With our industry standard certified industrial pilot R3, we proved our ability to build industrial-grade carbon removal facilities, make geoscale-stable carbon removal, high grade energy and make a consistent biochar that’s over 90% carbon.

What’s next? More facilities.

While a thousand million tons is our northstar, we’re cracking on with the tens of thousands of tons next. We are excited to share that we are now able to start developing our first commercial-scale facility which will be built in 2025! Our C1 facility will enable us to remove 20kt of CO2 per year.

But here’s the news, the big announcement today is: we have succeeded in securing a US$18.3M Series A funding round led by top tier partners!

US$18M Series A co-led by GenZero and True Ventures

The Series A funding round is co-led by the Temasek-owned decarbonisation fund GenZero from Singapore and San Francisco-based venture capital firm True Ventures with participation from Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd) as well as notable climate tech investors and family offices.

We at Carbo Culture are very happy to welcome Genzero to join the journey of scaling up biochar carbon removal and climate solutions. Genzero is a partner who deeply understands the space and domain we operate in, and have an inherent mission to invest into nature-and tech based solutions. We see Genzero as catalytic capital in propelling us to take on this vast opportunity of climate change solutions.

Industrial-scale biochar carbon removal

Biochar technology is one of the few ways in the world today to remove carbon in an energy-generating manner. According to cdr.fyi, biochar credits make up > 87% of all delivered permanent carbon removal to date. Carbo Culture salutes all the headway made in farm-scale and in-field conversion technologies and is aiming to lead the industrial-scale segment of biochar.

“Henrietta and the Carbo Culture team have proven with their R3 reactor pilot that carbon can be removed from the atmosphere and locked into a stable form,” said Toni Schneider, partner at True Ventures. “It was an imaginative idea and now it’s real. This next step of building a commercial facility is going to be a notable milestone in decarbonisation efforts.”

Frederick Teo, CEO of GenZero, said, “Carbo Culture’s work leverages the power of both technology and nature to produce biochar with superior carbon sequestration capabilities. By undergoing Carbo Culture’s Carbolysis™️ process, a greater amount of carbon is locked in per unit of biochar and stored more durably than conventional production methods. This proprietary technology also avoids the production of bio-oil, resulting in higher yields of clean syngas from waste biomass, which in turn can be used to generate renewable electricity and heat. We look forward to supporting Carbo Culture in their next stage of growth and scaling its decarbonisation impact across more markets.”

The Series A funding will be used to develop the first commercial facility, new ip, and push the boundaries on what’s been done before in biochar carbon removal. The commercial facility itself will be financed via a separate financial closing (est. Q3 2024).

Both personally and professionally I could not be more fulfilled leading this company through the next leg of the journey and I’m grateful for the trust to do so. We are 100% aligned with nature and its truth, and I recently read that truth is love. Well, if you love science, want to work on climate, and have a lot to give — we’re hiring!

https://carboculture.com/careers

Read here what makes biochar an amazing carbon removal technology and how Carbolysis™ makes it even better.

Biochar developer raises capital to fund scale-up of commercial facilities Carbon Pulse, Tue 28th Nov

Opening A New Chapter was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Arriving on site, I quickly get told where not to go as I put on my steel toes. I could not help but smile the whole morning — I was expecting a snowstorm, but instead I got greeted with sunshine and warm hugs from very excited team in high-vis jackets.

We are installing key equiptment at our new automation test facility in Kerava, Finland, about 25 mins from the (Helsinki) city centre. Reactor 3 is really important to us — it will demonstrate 24/7 operation in a real world environment, and in addition to gathering system data needed to move to a full scale commercial facility, also be a testbed for European feedstocks, as well as produce biochar for Nordic pilots.

Testing, testing

We’ve already proven that we can scale our core technology with R1, R2. Why build another test rig?

We are stress testing all the auxiliary equipment (think conveyors, etc) working in fully automated sync before moving to the full scale, industrial size commercial facility.
R3 is already one of the larger biochar production units in Europe, and the first-of-a-kind commercial scale-up will be many times that.
R3 continues to develop our full facility model towards a modular, quickly deployable carbon removal solution at scale.

“Our fully automated facility will showcase the quality of our engineering and outputs to our commercial and project finance partners.
We’re already building R3 to industry standard (engineering principles), which shows the excellent quality of our in-house design, engineering and deployment”, says Henrietta Moon, CEO and co-founder of Carbo Culture.

