Listen to the Interview:

---

Transcript:

Ross Chambless
Jason Aramburu, welcome to the Wilkes Center.

Jason Aramburu
Thank you. Happy to be here.

Ross Chambless
Yeah. And first of all, congratulations on winning for Applied Carbon the $500,000 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize!

Jason Aramburu
Oh, thank you so much. It’s really exciting. We’re really, really grateful. And really honored to win the prize. It’s huge for the company.

Ross Chambless
Yeah, I know. And really excited to have you back in Salt Lake City to award this prize and also just to learn about the next steps, what’s on the horizon for applied Carbon, formerly known as Climate Robotics, which we can talk about later as well – that name change.

But I did want to recognize that it’s been a pretty significant few months, or year, for applied carbon. Just recognizing that I saw that your company announced that you had raised $21.5 million in series A funding from a collaborating list of really impressive groups, including TO.VC, Congruent Ventures, Grantham Foundation, Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund and many others. And then I also saw that you were named as one of the top 20 global finalists in an XPRIZE carbon removal competition. So, a lot of exciting things happening for your company, right?

Jason Aramburu
Yeah, it’s been a really exciting year for us. So, we were able to put together our fundraising round or series A.  Really grateful, really excited about that. That gives us capital to help scale the company and build out our technology and that took quite a bit of time to get put together and get the right group of investors around the table.

And then we were also named top 20 finalists in the XPRIZE carbon removal competition. And that’s super exciting too. That’s a $50 million competition and sponsored by the Musk Foundation and XPRIZE. And it started out four or five years ago with thousands of teams competing and they’ve whittled it down to 20. And now all 20 teams are competing to remove 1,000 tons of CO2 before, I believe, the end of January. And you know, the judges will evaluate the performance of all the technologies and a number of different factors. And then they’ll select one grand prize winner and three runners up for the prize in April. So, it’s really exciting. It’s been very busy for us as well.

Ross Chambless
Yeah, I’d love to come back to that later. I wanted to highlight that there’s a lot of momentum going forward for your company right now. But let’s back up a little bit and start more with your story and the origins of Applied Carbon. I was reading that you were an undergraduate student doing work in Panama, and you came across biochar for the first time?

Jason Aramburu
Yeah. So, I did my undergrad at Princeton. They had a program, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology had a program where you could spend your junior year spring semester working in Panama and working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. So, it was kind of a mix of academic courses. We traveled down with several Princeton professors who were doing their research there. But then you’re also just doing your own thesis research and helping out on different projects. So, it was really exciting, really different from typical classroom instruction. And yeah, that’s where I first learned about bio char.

I was specifically looking at nutrient cycling in tropical soils in the rainforest. And that’s where I just learned about it. It’s a tradition, an indigenous practice that Indigenous farmers in Central and South America have been doing for thousands of years, making charcoal using rudimentary technologies, rudimentary kilns and burying it in the soil. And they were doing it really for the soil amendment benefits. They didn’t know so much about the climate benefits of biochar, but I thought it was really interesting. And I learned about many of these archeological sites in particular in Brazil, where the biochar was applied to the soil 2,000 years ago. And you can dig down and actually see that the entire act layers of char in the soil today. And I just thought that was a really fascinating concept. And that’s really when you know I was bitten by the biochar bug, so to speak.

Ross Chambless
I love that. Yeah, so biochar, obviously nothing new. It’s been practiced for many millennia going back in time. But at some point, I guess you came across.. you and someone else, you mentioned Dr. Morgan Williams. At some point you connected with him and started to develop this idea that somehow there could be a potential for innovation here.

Jason Aramburu
Yeah, after my undergrad, I went and worked overseas in Africa. I was doing work sponsored by the Gates Foundation to train small farmers in East Africa in the use of biochar technology and how to produce biochar using very simple kilns that they can produce with locally available materials. And, I realized that these sort of makeshift systems to make biochar, they worked very well for a small farmer that was farming a quarter acre of land. The biochar had a really dramatic impact on their crop yield. But in the back of my mind, I was always wondering, how do we get this into a five or 10,000 acre corn farm in Iowa, for instance? Because that’s really where it gets to massive scale. And I started doing research and I realized that no one in the sector was really targeting that side of the market. There were folks developing biochar for commercial agriculture in the United States and in Canada, but it was mostly sort of small, high-value organic farms and wineries, for instance – the really expensive side of agriculture, but relatively limited in terms of scale.

