was founded, and while the current machine is designed primarily for corn residue, Aramburu says it can be used for a variety of crops, including rice, wheat, straw, sorghum and sugarcane. It requires a large tractor and can cover about an acre per hour, but Aramburu says increasing speed is one thing the team is working on improving.
The $21.5 million the company raised in a recent Series A round should help.
“We raised this funding to take the pyrolyzer from prototype to initial production,” Aramburu said. The company is currently building the machines in Houston, with plans to deploy them in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, where they will produce biochar that will store carbon offsets that Applied Carbon already sells to companies like Microsoft.
For now, the startup operates the tractors that pull the machines, but in the future it plans to lease or sell the machines to farmers and help them sell the carbon credits their fields generate.
“To get to gigaton scale, you would need thousands of tractor operators in the field, which is not really scalable,” Aramburu said. “We don't want to be a fleet of farm equipment. We want to be like John Deere.”
Applied Carbon told TechCrunch exclusively that the round was led by TO VC, with participation from Anglo American, Autodesk Foundation, Congruent Ventures, Elemental Excelerator, Grantham Foundation, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Overture.vc, S2G Ventures, Susquehanna Foundation, Telus Pollinator Fund for Good, US Endowment for Forestry and Communities and Wireframe Ventures.