In the coming months, we are hiring key engineers and operators to our engineering hub in Finland, led by our fantastic new VP of Engineering. We’re seeing numbers of high quality professionals from relevant industries wanting to move into hard climate tech and work on a team that is really getting stuff done. Learn more on the Carbo site.

Building a circular economy and clean energy hub in Kerava

Our partner in the project is Kerava Energy, a municipality-owned energy company that’s no stranger to innovative clean energy projects.

“This is the decade to grow carbon removal to a global scale, and bringing this new tech to market will require collaboration across all spheres. We are thrilled to have found fantastic partners in the City of Kerava and Kerava Energy, whose long standing commitment to decarbonisation match our values” says Charlotta Liukas, Head of Operations at Carbo Culture.

“We are always excited to take part in developing new technologies in the energy business. At Kerava Energy, we prefer action instead of ceremonial speeches. Therefore, this project is a perfect addition to our project portfolio. With this project there is also a possibility to get renewable district heating to our network, which will help us decrease the use of primary fuel.” — Heikki Hapuli, Production Director at Kerava Energy

The location is perfect for Carbo Culture — 30 km north of Helsinki with a direct train service and close to the international airport, Kerava is the ideal jumping point to start building our engineering in Finland.

“The city of Kerava is committed to follow its Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) and be a carbon neutral city by 2035. The project fits well with the city strategy to be a spearhead of new ideas and green prosperity. Carbo Culture is warmly welcome in Kerava”, says Kirsi Rontu, mayor of Kerava.

The project is supported by the European Innovation Council EIC.

Carbo Culture was founded in 2017 on the idea that biochar is a game-changing carbon removal technique. We developed our Carbolysis™ approach, which is optimised to scale carbon removal and generate valuable by-products. The result is a biochar that is high in carbon, permanent, and versatile for many applications. With carbon removal is our main priority, we are developing biochar applications to decarbonise soil amendments and building materials, where the carbon remains sequestered for lifetimes to thousands of years.

Breaking ground in Finland was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s widely recognised that we will need to remove ten billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2050. Annually.

This poses us with two challenges.

1. Capturing parts per million is difficult
2. Capturing CO2 mechanically and storing it requires a lot of energy — energy that today is still largely produced by fossil fuels. (Unless project developers build a plant in Iceland, or build their own energy infrastructure, they are displacing others from using the green energy).

Luckily, we have a solution to both of these issues. Carbo Culture’s patented process leverages biology to capture carbon, and instead of needing energy, it generates renewable heat in the process.

When we have hundreds of plants set up, they will be helping the transition to 100% renewables instead of hindering it, all the while capturing millions of tons of carbon permanently.

How do we remove carbon?

Our patented technology is an ultra-rapid conversion system, where woody residues are turned into functional biocarbons instantaneously at a high temperature. The process transforms and locks the carbon into a stable form, which will not re-enter the atmosphere for 1000 years. The O:C ratio of the material, that we can find out from independent lab results, verifies the scale of permanence. The walnut shell carbon pictured above has a stability of up to one million years. You can store it in your garden, in a bioplastic, under city trees. It’s non-hazardous and it requires no massive scale infrastructure to store it safely. On the contrary, it can be beneficial to where it’s stored (eg. soil).

1 tonne of our biocarbon contains 3.2 tonnes of CO2 in a safe and stable form. Our technology has been independently verified by Puro.earth.

All plant life (the biosphere) captures carbon every day by using free energy from the sun for photosynthesis and turning CO2 into plant matter which then eventually decomposes and re-enters the atmosphere. This is the carbon cycle that Carbo Culture taps into by removing the carbon from the cycle and locking it away.

When we have hundreds of plants set up, they will be helping the transition to 100% renewables instead of hindering it, all the while capturing millions of tons of carbon permanently.

Scalability

Our demo-scale pilot facility in California is still expensive to run. At the processing speed of 250 lbs of biomass/hr while in production mode, we can produce 100–200 tons of CO2 removal annually. Today we’re at a cost of $600 per ton of CO2 removed. That price includes a thousand year storage, of course!

We’re currently preparing for a scaled up facility, with the design works already underway. We’re aiming to hit $400/CO2t by the end of 2022. Our stretch goal is to get to $200/CO2t by 2024.