And so about probably four or five years ago, I was catching up with a friend, Dr. Morgan Williams, and he and I have been friends for over ten years. We met at a biochar academic conference, and he had been working in industrial production of biochar. So, he was working for a company that was building pyrolysis systems to make char from wood for these applications, for these high-value farming applications. And he also had gotten his PhD, he’d finished his Ph.D. at Berkeley in soil science. And he was kind of thinking about what the next steps were for him. And, you know, we were just talking and saying, hey, you know, we’ve both been working in biochar for many years. The sector has been around for ten, 15 years by now. Why isn’t this in use everywhere today?

And we just started going through the why and we realized that biochar production has several obstacles that make it difficult to implement in commercial road crop farming, you know, corn, wheat, etc. And the first one is just the cost. The char that’s made in the U.S. today is made primarily on the West Coast. So, a lot of it gets made in the Pacific Northwest. It’s made in places where there’s a lot of wood, where there’s timber production. And that material then has to be moved thousands of miles to the middle of the country to get onto the farms. And we found that over 50% of the cost of biochar is just logistics. So, we realized, the trucking companies were getting rich off this, but the farmers were not able to access it because it was so expensive.

The other problem or the other challenge was that the feedstock, wood as a feedstock, is pretty expensive in many cases. You have to buy it. It’s not free because there are other competing commercial uses for wood and there’s also just not a lot of it. The U.S. is the biggest timber producer in the world and we only make about 68 million tons of wood waste every year. And so that means that our carbon removal potential via biochar is sort of capped at that level if we’re just using wood.

And so Morgan and I, you know, a series of conversations came to this realization that to bring biochar to corn farms, it needed to be produced on corn farms and it needed to be produced from the material that they have available there. And so, that was really like the founding principle, an idea that became Applied Carbon. So, we said, this is what we must do. This is our mission. Like, now how do we do it?

Ross Chambless
I see. So, it’s thinking, how do we resolve this issue of the distance gap, of bringing the biochar, eliminating that need to deliver the material from such long distances. And how can you allow farmers to just do it on the spot on the site?

Jason Aramburu
Exactly. Yeah. Those were really the kind of the two big challenges or guiding challenges that we identified.

Ross Chambless
And then, as far as thinking about how this could potentially be utilized on a larger scale as a climate change solution, that’s also very interesting too. I was reading that you said in your presentation that scientists believe there could be the potential to sequester over 2 billion tons a year of CO2 in the form of bio char. But to do that, we would need certain technologies, perhaps like what you’re envisioning.

Jason Aramburu
Absolutely. Yeah. Scientists… the consensus is that it’s around 2 billion tons per year that we can sequester as biochar. And I would say that’s probably an underestimate because those figures did not take into account a technology like ours existing, for instance. So, I think as new solutions like what we’re developing come to market, that number could increase. It’s possible, but I think 2 billion is kind of the current consensus of what’s possible.  And it’s really exciting because I do think that biochar is probably the lowest cost way to sequester and remove carbon durably that we have as well.

Ross Chambless
Interesting. So, when you say durably, durably generally means that you do it in a way, sequester the carbon in a way, that it’s going to remain sequestered?

Jason Aramburu
Yeah, exactly. Right now, in carbon removal, one of the big questions is durability — how long that carbon is actually taken out of the atmosphere or taken out of the system. And there’s quite a big range with different technologies. So, on one end you have what are typically called nature-based solutions. So that’s like tree planting or cover cropping. Those techniques do remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but they only store it for maybe a few decades. You know, if you plant a tree, it removes carbon, but that carbon only stays as long as the tree stays intact. Once the tree dies and starts decomposing, it releases the carbon.

And then you have on the other end, you have direct air capture technologies that sequester carbon dioxide deep underground. And it’s effectively permanent at that point with biochar. What the latest research indicates is that if you make your biochar under the right conditions, so if you produce it at very high temperatures, over 550 degrees centigrade and you meet certain targets, the carbon that is stored in that biochar is also considered permanent. It will stay in the soil for millions of years, according to the latest research. So, to me, that’s really exciting because biochar, you know is ready to scale today. The technology is there and it’s much lower cost than many other permanent removal technologies.

Ross Chambless
And I was also reading as far as soil health, biochar can provide a lot of other sorts of co-benefits as well, right. To agriculture in general, right?

