April 26 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm FREE
Our Open House was held on April 26th, during SF Climate Week and below is a summary of the event:
We had on exhibit our machines, namely the Power Pallet, Charpallet, Chartainer and a Containerized System. We also had a prototype on show that we will be speaking more about next year. This was followed by talks
Our CEO Jim Mason spoke about the intriguing history of the company, about our prestigious grants and awards (CalFire, CEC, NSF, X-prize) and about the big picture for carbon drawdown.
Regarding global market verticals he addressed the numbers around Forestry and Fire Management, Urban Green Waste and Ag/Food residue, both in terms of availability of funding streams and biomass and availability.
He said it was ambitious but not unrealistic to shoot for a 1 Gigaton yearly CO2 global removal with our technology.
He spoke about the carbon “multiplier effects” that better the numbers on biochar carbon removal, specifically:
- Because biochar stimulates humification, there is less plant matter that is lost to CO2 during composting and in the soil
- Nitrous oxide and methane emissions are drastically reduced during co-composting with biochar and subsequently in the soil
- Increased plant mass in standing biomass
- Increased plant exudates, fungal mycelium, glomalin and microbes
More studies need to be done to really be able to quantify these multipliers but we know that they amount to substantially more than the current carbon to CO2 conversion.
The key takeaway is
Using 10% of organic residues globally, (less than 1% of global plant production) we can impact 25–60ppm CO2e over the next 100 years
His talk was followed by our Chief Science Officer, Bear Kaufmann who spoke about the Gen3 reactor and how we got there from Gen1 and Gen2
He spoke about our key innovations and about the design of our revolutionary “swirl hearth” reactor that is more fuel agnostic and yields unprecedented low levels of PAHs in the biochar as well as engine grade syngas.
Lastly he touched on the Carbon Credits MRV technologies and how we are going to network our distributed machines to act as one.
Austin Liu, our resident biochar expert, took the podium and gave an enlightening talk on the Agronomic and Carbon Drawdown applications of Biochar. His deck can be downloaded here
If this was a lot to take in you might enjoy this 5 minute summary video of our company.
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