We have an audacious (some say preposterous) target of being able to sequester 1Gt CO2e by 2030. We believe (and there’s a fleet of new science coming out, too) that we can get added greenhouse-gas reduction from the applications where the carbon is used.

By using our biocarbon mixed in with bacterial processes, or by substituting a more polluting material, we can not just capture and store the carbon but actually avoid one to thirty tonnes of CO2e per ton of material used. This is why we set such a ludicrous target, in addition to the fact that someone really needs to do this job.

1 Gt is about 1/6th of the carbon removal that is needed by 2030 to stay below 2°C (if we reduce global emissions, too). That’s why we definitely want to see other companies join us in this race against time.

The climate tech wave is building, and we’re feeling it. This new market of carbon removals is gaining market share in the voluntary CO2 market, and as we look at more solutions entering the field and more people understanding the difference between removals and offsets, we begin to set targets, rules and use language that is in line with what truly needs to happen. Then, the green economy can finally lift off.

Thankfully, we have an amazing crew on our voyage. Our hungry team committed to solve climate change is growing, and we have some news:

Today, we’re humbled and excited to partner with True Ventures and Cherry Ventures as we set forth on our carbon removal journey.

Read all about it here:

Large-scale CO2 removal startup Carbo Culture raises $6.2M Seed led by True Ventures

The simple way was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This marks an important step in our north star mission to draw down a billion tons of CO2.

Our carbon drawdown solution is now independently proven, audited and verified! Our process sequesters 3.2 tons of CO2 per ton of biocarbon. Its half-life is over 1000 years, meaning that it’s safely out of the atmosphere for a very, very long time.

We’re one step closer to realising our mission of carbon drawdown by joining the Puro.earth carbon removal credits marketplace. In addition, we’re excited to announce that all of our verified carbon removal to date has been sold to South Pole, a corporate climate solutions provider!

At the moment, less than 5% of the globally traded voluntary carbon credits are carbon removals. The rest are emission avoidance, such as energy use optimisation or renewables. Carbon removal methods — such as new forested areas, or negative emission technologies, are few and far between.

We’re one of the removal technologies: a hybrid combining biology and technology.

These credits help organisations compensate to “net zero” emissions and the revenues help fund science-based carbon removal companies like ours.

What makes carbon removal important?

There are some emissions that will be more tedious to avoid than others. To get to net-zero — or zero added carbon to the atmosphere — we need to remove as much carbon dioxide as we release. While eventually decarbonisation is the goal for society, carbon removal credits offer an essential pathway to net-zero by neutralising the still unavoidable emissions.

How does carbon removal differ from carbon offsetting?

Most carbon offsets represent emissions avoidance, such as renewables, energy efficiency improvements or protecting forests. Even if emissions are avoided or reduced in one place, it does not neutralise other emissions. So the net result is adding emissions to the atmosphere.

Carbon removal, on the other hand, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which creates a negative emission. When coupled with an emission, the result is net-zero.

How does Carbo Culture sequester CO2?

When biomasses such as wood or crop waste decompose, 99% of the stored carbon is re-released into the atmosphere. We short-circuit this cycle by converting the biomass into a stable material called biocarbon, which won’t decompose for a very very long time.

Where do trees go? Is a mystery many have not thought of.

By converting the biomass into biocarbon, we lock in — or sequester — the carbon into a stable, solid form that won’t break down. Our biocarbon stays unchanged for over 1000 years, and when applied to soil, it’s considered a permanent carbon removal method.

How do we know the longevity of our carbon removal? This is the unique stability estimate of our biochar based on lab verified material characteristics.

Our biocarbon is used for soil remediation, water treatment and environmental processes, never burned.

Read more about our carbon sequestration process.

Why biochar, and not a different solution?

Carbon drawdown can be achieved by using different technologies and methods, but not all drawn down carbon is destined to be stored. Sometimes CO2 is repurposed and re-released, such as in the case of CO2 to fuel or chemicals.

Capturing parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere is difficult and energy consuming. In the quest to scale carbon removal faster, there’s an undisputed champion already doing this effectively: nature. Biology, photosynthesis, and the annual carbon cycle are drawing down billions of tons of CO2 every year. We are tapping into this cycle.