Jason Aramburu
Absolutely. So, what we see there have been over 30,000 peer-reviewed studies of biochar to date. And the consensus that we see in the meta-analyses of those studies is about a 16 percent increase in crop yield after applying biochar. So that means a farmer who applies char to their fields, statistically there their yield will increase by about 16 percent. We also see that biochar increases the water holding capacity of the soil by over 50 percent. So, that means the soil will hold on to up to 50 percent more water after irrigation or after rain. Also, 95 percent increase in nitrogen retention. So those are really important in commercial ag because for instance, if a farmer needs to irrigate their soil, that costs a lot of money. I mean, many people think, oh, water’s free on the farm, which it may be in many places, but what’s not free is you have to pump that water onto your field and that requires diesel fuel and that generates carbon emissions. So, whereas many farmers can get water for very low cost, it’s very expensive to actually pump it on to the field. So, anything that can reduce that need to irrigate a road crop is incredibly valuable to a farmer.

Ross Chambless
Right. I also understand soil degradation has been a challenge for a while now, especially with commercial agriculture as well, right. Perhaps this this could also assist with that?

Jason Aramburu
Absolutely. My co-founder Morgan likes to say that biochar is recreating a natural process that has occurred in much of the Midwest and Mountain West for millions of years. You know, in grasslands, which are our farmland in the U.S. it’s mostly former native grassland. What we would see is that during the summers, you would have fires, grass fires that would deposit a little bit of biochar, a little bit of carbon back into the soil. And this would happen year over year for millions of years. And that’s part of the reason that we have such high-quality soils in the Midwest because of this process of burning. And what we’re doing is we’re sort of recreating that process and speeding it up and doing it in a much more deliberate way.

Biochar does improve the health of the soil and it helps to slow down soil degradation. And that is a big problem, you’re right. What we see is that chemical fertilizers, although they have unlocked massive increases, massive gains in agricultural productivity, they do also deplete the soil over time. They do result in natural degradation of the soil. And we do find that year over year farmers are having to apply more fertilizer and more inputs to compensate. So, biochar is potentially a hedge, a way to reduce and mitigate that soil degradation.

Ross Chambless
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I want to just pivot and talk specifically about the technology itself. It sounds like you’ve constantly been refining the technology and improving it. I read that you had five prototypes in the last four years, so gradually improving it. Can you talk about that process? Let’s say if you have your technology on a corn field, for example?

Jason Aramburu
Well, so we’ve realized to bring biochar to commercial row crop farming we had to solve two big problems. The first problem that we set out to solve was the feedstock problem.

Today, if you want to make biochar at commercial scale, you have to buy a machine called pyrolyzer. And what that machine does, it is adapted from the coal industry and the charcoal-making industry. So, the same principle is what makes your Kingsford barbecue briquettes. You take your biomass feedstock, your wood, whatever, and you heat it in a kiln to very high temperatures. Anywhere between 300 and 800 degrees centigrade. And under those conditions the feedstock degrades. Pyrolysis literally means to break apart with fire and you heat your material to those temperatures, but you restrict the amount of oxygen. So, a pyrolysis kiln or pyrolyzer is designed to heat the material but does not allow a lot of oxygen into the kiln. And so, under those conditions, the biomass, it gets to combustion temperatures, so it gets hot enough to burn, but since there’s no oxygen, it doesn’t actually burn.  It pyrolyzes.  It converts into pure carbon or biochar.

These systems exist. So, if you wanted to make biochar today, you would need to buy a pyrolyzer. But the problem with what’s out there today is they don’t really work well with agricultural waste feedstocks. Whereas wood is very dense material. It’s very easy to move through a continuous process. Agricultural waste is very low bulk density, it’s very fluffy and light, and it is not as energy dense. It also has a lot of ash in it and a lot of silica. And all of those characteristics make it really difficult to use those feedstocks in existing pyrolysis systems. That’s why nobody’s doing it. And, believe me, we scoured the globe looking at every reactor design and system that was out there and we realized nobody was doing this. Others had wanted to, but nobody was doing it.

So, we had to first redesign the pyrolysis system to actually work with these feedstocks. And that took several years to get a design that works and that is energy efficient and that can reliably produce good biochar from that material. So that was the first problem.

The second problem was then, okay, so you have a pyrolyzer, how do you deploy it? And we realized that it really needed to be operating on the farm. Because these feedstocks, these these wastes, are very distributed. They’re typically about 1 to 3 tons of feedstock distributed across an entire acre. And we realized that the cost of going out to collect these materials and then bring them to a centralized plant was really expensive, probably prohibitively expensive.

