You're listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast
by the team at Nori, the Carbon Removal Marketplace.
This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs
developing solutions to climate change.
Tom, I have a pitch for you. This show is going out a week
from today. Would it be possible to work
with Ben and make this a grounded episode and produce the
show for? Sure.
Hundred percent, 100%. Let me just give, let me just
give Ben a very quick ring. OK.
Yeah. Now this is very grounded right
here. It is very grounded.
Hey Ben, how's it going? I'm sat here chatting with Ross
from Nori and the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Are you? Do you want to jump on?
Hello and welcome to the Reversing climate Change
podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon, I'm one of the
Co founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace.
We're doing something weird today.
Tom Perviti of the Carbon removal show and also of
Grounded, which is his new podcast about starting a biochar
company in the UK. You know, I feel like I've
stagnated in some ways where I've stopped experimenting with
the form. The form that I set up has been
very straightforward, as you'll hear in the show.
So I would avoid a lot of the post production woes that
previous video projects I worked on had fallen into.
I gave this advice to Tom several years ago when he was
starting the carbon removal show and he disregarded it very
rudely. And he made a highly produced
show with segments. That is something that I, I
always tell people to avoid. But it made for great radio.
And I'm, I'm really happy that he did because it made for a
really great product. That's something entirely
different within the world of carbon removal and climate
podcasting, at least as far as I've heard.
Ross, you know I am here right now.
I am here speaking with you SO. I mean, it's always, it's always
a bit funny to do these kinds of interests.
But yes, you were allowing me to prattle on a bit about you
waited till I finished saying all the nice things and then you
decided to jump in. You just kept going, you know?
It just sounded so good that I didn't want to, didn't want to
cut you off in your stride. Well, OK, without further ado,
here's the trailer for Grounded. I set out on a mission to create
a business that made biochar, explore the benefits it might
have and document the journey. But I'm learning that making a
small change involves big challenges.
Is the UK the wrong place to be doing biochar?
I don't think so, but. Why does it matter if it's
produced here or not? It doesn't.
From where to do it to proving the business model, This is my
very honest story of starting a climate business and everything
I've discovered along the way. You know, it may take a lot
longer than you think and there's a lot of other moving
parts, so I wouldn't put all the eggs in one basket.
Find out how it goes by subscribing to Grounded, a
climate start up journey, wherever you get your podcasts.
I don't know why it's so difficult to talk about.
Maybe it makes it more real, which in yeah, some ways is very
scary and I think hopefully in other ways I can find to be
quite exciting. Happy to have you here, Tom.
This is Tom Perviti from the Carbon Removal Show and
Grounded, which is his new podcast.
It's a great show, Tom. I've listened to all of it.
I wish there was more. There's only 5 episodes.
Come on man. I know, I know.
But you, you know, those five take a long time.
It's, it's taken US 6, six months of recording, just
conversations back and forth with family, friends, whoever,
and then two months of like just continually producing to get
those five out. So it takes more than you think.
Well, I mean, you know this anyway, Ross, because you,
you've been podcasting for years now.
But I think the average listener doesn't understand or doesn't
isn't fully aware of like the production value that can go
into these shows sometimes. They absolutely do not know that
at all. People ask me for advice on
podcasting fairly frequently, and I say a pretty similar thing
each time. But I come from a video
background and there's a impolite term for this, but it's
called frame effing. But it's not, not believed in
that way per SE. But there's a tendency when
you're in the editing Bay to be like, oh, we can just like
change like a millisecond here. Oh, we can add a little thing
here. And before you know it, you've
spent a lot of money, a lot of time.
No one's going to notice this change for the most part, but
the process just dragged and it's asymptotic to you let you
never reach finishing once it's there.
And so I set up reversing climate change to do it the
opposite way. You interview naturalistically.
You basically get what you get in the can, and if it's good,
then cool. If you sound kind of foolish,
OK, maybe you can edit a tiny bit, but maybe that's just what
it is and they're not all going to be winners.
And that's OK. But then the alternative is
doing something like what you did or what what Planet Money or
or Gimlet start up, which is very similar to to ground it
does. But did you hear it like that
workload and that that workflow for even producing 5 episodes,
six months of recording and what two months of producing?
Is that what you said? I mean, I'm not a perfectionist.
I'm going to say that right now. That's not even at that
perfectionistic level either. No, I know.
I know. I'm really not.