When we started working on preventing global warming, we set out to find the most elegant solution for CO2 drawdown. In biochar, we’ve found a safe, stable method with huge potential as a scalable and cost-effective way to remove and store carbon.

What are the benefits of Carbo Culture’s biocarbon conversion method?

Biochar as a tool for soil has been around for thousands of years. We’re working on a scaled-up upgrade of the process of making biochar. We focus on maximising the stable carbon retention, and minimising losses as energy and liquid tars.

We work in a very high temperature that makes our high-grade biocarbon functional and clean, with low ash and no PAH toxins.

Our process is ultra efficient: each ton of material sequesters 3.2 tons of CO2. (LCA)

Where is Carbo Culture biochar used?

Our current focus is on the urban space and in blue-green infrastructure. This includes urban green spaces (trees, rooftops), stormwater filtration and water treatment in general. We also have a few friends making new construction materials with our carbon, as it’s durable, lightweight, and lowers their material footprint.

How does Puro.earth work, and how can I trust their verification?

Puro.earth is the world’s first CO2 credit sales platform focused purely on carbon removal. They have developed a rigorous methodology to assess and certify projects. In our case, this meant undergoing a Lifecycle Analysis conducted by UseLess, an audit by ELS, and laboratory analysis of material in addition to meeting the marketplace’s other rules and requirements for production conditions, applications and end-of-life.

This could fit our company climate strategy — where can I get in touch?

You can visit our profile page on Puro.earth, or get in touch with the professionals at South Pole.

Thanks for reading —and let us know what you’d like to learn more about! Feel free to reach out to us at hello@carboculture.com or tweet @carboculture.

Carbo Culture’s carbon removal is now certified! was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Humans have over-used the resources that this planet can annually produce again, but we still have a possibility to transition to a sustainable world. We’ve made progress — since last year, our consumption fell by 10%. We are still using 3/3 resources in 2/3 of a year, and our eco-debt is racking up. Ecologically speaking, we are on high-speed rails headed for a cliffs edge, but with novel resources directed to fix the problem we could bring our speed to extinction down, and ultimately transition us to a juster, cleaner future.

Today I saw a house on fire that I had been in: a teacher’s house in the Santa Cruz mountains in California. Another dear ranch to me is less than ten miles away and the people are luckily evacuated. These fires are moving rapidly, they are taller than the houses, and they don’t wait for you to get out.

Conditions to protect humans, settlements and the environment from extreme weather events are worse every year. California is now enduring record heat, record fires and record acreage being burnt. The bone dry feedstock, high winds and a very unusual phenomenon — thunderstorms with 10k lightnings in 72 hours — now spell out catastrophe. Lightning is very unusual for California, and it’s becoming apparent that even the 1c warming that we are now experiencing is the reason why weather patterns are radically shifting and unexpected consequences arise.

With a heavy heart I mourn for the forest raining down as ashes now. Just six months ago it was Australia. This devastating orange-red imagery of climate inferno is becoming all too familiar.

Siberia made heat records at 38c and had forest fires, Hong Kong and Spain had their warmest July ever, and Hyde Park looked like a scorched savannah last week. You only have to look a few days back to find weather anomalies.

This planet is getting hotter as carbon in the atmosphere absorbs more heat from the sun than air does. According to Nasa, Noaa and the British Met, the last decade has been the warmest on record.

Warming is dispersed unequally, as land absorbs more heat than the sea. Even a small change can alter life for us, and something as large as a three degree global warming could mean up to seven degrees c more inland!!

We still have the chance to steer this ship away from 2c global warming and massive scale catastrophe, but that window to take meaningful action is closing rapidly.

Our carbon budget is running low, and scientist do not know how long this power to keep our planet as we know it will remain with us, as we may be tipping the Earth’s system into a different state.

As a sea captain myself, abrupt worsening conditions means that I need to make quick, determined decisions for the safety of all on board. So you quickly secure your crew with lifelines and start bringing in the sails. Knowing that every second the weather could take a turn for the worse, you need to start executing safely but immediately.

What we truly need now are decisions, at every level.

We’re seeing many companies and countries making commitments towards 0 emissions, but despite these commitments, our total emissions have still kept rising in the past decade. Far more action is necessary.