So, I thought back to a quote or a comment that I’d heard much earlier in my career. When I was first starting to work in biochar, I got introduced to Dr. James Lovelock, who is now deceased. But he was an author scientist from the UK. He developed the Gaia hypothesis.  And he was one of the first people to talk about biochar as a climate change, as a carbon removal solution. And he and I had a series of conversations, and I was saying, well, how do we get this biochar onto corn farms? How do we get it onto commercial ag? And he said, you know, if you want to get it onto a corn farm, you have to think like nature and think how nature would handle this. Nature would operate like a grazer, like a cow, or, some livestock moving through the field, harvesting this material. And that really stuck with me. And so, when Morgan and I were then thinking about how we could tackle this problem we sort of came back to that idea. And that’s fundamentally what Applied Carbon’s technology does.

So, what we’ve actually built is the world’s first mobile pyrolyzer. So, it’s a system that operates a lot like a combine harvester rather than a stationary piece of equipment. It actually moves through the field, picks up that agricultural residue and produces biochar on the fly. So, it actually converts the material in a single pass through the field from waste material into biochar and applies it directly to the soil.

Ross Chambless
Wow. I love the imagery that you put together, as a grazing technology working as nature might. So, this machine will move through the field and it probably doesn’t move that fast, right?

Jason Aramburu
Right. About 1 to 2 miles an hour, which is about the same speed as a typical harvester or piece of piece of farming equipment.

Ross Chambless
Yeah. And I was also thinking that at some point, if you take these things to scale, potentially you could be looking at driverless units.

Jason Aramburu
Absolutely. That’s part of our plan today. There is an operator in the cab who’s driving the tractor. So, the system looks like a typical tractor with a trailer on the back and there’s an operator driving the tractor and then he has a tablet where he can control the pyrolyzer. The pyrolyzer is mostly automated at this point. But yeah, we absolutely want to do the same thing with navigation of the system. So, over time we are working to fully automate the process. Really our vision is that a single operator can control a fleet of these units on a farm and just allow them to operate autonomously, day and night, running through the farm.

Ross Chambless
Yeah. And as far as the types of crops, we talked about corn, but I was reading also that you said there’s potential for other types of crops that are very common, you know, wheat and rice?

Jason Aramburu
Yeah, we’ve tested with a number of different row crops. Corn has been kind of the main focus to date because it’s the most widely grown crop in the U.S. But we’ve tested with rice, wheat, sorghum, cotton waste, also sugar cane waste. When you factor in all those different feedstocks, this is billions of tons of material available around the world which really has no commercial use today.  In the U.S., farmers typically will just remove it from the field. Some farmers, if they if they live near a dairy, will sell it to the dairy to be used as bedding material. But these wastes don’t really have a lot of food or protein value. You can’t really feed them to animals. In most developing countries, they just burn it. They just burn the material.

Ross Chambless
So, another question I want to ask, and others might be wondering too, is your plans for how to evaluate the capacity or the effectiveness of these new models or prototypes that you’re coming up with? Partly for carbon removal buyers, companies who are interested in investing to see that their carbon impact is being addressed. What is your approach with that to measure the impact?

Jason Aramburu
So, that’s been really important. The MRV process (measurement, reporting and verification), is probably the most important part of carbon removal. Because companies that are buying these credits, these removal credits that are supporting our work, they want to know exactly what they’re getting for their money. So, we are pursuing third-party certification now of our system. Right now, we’re working with the Puro.earth standard, and that’s the largest biochar certification mechanism to date there. There are others in development and other mature methods, but right now the Puro is the largest one and we are we work closely with the Puro team. And fundamentally what that means is they’re dispatching their team of scientists to very thoroughly evaluate our system, and they take into account the emissions that are associated with making the system, getting it out into the field, operating it. And then on the flip side, determining how much carbon is stored in the biochar and for how long.

And with our system, t’s unique in that we actually collect a lot of data to support that. So as that as the pyrolizer moves through the field, it’s constantly collecting data about how much feedstock is coming in, what the moisture content is, and the exact conditions under which the biochar is made. And then, it’s also capturing data on how much biochar it applies to every square meter of land. So, we actually build this really detailed heat map of how much carbon we’re applying to the soil. And so now, we’re going through with Puro.  We’re also really doing the same with XPRIZE and their team to really hone in and measure and determine exactly what the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) and carbon dynamics of our system are.