But I mean, yeah, this this,
this latest show, I, I say six months of recording because I
just had the idea for it about six months ago.
That was, you know, shortly after I had some bad news at
work. I was naive, redundant, and so
was looking at what I can do next.
I started going down this path of biochar, which I've been
thinking about and I just had had in the back of my mind,
like, it'd be great to just capture this content that I'm
learning because I'm picking up so much stuff from so many
interesting people. So at worst case scenario, I'll
just have a Bank of interesting content from conversations with
farmers or, you know, influential people in the space.
Farming is not farming though. Farming is a business.
The farming used to be a way of life.
And that's the difference. If you're looking at this from a
global lens, the UK is not an easy place to do by a charm.
There's there are a load of limitations.
And fortunately it turned into an opportunity where we could
get some funding and we started the podcast to document our
journey. And so for the last two months,
we've really been taking all of that content, which is probably
about 50 hours worth of content. And we've taken that, condensed
it down and chopped and changed it into 530 minute episodes.
And yeah, at that rate, maybe the overkill, I don't know.
But we're but but but but we're we're happy with it so far.
I just did a show recently with the subject of a Ken Burns
documentary and he was saying that the Ken Burns process is
something like 100 hours of footage to one hour of produced
finished product. Like, wow, those editors, That's
hard too. People often think that just
record it and then deal with it in post.
That's sort of a joke in film too.
It's like, we'll fix it in post, we'll deal with it later.
But I have a background in documentary filmmaking and it's
actually really hard to get even you have a good footage, turning
it into something that's a coherent story that someone
would actually want to consume. It's like extremely difficult.
There's there's a lot of creative decision making.
It's invisible to the listener too.
They're so spoiled. They have no idea the the sweat
and tears. I'm sure that you're doing you
and Ben suffering right? Oh, my God.
Yeah. And I mean, I have to, I have to
shout out my producer chap called Ben Weaver Hanks.
He's a magician. Like I basically I came to him
and was like, hey, Ben, I've been capturing all this content
for the last few months. Obviously we worked together and
worked together on the carbon removal show.
So he was like, oh, say Tom, not more.
What's this new idea you have? And fortunately, he kind of
liked the idea of telling the story of launching a carbon
removal startup and listen to some of the content that I
banked and thought, let's let's give this a go.
So yeah, hats off to him for the the hard work he's done on
helping me kind of put it together.
I didn't have six months to spend on an episode, but this
was when I thought we could collaborate to make something a
bit more interesting. OK, this is a lot of effort that
has been spent recording, conceptualizing, producing.
We get this question at Nori sometimes too.
All the the ways you could spend your time.
Why creative media? I'd be really curious to know
what your answer is, both for carbon removal Show and also for
Grounded. Big question you stumped every
time they ask you as well. Yeah, it's hard to.
Yeah, there's a lot to say about it.
Yeah, that's a thing. There's like there's lots of,
there's lots of different answers.
I think if I'm trying, if I try to condense down, I think first
and foremost, something that became really apparent to me in
2020 when we first started like looking at this was that just
that there was just such a poor lack of understanding in carbon
removal and being able to tell a compelling story in a very
simple way. Put it into lay terms, make it
interesting for for your average listener, for anyone, your
climate conscious individual to to your grandma who doesn't
really kind of know what a podcast is.
If you can make it engaging, then I think that can only do a
world of good for like the awareness of this industry.
So I think there's a big awareness raising thing there
that, that that drives me when it comes to the carbon removal
show and grounded and this new podcast.
I think in the grounded context and for this new business that
I've set up restored the biochar company, I think it makes a lot
of sense because firstly of that awareness raising thing for
carbon moving more generally, but then secondly, with these
projects, you have a lot of lead time to build up for things like
I could put a deposit down on a, on a pyrolysis machine, which is
the machine we need to make biochar.
And I'm going to be waiting, you know, 3612 months before that
machine is ready. So I've got some downtime to
sort things out and that could be anything from finding my
feedstock, building out partnerships and supply like
supply agreements, finding a buyer for my carbon credits.