There’s light at the end of the funnel —as Georg Kell writes in Forbes: “With the EU Presidency’s historic decision “Next Generation EU” on 21 July 2020, .. 750 billion Euros.. — are earmarked for climate action. .. and several European countries have given bold additional public funding for possible climate solutions, such as carbon capture or hydrogen.”

For our elected and other people in power, fellow business leaders:

1. Enforce (the Paris agreement) with clear CO2 accountability. Climate change mitigation and adaptation needs to be a part of every investment decision. Especially in the trillions of fiscal stimuli to be released globally.

2. Leaders must decentralise decision making. Piling up too much authority on one person is too slow and too exposed to competing lobbies. There are so many climate programs, funds and grant systems that are just waiting for approvals, political programs to be finished, or some other public image adjusting. This needs to change immediately to objective, science-based targets which can lead to rapid and truthful decision making.

There’s never a good time to make the most critical decisions for the longterm without more urgent items coming to disturb, but stalling decision making with your own (space) ship on fire is irresponsible.

The emission reductions and the carbon sequestering targets we want to reach as a nation are largely outlined already: We need to get to Zero emissions by 2050. Your NDC, the Paris Accord, bolder country targets all give a good idea of targets. You know the direction.

Make decisions with longterm (€ $ £ / CO2 t reduction or sequestration). Give people decision making power and budget to execute. Ask them to account for carbon emissions in their procurement. And set a pollution tax to fund the transition and make it faster.

Lead the transition towards the clean future we owe the generations to come!

Gift Mom’s garden some biochar and help us sequester carbon. Limited edition biochar gift cards (US only) now available at carboculture.com/store.

This past spring has made most of us more grounded and attentive to nature. Growing things, whether potted plants, food or trees, has been a safe space for many, and we’re happy to see natural plant care techniques like biochar growing in popularity in gardens and green rooms around the world.

Ok, so Hiroko Tabuchi is now making compost in her NYC flat. This coolness-level along with a quarantine-garden bloom inspired us to open up a little shop so all the avid home gardeners / composters and their moms can get their hands dirty!

To celebrate Mother’s Day, Carbo Culture has put up gift cards for sale (it’s good for about a gallon of biochar, tax and shipping). We’ll be opening the webstore in May and shipping all orders by June (*pandemic forbidding)!

Biochar brings long lasting benefits to the soil

Thanks to the added surface area that the microbial life can habit, biochar:

• Improves soil tilth, or aeration
• Improves water retention
• Increases nutrient retention
• All in all makes healthier soil

Keep some CO2 out of the atmosphere

Biochar is made by rapidly converting biomass waste (think agricultural residues like walnut shells or peach pits) into a bio-carbon, and when it is used for soil it’s called biochar. Ours is made at a high temperature to ensure the biochar is pure.

Carbo Culture’s garden biochar consists of:

Carbon > 83.0%
Nitrogen < 0.6%
Ash (Low!) 3.5%
Water holding capacity 250%

Biochar is a natural pathway for carbon drawdown. When we make biochar, we take organic waste that would have decomposed and been returned to the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, and turn it into a stable form of carbon. (Nature has done this for 10,000 years..) This means that our biochar contains over 3 times its weight in sequestered CO2. Link to more science: Lehmann & al, Yale 360 environment.

Ok, so how to use it? Prep the biochar with nutrients

We always recommend mixing the biochar with nutrients before you apply it to your garden or soil. Add into composting at the earliest stage possible, or mix with your nutrient of choice (compost, fertiliser etc).

Home composting is a great way to lower your personal waste + carbon footprint. EPA estimates that up to 1/3rd of what we throw away is made up of food scraps and yard waste.

Adding biochar to compost

• Good compost
• Some water — a bit wet when you feel it with your hand
• Don’t flood and make sure the compost gets air
• Add about 10% biochar

Even better — mix it in while starting the compost or when it’s still going. Composting should be done with 50%-50% green (veg food scraps etc) and brown (leaves, twigs, sawdust, biochar). The brown side brings aeration and surface area to the microbes working with breaking down the green side.

To gift some biochar, go to the Carbo Culture Store.

Here’s a few links on making great compost

EPA: Home composting basics

NPR: How to compost at home (Lovely photos!)

Gardening channel: Ultimate guide to biochar for home gardeners

Please don’t wear your finest when handling biochar.. It is dry, black carbon, and any dust and will easily make a mess! Have fun!

