Why biomass was used for energy historically

Agricultural byproducts like corn stover, wood chips, and soybean husks typically get left to decompose and release carbon dioxide. Don’t call them “waste” though; some farmers use these byproducts as field cover to improve soil health. And industry uses a fraction of this biomass as feedstock for valuable products like ethanol, electricity, and heat. Theoretically, it’s a vastly underutilized resource. 

The problem is that agricultural residue is really hard to collect. The economics of gathering, sorting, processing, and refining are tough. On top of that, it makes for a crappy fuel. It’s low energy density and high carbon, compared to oil, for example.

So in what applications does agricultural residue make the most sense? And how do you economically collect the material at scale?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, a carbon removal startup that collects agricultural residue and refines it in the field into what it calls “bio-oil.” It then injects the bio-oil underground for sequestration. Together, Peter and Shayle discuss the use cases and collection of agricultural residue, covering topics like:

• How the difficult economics of collecting and transporting biomass have killed centralized biomass projects, except in a few niche examples

• Why Peter says the processing and densification are key to improving the economics

• The tradeoffs between big, centralized processing facilities and Charm’s on-field mobile pyrolysis units

• The case for using agricultural residue for applications where the carbon content matters, like iron-making, sustainable aviation fuel, and carbon removal

• What’s driving carbon removal buyers and what it takes to build trust with them

Resources:

• Catalyst: Fuzzy math and food competition: The pitfalls of sourcing biomass for carbon removal  

• Open Circuit: What we learned from the ethanol disaster  

• Catalyst: Shopify’s head of sustainability on the realities of the carbon removal market  

• Catalyst: From biowaste to ‘biogold’  

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. 

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