But at the same time, like I'm not physically doing the thing
yet. So it made sense to put effort
into building content. And I think the the other piece
for me, for the grounded side of things that made sense was I
don't know, when I first started looking at biochar, I thought I
thought I knew biochar. I thought I knew carbon removal,
right? Like I do a podcast on carbon
removal. Therefore I must know lots about
it. Be very careful what you say
next about that, Tom, but OK. But I guess like naively, I was
like, well, you know, I know about this, I know about
biochar. And then, you know, a few weeks
in I was like, holy SH like, oh, there's a lot more here to that
meets the eye. And so that sort of kind of
shock for me, having been in the industry for two or three years,
made me realize people need to know more about how these
projects get set up. You know, they need to
understand the challenges around getting set standards and
certifications, machinery, supply chain.
And I think that story isn't told ever.
So I'd like to tell that story as well.
Very similar to an answer that I would have given Nori for a long
time. Was just chugging along trying
to get carbon credits out the door and finding ways to talk
about things that people don't fully understand or especially
when we started carbon removal was was a much newer thing and
so we're just trying to educate people on what we're even trying
to do and why it matters at all. I love the format of doing this
though as a business starting up I think one of the hardest
interviews to do. Maybe you agree with this and
maybe you don't, but companies, as they receive venture backing
and they get a little bigger, there's a tendency towards
conservatism and people don't want to be too vulnerable in a
public space because it might they might reveal some One of my
favorite parts of the show that I ever had was OK, I hope you're
not going to blush. Peter Reinhart of charm.
But I asked Peter a question about intellectual property and
if he felt any difficulty with patenting bio oils process
because charm has a, as I understand it, a pretty large
patent in that space. Peter has a software background.
People in software and did not like, they like to open source
ethos. They don't actually want to be
real patent focused. And I could tell that Peter was
really struggling with the idea. He needed to, but he wasn't
fully comfortable with it. And the way that he talked about
that on the air, I respected that a great deal because a lot
of people would have given me a much more canned answer.
And it doesn't make for good radio and it doesn't make me
trust them as a business as much.
But the way that you go about it and with grounded, honestly, it
made me want to buy biochar from you, like made me want to
support you. I I find myself connected to you
specifically, not not just biochar as a whole.
I'm invested in you. Listening to this show.
It's, it's a really successful marketing tool, I think for you.
I think it worked on me. And I know the trick, yeah.
Well, I mean, we're selling. But then again, I haven't bought
anything yet. So did it actually work?
I don't know. It inspired good affection from
me. Yeah, I think just, yeah, I
mean, it's something that we're thinking like something that I
think a lot of carbon removal companies face is like how open
do you be, how transparent do you be versus like, I guess
keeping a lid on things. And I think a lot of companies
towards the side of being, yeah, let's keep a lid on it.
And I don't know, I've just taken a very different approach.
And you know, we have nothing, we have nothing special
ourselves, right? Don't get me wrong, we have
nothing special. We, we're just like, as things
stand, we're, we're, we're purchasing a machine from Auk
manufacturer in the name of Catcha, who have also got a bit
of a turnkey solution for some of the software side of things.
You know, we're, we're doing this on farm.
We're sourcing biomass from local councils and other sort of
like civil engineering contractors.
We have no IP yet. And I think, you know, that's
something that's a journey that I would like to tell is like,
we'd like to figure out what our unique selling point is, what
our IP is, if we do find that. And I'd like to be able to tell
the story of how we get to that point because I think there's
such a mystery. And I think everyone talks about
transparency in this market, how transparent we must be and being
open to, you know, kind of lifting the lid on things.
But I'm just curious. I'm just eternally curious and
want to want the answers to things.
And so I would want the answers to this stuff if I was on the
other side. So I feel as though being on
this side I should give the answers.
It's beautiful. It might be naive, but I share
in that naivete with you like I want it to be that way.
We publish our methodologies under a very permissive Creative
Commons license. If you want to use our DAC
methodology or our croplands methodology, you can just fork
it, remix it, republish it. As long as you don't make put
republish it under a more restrictive license, you can
just run with it because that's not the thing that we're trying
to make money off of. We're not trying to make money
off of gated methodologies or services like that.
I think that's part of this is just OK.
So backing up one second, one of the episodes I just listened of
Grounded, you're talking about how you've been seeking non
dilutive capital by way of grants and pre purchases and not
seeking venture investment, which is good 'cause once you
get on that C Corp way or whatever they have that's
equivalent in the UK and you have a, a board of directors and
they want you in many cases to have intellectual property.
Because if you ever seek acquisition, that's the thing
that's being acquired in addition to the team in most of
these cases, unless you have physical infrastructure or
something else. And maybe you will, because if
you'll have actual physical units out there, But they want
to see that. It's like the pressure is really
there to not be collaborative at the level of intellectual
property that we would like to see.