Home Compost & Garden Biochar —  This Mother’s Day, store CO2 and make Mom happy! was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Resilient cities and city tree infrastructure are central to responding to changing climate conditions, but urban environments put tree and plant life under increasing pressure. The City of Stockholm, capital city of Sweden, has been using biochar in all of its urban plant beds for a decade now. The results? Dramatic reduction in tree deaths, healthier, stronger trees and more beautiful plantings.

Let me share why we at Carbo Culture started working with urban greeneries and wrote an open-source guide to learn how to introduce biochar to plant beds in urban environments.

More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas. From flooding to extreme heat, many cities are already living in the midsts of the effects of the changing climate. Cities are at the forefront of the fight against climate change with the ability to adapt quickly and transform into greener living. Around the world, cities of all sizes have pledged to seek solutions and take action to curb emissions.

A strong urban tree canopy, or a thriving city tree population, is an evidence based method to make urban infrastructure more climate change resilient. City trees are vital to air quality, public health and safety, they provide cooling and shade on hot days, increase property values and improve health.

In larger cities, urban trees bring health and resilience benefits that are worth millions of dollars annually, and canopy coverages are valued as an important infrastructure asset. In New York City alone, the positive economic impact of NYC trees is estimated to be $120 M a year. Yet our city trees are often not surviving the urban life, because the lack of oxygen and space combined with the non-natural environment leave many trees dying and in need of replacement. In some cities, up to a quarter of all trees need to be replaced.

Cities are tough environments for trees to thrive. Urban trees often grow in poor conditions under concrete pavements in compacted soil and with poor gas exchange to the roots. In many urban areas, such as San Francisco, existing trees are dying at the same rate new trees are being planted. The expectation for new tree survival is low.

If we can improve the wellbeing of city trees, we can both improve the air quality in the city and help to make the concrete jungles more liveable. Thriving trees have even a positive mental affect on citizens.

Greening our cities and storing some carbon

Carbo Culture is a carbontech startup native to the San Francisco Bay Area. We’re fighting climate change by converting local Californian biowaste, such as walnut shells, into high quality, stable biocarbon called biochar — a building block of regenerative agriculture and soil health. Each ton of biochar stores the equivalent carbon of three tons of carbon dioxide, that won’t escape for hundreds of years.

As we studied the science of biochar further, we noticed that it can play a big role in helping soil in cities as well.

Stockholm, the capital city of Sweden has been using biochar in all its new urban tree infrastructure for the past decade. Dubbed the “Stockholm model”, the city has developed a new method of using structured soils and biochar to plant their trees. This has led to impressive results in keeping trees growing and healthy, not to mention the array of benefits to citizens’ health and the city maintenance budget.

Biochar is to the soil what coral reefs are to the sea — structure and surface area to foster life in.

Biochar acts like a sponge for the soil. The structure of biochar helps retain nutrients and water, and brings new surface area for the microbial life to thrive in. Did you know that a gram of biochar can have over 3000 sq ft of surface area!

As shown by the decade long experience in Stockholm, biochar improves the soil utilised in urban plant beds by :

• Cultivating soil micro-organisms needing access to carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and oxygen
• Biochar can substitute finite resources often used in plant beds, like sand, peat and clay
• Improving stormwater filtration and retention — securing a water supply and creating a water reservoir in the soil, and preventing stormwater flooding with better drainage

How Stockholm got its trees back with biochar

The Stockholm model is a method to build and remake urban plant beds. By using large rocks from construction sites, Stockholm creates plant beds with space to allow roots, water, air and nutrients to spread. A mix of gravel, biochar and compost is flushed down with water into the stable structure creating a long term supply of nutrients for the plant. The structured soils alleviate the compaction and promote air flow to roots, while the biochar acts as a home for microbial soil life to thrive in.

The development of the plant beds in Stockholm got started in 2009, when the city noticed that all of their newly planted hard surface trees were dying. The use of structural soils with biochar in new and restored plant beds started as a trial to improve the conditions of urban trees growing in compacted soils. The result has been healthier, stronger trees and more beautiful plantings. The positive results became the start of the Stockholm Biochar Project, a city wide rollout of the biochar efforts on all city trees, which has been hugely successful. Stockholm even won the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayor’s Challenge in 2014 with the Biochar project. Structural soils with biochar is now the standard for how all public plant beds in the City of Stockholm are built.