Ross Chambless
Very cool. I guess another question is, what is your grand vision with this? Where do you see this idea going, so that you can say you’ve truly are achieving the scale necessary to accomplish the megaton or more of carbon to be sequestered by 2030?

Jason Aramburu
Yeah, so right now we’re you could say we’re totally a vertically integrated company. So, we today own and operate our own pyrolizer.  So, we partner with farmers to access their land, we produce the biochar, and then we go in and verify and sell the carbon removal credits to large corporations. And so, one of the companies that we’ve announced that we’re working with is Microsoft. They’re buying carbon removal credits from us that we’ve produced on these farms. But our grand vision is really, we don’t want to be a huge company running pyrolizers all over the world. We really want to be more like a carbon negative John Deere. So, our grand vision is really that we can sell or lease the equipment to farmers, landowners, third parties and large ag corporations to do this themselves on their fields. And I will say we’ve gotten a lot of inbound interest from some of the Big Ag companies who want to decarbonize their supply chains and they want to run equipment like this. And so, for us, you know, we need to get the equipment to, number one, a level of polish and finish that we can kind of turn it loose with a customer like that. And two, we need to scale up our production so that we can produce the units and really get the cost down to where a corporation could buy many of these.

Ross Chambless
Yeah. It seems like success would also be, like you said, becoming almost fully integrated with a company like John Deere that perhaps farmers purchase or lease to as accessory equipment, or maybe it’s built-in with the standard tractor, and using it becomes commonplace.

Jason Aramburu
Absolutely. We really want biochar production to be integrated into the row crop agriculture supply chain in the U.S. and around the globe. So, we just want it to be another typical process that comes along with cultivating the land and growing crops.

Ross Chambless
Very interesting. Well, just a couple more questions while I have you here. I’m just thinking as far your idea is catching on, and marketing and getting the idea out there, you made a decision this past year to change the name. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jason Aramburu
When we started the company we called it Climate Robotics.  And we changed our name this year to Applied Carbon. And we did that for a couple of reasons. Number one was that we feel like this new brand really better encompasses what we’re doing. We are applying carbon to the soil and applying carbon to new agricultural, or creating new agricultural applications for carbon. So, number one, we feel the brand just really encompasses what we’re doing. We’re literally applying carbon to the soil.  And two, we also just found that there are other companies in the sector that are building robotic agricultural equipment which have very similar sounding names to climate robotics. So, we were often just getting confused for those companies and we really wanted something unique that really encompassed what we’re doing, and really told the story of what we’re building. So, we made that decision, and re-did our website, made it much more informative. And the response has been great so far.

Ross Chambless
Yeah, I can tell. The website is really well done. And it makes a lot of sense for trying to explain your story better to interested folks. I guess the last question is what are you excited about on the horizon for the company going forward?

Jason Aramburu
Yeah. We’re at this really exciting inflection point as a company. We’ve been through five generations of prototypes and now we finally have something that we think is really scalable and kind of meets our performance targets, are uptime targets, and our cost targets.

So now, we’re starting to build out a fleet of these systems. So, we have two coming online in the next week. One actually came online today. We’re building our own supply chain to scale these. We’re hoping to get to 20 to 25 units in the field by the end of next year. And so just that process alone is really exciting.

For us, opportunities like the Wilkes Climate Prize are huge because, in this space of climate startups, there is money available for proving the science of your idea. You can get an NSF grant or a government grant to prove that the science works, that your idea is possible. And the flip side, once you have something that’s proven, scalable, and you can make hundreds of them, you can get a bank loan to scale that, or you can get project finance.

But there is really a missing middle there, of we have a prototype, it works, we want to make a few more and prove the concept and get to that stage where we can raise project finance, but that funding is hard to find right now. And so, programs like this that can support that are just so crucial and catalytic. So, I’m really excited about that.

We’ve got a full plate through the end of the year of production. We’ve got our equipment up in North Texas working on corn farms. We’ll be hosting the XPRIZE team out there as well. They’ll be evaluating our systems in the field. So, really quite a lot on the horizon for us.

Ross Chambless
Excellent. Well, Jason Aramburu, Co-founder and CEO of Applied Carbon, congratulations again on winning the Wilkes Climate Launch Prize ,and thanks again for talking.

Jason Aramburu
Appreciate it. Thank you.