So we, we might all talk a good game about that.
We clearly climate is past fail. We need to all do it together or
we don't. But there's also capitalistic
incentives that throw a big monkey wrench into there, too,
where you're like, OK, now to please the people with money and
corporate governance norms, now I have to do something that
might not actually be in the climate's best interest.
That's a really hard decision to deal with.
Well, exactly, I don't face any of those.
We don't face any of those pressures yet because we're
funding ourselves through crowdfunding and well, we're
funding our pilot project. Sorry, we are starting very
small and and so we don't have those, you know, large pressures
from investors because we're doing crowdfunding, we're doing
grant funding, we're taking pre purchase agreements or pre
purchase orders. And so that's enabling us to be,
I guess, quite nimble in, in the way that we think about things
and how we talk about things. But I think I also, I did have a
conversation with, with, with somebody in VC in, in, in the
climate tech space recently and kind of asked them that
question. I was like, what makes a carbon
removal company investable? And they're very clear, like you
need to be able to demonstrate that your solution is, you know,
having X amount of impact in terms of removing CO2 from the
atmosphere. It could be X millions of tons
by a certain date. And that could be through you
doing the removal yourself or through you providing software
that assists that removal, providing some sort of
intellectual property that allows others to do the same,
get catalytic impact. And they made an interesting
split between being a company that's venture capital sort of
backable in this space and being a project developer.
And like currently I see, you know, currently the way that
we're set up, we're just a project developer.
You know, we're sourcing a machine, we're we're sourcing
feedstock from somewhere and we're, you know, funding project
by project. And that doesn't make us venture
capital sort of fundable. And that might well be the path
that we choose to go down. We'll see what happens.
I don't know yet, but we're using the pilot as a way of
figuring out whether we are a venture capital back able
business. And if So, what it, what is our
IP and how do we want to talk about that?
Or are we just a project developer, which is still great
in and of itself, but kind of I guess eventually we'll need to
make that decision. Hopefully we'll start making by
HR first. Yeah, I think I think it's nice
because there's been so much criticism of the venture backed
model for carbon removal companies because a lot of them
are used to outsize software company returns and people.
This is the cliche at this point.
But you know, moving atoms is more difficult than moving
electrons essentially doing things in physical meet space,
different, different economics, different amounts of electricity
needed. It's just it's just not scalable
in the same way. But the pressure to constantly
be ramping up, I think we're going to see a lot more of the
developer model. I've talked to a lot of people
recently who are working on various types of project finance
efforts because people people realize there is this gap here.
And even for companies that are venture backed, once you get an
off take agreement that is not bankable because you have no
track record and cannot receive, you can't raise debt against
many off take agreements, then what do you do?
You're just like, cool, I have an agreement for every year for
four years, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get there or I
have to raise venture capital in order to do that.
But that puts me in a whole different dynamic that I might
not even want for my company. Yeah.
We need we need something like what you're describing.
I'm glad that you may fits your business model may be trying to
pioneer some of that. Yeah, I do.
Yeah. Well, again, it's so early days,
right? You know, we've got a machine
that's we've got a machine on order and we're hoping to start
to break ground and make our first batch of biochar in the
summer. But yeah, we're, we're hoping to
take those learnings and see how we can kind of forge a path
forwards. Whether that's smaller
decentralized systems, whether that's larger, more centralized
approaches with the unique approach to supply chain, I
don't know yet. But like we're going to, we're
going to learn as we go and hopefully document the journey
because I think that's what a lot of people want to know.
I've got I yeah, I've had enough challenges trying to figure out
how we get grant money and crowdfunding money, let alone
going to institutional banks for our project yet.
It seems like that's going OK for you, though.
It sounds like you got what? It sounds like you had 11 Grant
come in, at least as of my list, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the way that we've
gone about funding our kind of start up so far is like I said
through non repayable finance. So we've applied for a bunch of
grants and we've done a crowdfunder which is
successfully just tipped over 100%.
So we, I think we were trying to raise £30,000 on there so far,
which is awesome. We had half of that has been
matched by Cornwall Council, which is the local council which
we're where we reside. They're really bought into the
project, which is awesome. So yeah, kind of crowdfunding,
R&D grants, local grants, climate grants, these sorts of
things for like small businesses and then pre purchases.
