Startup Series: Arbor
Inevitable
The Importance of a Career in Aerospace Engineering
"I felt like, you know, it was decades of career packed into a few years," he says. "It had a big enough effect on me that I actually wanted to then go and try and become an astronaut" The company's product is now ferries astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Brad Hartwig is CEO and founder of Arbor, and today’s topic is BiCRS. No, not the people in black leather jackets cruising down the highway, but rather the acronym for the process of biomass carbon removal and storage, BiCRS. Arbor is developing a process that transforms organic waste from forest thinning to prevent wildfires. The company’s process converts the carbon in the waste into stored CO2, while also producing clean energy and freshwater as byproducts. Specifically, Arbor's process runs wood waste through a light thermal treatment known as torrefaction, which is somewhat akin to roasting coffee beans. They take this torrefied biomass and gasify it into syngas and then combust it with pure oxygen to produce clean water and high purity CO2, which they then run through a highly dense turbine to create carbon negative electricity while injecting the CO2 into permanent sequestration.
The plants that they will build to operate this process end to end will be significantly smaller than existing biomass energy facilities. And Arbor has an audacious vision to own and operate these carbon capture plants in a distributed nature near carbon injection wells and sequestration facilities, selling the excess power that they generate back to the grid or to the facilities themselves.
We start the conversation going into Brad's inspiring background, which includes time as a rocket engineer at SpaceX and nearly a decade on the USA National Swim Team, while also volunteering for Marin County Search and Rescue and the California Air National Guard. We cover how he surveyed the entire carbon dioxide removal space before landing on the idea for BiCRS and how his aerospace background seemed particularly well suited for Arbor's specific approach.
In this episode, we cover:
- [2:51] The movement of talent from the aerospace industry into climate
- [6:28] Brad's volunteer work with the California Air National Guard Rescue Operations and Marin County Search and Rescue
- [8:37] His personal background in aerospace and work at SpaceX
- [15:24] The importance of meaningful service work
- [19:57] Brad's motivations for getting into the carbon removal space and the thesis for Arbor
- [25:21] Differences between BiCRS and BECCS
- [27:47] How and where Arbor sources materials
- [31:49] Arbor's process for transitioning forest materials into biocarbon
- [35:07] An overview of torrefaction
- [40:37] The "trilemma" of biomass, CO2 storage, and load demand
- [43:38] How the company plans to scale based on organic waste feedstock availability
- [45:38] Arbor's integrated carbon sequestration and power generation business model
- [50:49] The carbon capture side of the business
- [51:38] Funding to date and plans for Arbor's future capital
- [54:27] The challenges of processing biomass
- [56:52] Who Arbor wants to hear from
Get connected:
Cody Simms Twitter / LinkedIn
Brad Hartwig / Arbor
MCJ Podcast / Collective
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Episode recorded on May 5, 2023
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
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