Biochar pilots in California cities and counties in 2020

Working with the people that pioneered the Stockholm model, we wrote an open guide to help all cities, towns and counties get started on using biochar for their city trees. In 2020, Carbo Culture will start new pilots of supplying biochar to urban green roofs and cities in California.

We make our biochar from agricultural residues such as walnut shells in California’s Central Valley. With our production technology, we’re sure to make conductive, high surface area, consistent and clean biochar — which has been made with a carbon negative, beneficial total environmental footprint.

As any grand project, nothing would ever happen without the change maker who starts to think differently. Stockholm city was fortunate enough to have the innovative arborist Björn Embren, who took action and tried this new method to help the trees survive, with great success!

Since Stockholm has adopted this methodology, not a single newly planted tree has died. This is especially encouraging, as newly planted trees are most at risk during the first years after planting.

We thank Mattias Gustafsson and Lotta Ek from EcoTopic as well as Björn Embrén and everyone from the Stockholm Biochar Project in providing their insights and expertise for this guide.

EcoTopic is an environmental consultancy that has helped Stockholm and other cities in starting their biochar use in planting city trees.

Contact us at trees@carboculture.com! We look forward to seeing lots of more cities adopting these tools to their benefit.

Thanks for reading. -Henrietta, Charlotta and team

How does the future of urban greeneries look like? was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fast forward a few years, and we reunited to tackle the trillion-ton carbon dioxide debt looming in the atmosphere. We met with a professor from the Hawaii natural energy institute, who was far ahead of his own time with his inventions in carbonising biomass waste. This is how we found the first version of the technology Carbo Culture uses today, which we‘ve now developed further, started trials with and defined business cases for.

A planetary change is here.

No one escaped the latest IPCC report bringing forth the devastating news of reaching 1.5c warming already now. A planetary change is here and it’s very difficult to reverse. It will change our habitat and alter our way of life in ways that we can not yet comprehend.

Land use change, in the report’s limelight, is an interesting area with both huge problems such as deforestation, peat land use, wetlands reforming, soil erosion and more, but a huge opportunity as well. This is because land use could actually remove an equivalent to a third of human emissions out of the atmosphere annually (Griscom et al, 2017).

According to the UN, we have an average of 60 harvests left until we have depleted all of our soils, which feed 95% of the global population. Yes, that includes you too! And where do your cells get nutrients from if not the soil? We’re more tied to the soil microbiome (also with our own microbiome) than we fully understand. And yet every year we lose $100B worth of soil to erosion and degradation. This will accelerate to the trillions by mid-century.

We didn’t start working with a soil technology. We started working with a carbon invention.

The Carbo Culture mission is to remove a Gigaton of CO2 annually by 2030.

Our novel technology lets us convert bio-based waste into functional, pure carbons. In essence — we take waste like nut shells, put them in our reactor, and they come out as biocarbons, or biochar. The biocarbons stay stable for hundreds of years, keeping them out of the natural carbon cycle. According to IPCC, this is one of the ways to safely sequester carbon.

What’s unique about our technology is that we can process a variety of biomass wastes right on the spot. Our “manufacturing 2.0” approach means that we can transport our agile little factory right next to the deposit of the waste, and on a global scale, this means anywhere. No need for new forest for the biochar, no need for trucks driving the waste around.

What excites me the most, besides trapping the carbon and putting it to use, (we have very cool material companies buying our carbon which we’ll tell you more about very soon!) is the use of it in soils. Our soils are depleting at record speed. But when this carbon is added to nutrients and then to the soil, it brings new structure and surface area, and helps the soil microbial life thrive — essentially, helping the soil to regenerate.

The added leverage from adding biochar to the soils does not end in making the soil healthier and helping the soil take and store more carbon in the form of roots and healthy biology.

Biochar has actually been shown (Cayuela & al., Nature 2013) to have a significant impact on denitrification: a 10–90% reduction limiting Nitrous Oxide (N2O) which has roughly 250x the global warming potential (GWP) to CO2.

So this is what we do and why we do it. We clean the air to heal the soils.

Let us know if you’re up for joining our mission of Culturing Carbon: https://carboculture.typeform.com/to/tglAui

xo, Henrietta

Why Carbo Culture Exists was originally published in carboculture on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.