So and then a bit of savings, a bit of my own savings or
redundancy package basically is kind of what's going into
setting this project up. And you know, in total, we
estimate that this pilot, we're essentially going to be removing
around 100 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere if we were to run
it for 12 months, which means we're probably producing about
40 tonnes of biochar. And that the cost of doing that
with the operations that we have and with the CapEx.
So buying the machine and getting it set up, it's about
100 to 150,000 lbs. So I mean, it's still not cheap,
but it's, it's, it's a lot cheaper than like machinery and
kits and projects that I've looked at in the past when I was
doing my research. I mean, you know, when I was
this, this is what blew my mind. In one of the episodes we talk
about they're finding the right machine.
Looking at machinery for a while now, you can get one machine
that costs £20,000 and then you get another machine which costs
upwards of €2 million. Wow.
If you drop £2,000,000 on the machine, what else would you
expect? Constant monitoring, 24/7 on
time, an automated feedstock popper, automated bagging
system, a weighing scale, like everything flat screen TV makes,
you can get the cricket. It just kind of blew me away
that there was such a big difference in price.
And so like, yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting
kind of approach we've taken to funding it.
I don't know if many carbon removal companies have
crowdfunded their first pilot project, but it made sense for
us to do so. Is it is it crowdfunding for?
Is it donations or are they buying equity or?
Yeah. Well, so so they're, they're
getting, I guess, yeah, kind of like more like Kickstarter
reads. So they can get, they get
products if they like. If you, depending on what you
contribute, we'll send you some biochar or we'll do site visits
with you. You'll get access to the
podcast. So it's a bit more of a
Kickstarter type thing. Note, if we send you biochar, we
can't account for that in our actual life cycle assessment.
So like that biochar won't be counted in our carbon removal
totals because we can't make sure that it's gone on.
You know, we, we can't guarantee that you've put it into your
soils. But yeah, so, so we might need
to make it a little bit more, for example.
I have a personal connection to the UK biochar scene actually,
which I recommend rather small, but I was one of the one of the
first buyers in my understanding of the earthly kiln so.
Oh, oh, you put one of those kilns.
We did a show about it. I'd still have it.
It's in my garage. I actually should bust it out.
I have a bunch of waste biomass, and so it's time.
But yeah, I felt like I tried it several times with people from
work. Never quite got the full hang of
it. To be clear, I think this was
user error. I think what Earthly is doing is
amazing and very cool and I think I just need more practice.
I find it's it's a little bit harder than people think to
actually produce workable biochar.
Oh, it's not like you had to do several weeks of training to
with the the manufacturer, essentially.
Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of lot of back and forth on on really
getting to grips with how we're going to work with this machine.
But when you first hear about biochar, right, you just think,
oh, that makes sense. I take some biomass, I stick it
into a bite into a pyrolysis kiln or system, whatever it may
be, and then I turn it on and then I'll get by HR out of it.
And in reality, it's a lot more complicated than that.
You know, you've got to think about the moisture content of
your feedstock. You know, you're biomass, you've
got to think about the residency time, making sure like we have a
batch system, right? So we've, if you imagine this
big three by three meter, you know, machine a box within a box
and inside that internal chamber, we stuff our biomass,
we switch it on by literally doing a small fire.
And then that heats up the external chamber, which then
warms the internal chamber to a certain temperature.
Then you're getting syn gases coming off, which they have to
funnel back into the external chamber to then run that
cyclical sort of burn process. And then you've got to watch it
for hours to make sure that it doesn't go to too high a
temperature so that you're melting the steel or that it's
not kind of dropping in temperature.
And there are all sorts of things that you need to bear in
mind, you know, when you're when you're running these processes.
It's not just as simple as like making a bonfire and putting
some wood on it and getting some biochar out.
Yeah, it's complicated. I actually have nightmares.
I genuinely, I wake up at night time.
I mean, having like the panics thinking about like, God, are we
going to like, are we going to, are we, how's it going to work?
Are we getting all the wood, you know, all the, all the supply
coming in at the right time? How are we going to process it?
What's going to happen after we've run the first few burns?
What if the machine isn't working?
Like there's so many unknowns? And I mean, yeah, I guess that's
part and parcel of setting up a new project, but I'm excited to
to see where it goes. Yeah, I am too.
