Jason Aramburu on the Promise of Biochar
TreeHugger: When you say traditional biomass, explain how that technology differs?
Aramburu: In a traditional biomass system you're just burning biomass to make heat, and then you use that heat to run a steam engine or a steam turbine. Those systems are typically built at the scale of about one megawatt or more in size because that's where the technology is really efficient. With traditional biomass, when you get below a megawatt I think you can only get about 15 percent of the energy in that biomass out as power; the rest is heat. That's been the limiting factor of small biomass.
TreeHugger: Tell me a little bit about your background, how you got into this and how big you ultimately want to make it.
Aramburu: I studied at Princeton and I was working in the Carbon Mitigation Initiative down there. Its main project was clean coal technology, and I was helping out with that. I realized going forward that clean coal is really an oxymoron. Even if you can capture all the emissions from coal, it's still dirty to get it out of the ground. So I wanted to apply some of these carbon-capture and low-emission technologies to cleaner fuels like biomass.
That's what really got me interested, and from there I just started working, looking at what was out there, developing prototypes. It all just came together.
But as far as where I see it going, I really want to scale this up so that it's on every continent, so that small farming villages and larger industrial-agricultural complexes are taking their waste and turning it into biochar and generating carbon-negative energy.
Our goal is to get to a point where we can take two billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere each year. To do that, we need a massive scale. It's got to be huge. But the fact is that it has to be done.
TreeHugger: The piece of equipment that you're talking about is not huge. Is there a possibility to make a much larger version? Are there advantages or disadvantages to something the size of what we now think of as a small power plant?
Aramburu: There are advantages and disadvantages. I tend to think that smaller is better, and that's because with big biomass power plants, you end up expending a lot of energy (which is unfortunately fossil fuel-based at this point) just trucking or shipping the biomass to the plant, because plants don't grow that fast. Trees don't grow that fast. So with the big plant you quickly use up all the resources in the local area.
I think it's a much better idea to build small plants and take them to where the biomass actually is. It's much easier to transport electrons on the grid than trees.
TreeHugger: You mentioned clean coal being an oxymoron. Tell us more about that. Is this really barking up the wrong tree?
Aramburu: We're really far off from any clean coal technology that's ready for prime time. So when coal companies say they're building clean coal or clean coal-ready plants, that just means that maybe at some point in the future when this technology is ready, they can bolt it on to their existing plants. Now the plants we're building today are cleaner than the coal plants we've built in the past, certainly. But it's still coal. It's still very dirty. There is still mercury, massive amounts of carbon emissions, particulates, soot. It's bad stuff.
Couple that to the fact that mining coal is hugely destructive. A few months ago, I went down to a protest at Coal River Valley against the Massey Energy plant. Jim Hansen was there.
TreeHugger: He went to jail, didn't he?
Aramburu: He did. He went to jail. Darryl Hannah was there, too. She also got arrested. You look at a site like this where they're practicing mountaintop removal, they're actually blowing up the mountain, then taking that rubble and putting it in a valley. I'd never been to West Virginia; it's one of the most beautiful places in the country. And the coal industry is destroying it.
We looked at one of the mountaintop removal sites, and they actually put these away from main thoroughfares just behind a mountain ridge so that no one can see them. But it takes a beautiful mountain and makes it look like the moon. It's just awful.
The problem is that these towns have basically sprung up around coal mines. The coal mine is the sole employer of the town, and the people there, their parents, their grandparents, all worked at the mine. So they're very resistant to any kind of change. They see it as a threat to them, which is completely understandable.
So going forward, I think people in policy understand that we need to phase out coal. The question is: what do we replace it with from a power standpoint, and also how do we keep these towns alive? That's a big question.
TreeHugger: Biochar seems brilliant, and you've got the double whammy of making clean power and pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere while improving soil quality. But it can't be all just roses. What are the tricky parts?
Aramburu: The main issue is scale. For us, it's hard to get to the scale where biochar can really make an impact, because we need huge, massive deployment of this technology. To get there, number one, we need the funds, so we need to be able to raise money to do this. Also, we need governmental support. Tom Vilsack at the USDA, he is aware of biochar now. He spoke at the biochar conference over the summer. But as far as I can tell, he's one of the few politicians who understands it in the U.S., and so we really need to raise awareness of the potential.
No one in biochar is asking for subsidies or government handouts, but what we do need are things like research grants and small business grants just to move the technology along and get it out there.
TreeHugger: In a best case scenario, where you do have a lot of good support to keep the technology moving, how long do you think until it starts to see some widespread implementation?
Aramburu: To get up to the scale where we're taking two gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year, I think an aggressive timeline puts us there in maybe five to 10 years. It's a massive undertaking, but again, it's really necessary, I think.