I'm definitely excited to listen to actually, once the machine
gets turned on and it's time. I'm that's why when you're
coming back with the show, right?
I imagine delivery day is probably the tapes rolling.
Yeah. Yeah.
Our plan is, I mean, yeah, the way that we've organized it so
far is that the first series, the first season of this kind of
grounded show documents I guess the the founding idea of, of
restored and getting to grips with the location while we're
picking Cornwall as our area to grow, to run with the machinery,
the financing and the sort of pre purchase stuff.
And then the second series is going to be later this autumn
where we, yeah, talk about the practicalities of running this
thing. You know, by that point, we'll
have got the machine on site, we'll have sourced our
feedstock, we'll have been producing Biocharm, We'll
hopefully be working with those farmers that we've partnered
with. And then we'll go through that
whole process of getting certified.
So all of that is to come in the next season.
Sounds great. Where's the where's the pasties
and where's the clotted cream? Those are the only things people
know. Yeah.
Where is. That's a good point where?
Yeah, no, no, it's true. Cornwall's got a lot going for
it. There's there's a, there's some
great, there's some, it's a beautiful place.
Like I'm fortunate enough to to spend a lot of time there when I
was younger. So it's nice to kind of be
spending more time back there again.
And then I'll be I will be eating a lot of a lot of cotton
cream and scones with some jam and and pasties.
How's been the reaction from the biochar community?
Because we have a running joke internally, especially in the
the meme lab, that biochar people are a special breed.
They're, I feel like they're the oddest of any of the people in
the carbon removal as a class of people.
I don't know what it is, but it attracts a very specific kind of
person, as have you been welcomed into their arms?
I mean, first and foremost, we've been since putting this
out. I mean, we've obviously been
speaking with people for like the last six months and so have
been communicating with a lot of bunch of people in, in biochar,
whether they're project other project developers or academics
and whatnot. And I think, yeah, you, you,
you're totally right. It does attract, it attracts a
breadth and depth of character. And I think that is testament
to, yeah, like all the possible kind of uses biochar has and all
the possible ways that you can make it, all the possible
feedstocks that you can use. You know, you could turn any
sort of organic biomass into biochar if you had the right
machinery and the right kind of process.
So I think it just attracts all sorts of characters that have
like these interesting inspired ideas of, of, of how to make
this stuff. And some are a bit bonkers,
others make a lot of sense. And the community that I've at
least been engaged with so far has been really has been really
positive actually, like I've spoken to some really, I've
spoken to some of the largest biochar producers now in terms
of kind of carbon removal deliveries and, and pre sales
and off takes. And it's been really positive to
hear their kind of feedback from what we're doing, which is it's
just really nice that you guys are talking about this in a, in
a candid, transparent way. And, you know, when we went
through this journey a few years ago, especially at the stage
where you're at, we really identify with some of the, you
know, challenges that you have. And so far, it's been a nice
positive reception. Yeah.
Do you guys get any, any view? I'm curious from putting
something out there like this podcast and obviously the years
you guys have been doing this, what's like the craziest sort of
response you've had or like most memorable outreach you've had
from a listener or from from someone that's engaged with the
podcast? Oh.
There's been been a decent number of those over the years.
My favorite ones are the people that are still involved in the
carbon removal community who got into it through the podcast.
That isn't to say the podcast necessarily.
Like in some cases that means the podcast introduced the idea
of carbon removal to them when they wanted to work in climate
and they made a beeline for carbon removal subsequently.
And that's really cool. But I also just like being a, a
step on people's way in. So there's a version of you
reached out to us for advice about podcasting and there's a
version of reality where I was like, podcasting is full.
Don't talk to me, Tom. We don't need any more carbon
removal podcast. Please just go to your job.
And I think that's pretty wrong headed because climate is pass
fail. We need more content.
The kinds of people that might listen to your show might like.
The last couple shows I've done have been kind of odd, frankly.
The show that came out today as of recording what was it about
was on the philosophy of science.
So we read Thomas Kuhn and Paul Fare off and not everyone's
going to listen to that. Before that, I did a show about
the Vietnam War and climate change and and Carl Jung and
psychoanalysis. That's not for everybody.
There's been a bunch of shows like that where maybe I'm able
to like bring people in through avenues like that and.
But yeah. A lot of people have come in and
into carbon removal at least partially due to reversing
climate change and carbon removal.
Newsrooms, I think a lot of pride in that.
I don't know what. What's the same question for
you? What Have you had anything like
that? Yeah, I think this is going to
this, this, this was, this was a really odd thing for me
actually, when I. So, yeah, when I was out of a
job like November or December last year, I had been spending a
bit of time researching this biochar project.
And ultimately, as you know, I'm now here committed to doing
that, which is what I kind of wanted to do all along.
But there was a period for, you know, a few weeks or a month or
so where I reached out to, you know, the carbon removal network
that I had. So I spoke to other marketplaces
and registries and, you know, people within the industry and,
you know, had coffees and, and early stage interviews, quote UN
quote, literally every single one of them was like, oh, it's
weird hearing your voice because I've listened to you before on
the carbon removal show and I was like, what?
Welcome back to the Carbon Removal Show.
My name is Tom Bravitti, and I'm joined as ever by Emily Swaddle
today. We're going to.
Be talking, you know, there are senior people that are heads of
departments at these amazing businesses that, you know, when
they were first hired or first getting into carbon removal,
they were like, they listened to the likes of the carbon removal
show or the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
And that was a bit jarring for me because I was like, well,
you're interviewing me for a role and you got upskilled on
this industry partially because you listen to the show that we
produce, which is awesome to hear, but also a bit jarring.
And I was like, well, so that, but that was quite a cool, I
guess in a way, quite a cool moment to kind of have that,
have those sorts of conversations.
I love those ones too. Those ones are always kind of
fun. They're like, wait, I know
you're. Oh, OK, I get it.
I see your name. OK, I got it.
That was like the one thing, one thing I love loved about
Grounded too, is that it made me want to start a biochar company.
I was like, OK, So what if Nori doesn't work out?
What would I want to do? And one of the things that is
really interesting about biochar among all the other carbon
removal methodologies is that you, there's many biochar
producers. If you look at the leaderboard
on CDRFYI, like, oh, there's a lot of biochar represented in
there. And the volumes are often
smaller, the deliveries are higher because it's available
pretty quick relatively. And it seems like it's one of
those things almost like concrete, where since the LCA
matters a lot where you are in proximity to waste, biomass or
other things or other feedstocks.
So it means that like it can take place in a very distributed
fashion. It's not like I have to raise
$100 million to pump into a reservoir.
Essentially, yes. If I wanted to do this, what
what should I do besides listening to Grounded?
How? What are you going to evaluate
if this is the right career move for me?
A caveat this by like don't take my advice.
What? Why wouldn't I take your advice
on? That, I mean, I don't, yeah,
really. Yeah.
Why would you? Who would, who would do that?
Really? We're really starting on doing a
podcast about it. But I would say you can.
This is something that I, I thought about.
I'd, I'd kind of gone back and forth on, I think like you can
map, you can map all day long. Like you can build a spreadsheet
and work the numbers and kind of work that, you know, as much as
you want. And I think at the end of the
day, it's quite a knife edge business model, biochar
production. And I think when you when you
pour over like a spreadsheet, modelling it so, so much, you
might just get to that point where you just see it's too big
a risk to take. And I would say, I would say do
do some of that, but also don't be afraid to take the risk and
like have A and start small. So you're not perhaps, you know,
purchasing a multi $1,000,000 machine to begin with.
But start small, learn your supply chain, learn where that
feedstock's going to come from, build those early contracts,
which is what we're working on right now.
And then work on the other side. You know, who's going to utilize
your biochar, Who is your customer at the end of the day,
Because you need that physical biochar to be used by somebody
so it can be stored somewhere, whether it's in the soils or
elsewhere. And I think, yeah, there's only
so much modelling you can do before you just have to push the
push the screw it button and just do it.
I would say don't let that that sort of like financial modelling
get in the way of doing something meaningful.
It's. Nice, I like that advice.
I'm I'm going to. But again, don't take my advice.
Do not take. My advice here?
OK, I won't take your advice against Tom's warnings.
I kept picking his brand. I want to ask you about the
directionality of biochar because at least for now, you've
said that you're focused on a more decentralized farm oriented
model for biochar production. One of the long time things I
used to hear a lot, I think I'm hearing less of it now, was that
there actually isn't a lot of availability for large scale
kilns being made in biochar. Just the the sort of like tool
and die shops have not yet started making the machines to
make the machines yet. It sounds like maybe that's
changing, but is there a future where there is going to be quite
serious centralized biochar production or do you think it's
going to be remain distributed like concrete is?
Oh, it's a really good point. It's a really good question.
I mean, again, this is just speculation, speculation for me,
but I, I do see a world in which there is both a very centralized
model, so very large facilities removing, you know, 10s of
thousands of tons, maybe more each year.
And then there's a more decentralized model.
Like again, I think it very much depends on the, on the
geography. You know, perhaps a more
centralized model works in regions where you're able to
have that sort of large infrastructure.
You've got large farms, large, you know, single ownership land
masses and areas where you can kind of get a facility set up
and you've got all that biomass in that area.
But then there are, you know, countries and geographies where
you've got very smallholder farmers, let's say, and they've
all got small plots. And ultimately you need a sort
of kind of community sort of biochar production model.
And I guess like the centralized people may query and question
the decentralized people on their approach when it comes to
the efficacy of the biochar, for example, and the and like
evidencing the LCA in the right way because there's, you know, a
lot of challenges there if you've got hundreds of
smallholder farmers producing biochar, for example.
But I think I do see a world in which there is like sort of two
types of biochar then. And I think there's a market
maybe maybe for both, but I'm, I'm very curious to see what
what happens to the sort of like pyrolysis machinery over over
time. It's weird because the the
climate doesn't really care in a in a way where.
It does not turn out where that. Ton of CO2 is being removed.
The climate doesn't really care, but the customer does like the
the companies do care. And so weirdly, they really, you
know, auk based company really likes the idea of auk based
carbon removal project. And, you know, I'll be the first
to admit we are using this pilot project as an opportunity as
much as anything else to test whether we believe biochar can
scale in the UK. And there might be a world in
which that isn't the case, at least for us.
And so therefore, we need to think about a Plan B.
And that could be looking abroad and working in a different
geography, or it could be kind of doing something else.
But we're using this pilot to figure that out.
And so, at least as things stands, kind of new, this is a
big learning exercise for us. For us too, I think we came at
this from a very a prioristic, rationalistic approach where,
yeah, the climate doesn't care if it's produced here or there.
We want this to be done as cost effectively as possible.
But buyers want more than that. In many cases.
Buyers want those intangibles. They want the story.
The line we used to say was that no one really wants to buy a
barcode. I think that's true.
I think people abstract climate benefit is one thing, but I
think people are often times buying a story.
And if that story means it comes from an idyllic part of the
British countryside that you romanticize because of King
Arthur and Claudic cream and all of that, then OK.
Like maybe that is something that you should lean into rather
than scolding them. Be like, you shouldn't care
where this happens. Like maybe, maybe it's OK.
Yeah. No, I think, I think like, you
know, it made sense to do the thing where we're doing it now
for various different reasons and kind of, I guess we, yeah,
we're leaning into that, that Britishness and want to want to
really spread the project as as far as we can.
And I think not only for like to help raise awareness about us as
a project, but also just raise awareness about biochar and
carbon removal. Like I said, having spent a few
years in carbon removal and then also a year and a half or two
years selling carbon removal through the marketplace that I
used to work at, I was blown away by how few people in
sustainability like heads of sustainability.
Knew about carbon removal. I think it was just, it shocked
me that and again, it's it's a bubble, it's a small industry.
Hopefully it's growing, but it just took me by surprise by how
few people were aware of it really, given how important I
guess the IPCC says it will be come 2050.
That's a That's a hard thing to face.
That is indeed a hard thing to face, but I really respect the
way that Tom is working on this. I like when people are doing
their work in public and being able to show vulnerability and
how uncertain so many of these things are.
I think people think that IT projects strength to not
acknowledge how difficult these questions are.
And when people do their work in public, I think it
counterintuitively inspires a lot of trust.
The kinds of people I trust the least are people who pretend to
have all the answers and to have everything figured out.
I think that's a scary ideological position to try to
defend, and I really like it when I see people who are able
to work through these things openly and with an open heart in
that way that you can tell. I think that really shows
strength in a way that people do not commonly understand or as
business people use to their advantage.
So kudos to Tom. Please go listen to Grounded.
It's a great podcast. The Carbon Removal Show is as
well, and they have an active crowdfunding campaign going
right now if you'd like to get involved in what Restored is
doing. If you want to support British
biochar production in the countryside, that's a great way
to do so. And thanks so much for
listening. All the normal ending notes here
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are very much appreciated. Thank you so much for listening
and have a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening.
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