Recently I visited a biochar demonstration site at Spruce Haven Farms (SHF) in Union Springs, NY. The project is funded by NYSERDA and is a collaboration between the folks at SHF, Johannes Lehmann (pictured 2nd from left) and team from Cornell University, Biomass Controls (CEO Jeff Hallowell 2nd from right), Cuff Farm Services, and others. They are carbonizing dairy manure digestate and quantifying the climate impact of reducing methane emissions from digestate storage and spreading on fields, emissions from transporting and spreading significantly reduced amounts of material, and reduced phosphorus fertilizer requirements. In addition to the carbon sequestered in the biochar they are also optimizing excess heat recovery to reduce fossil fuels used to heat the digester during cold months to reduce the farms scope 2 emissions. Hopefully they will have the bandwidth and funding to test the use of biochar produced on-farm in the digester as a means of improving the quality and quality of renewable natural gas produced and fed into a nearby pipeline. A techno-economic assessment is also in the works to better understand how on-farm pyrolysis could be scaled up across New York State.  Conversations with the buyer of their milk products about purchasing removal credits are also underway. It is an ambitious, comprehensive project. We need a thousand more like it.  

As with nearly all biochar demonstration projects that I am aware of, to declare that things have always gone smoothly would be misleading, to say the least. But this team, which includes some of the leading thinkers in biochar and sustainability at Cornell University, has persevered and continues to educate the public and policy makers about the benefits and challenges of biochar production.

During the Q&A session I asked Doug Young (pictured on far left above), owner of SHF, this question: “knowing what you know now about all of the challenges in moving this project forward, would you do it all over again”. I instantly regretted asking the question in such a public forum. But his answer was unexpected, heartfelt and provides a much more pragmatic perspective for justifying challenging climate action. His analogy was that of raising children; if we all knew how challenging and costly it was, would we still do it? Of course, we would (or at least most of us would I’d venture to say)! This got me pondering possible parallels to parenting when it comes to taking on a biochar (or any other CDR) project.  Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

Benefits:

• You become a teacher (and maybe a bit of a preacher too) – parents are forever showing kids how to do a myriad of new-to-them things. Climate activists get to be on the cutting edge of ‘show & tell’ when it comes to demonstrating new lower emission alternatives and processes.
• You become part of a new community/family – much like finding new communities through children’s sports, music or other activities, hosting a biochar facility opens new doors to a host of new individuals that are eager to collaborate with you and share lessons learned.
• Makes you more empathetic – understanding and acknowledging concerns of others is a vital parenting skill; once you have lived through the challenges of getting a pyrolysis plant permitted and into production, empathy likely rises leading to (hopefully) improved collaboration with others just coming into the industry. (I have seen this over and over within the biochar industry!)
• Teaches you patience – keeping your cool with kids is not always easy and not all parents learn to be more patient, but many do out of sheer necessity. Getting a biochar facility up and running has many unforeseen obstacles which can test your patience beyond what many project developers are used to, but for those that succeed that want to replicate the model over and over (a common refrain that I hear almost weekly), getting subsequent plants up and running, will likely be less stressful given the lessons learned and patience developed during the demonstration phase.
• Pride in seeing you kid (or project) graduate from one stage to the next is its own reward.

Challenges

• Discipline is necessary – A lot can go wrong when raising kids and burning biomass, so running a tight ship at all times pays off!
• Not for the faint of wallet – getting into industrial-scale biochar production is not cheap! Finding patient capital to get things off the ground can be exhausting…much like keeping food on the table and a roof over your family’s head.
• It’s hard work and often messy – Birthing a biochar production facility is far more complicated than most people understand at the outset.  As with parenting many activities will be quite new to biochar producers; from permitting to procuring off-take agreements to finding carbon removal buyers.  Even those in the waste management industry that have experience with moving biomass around will need to delve into a number of new realms.
• Less me-time – most new families (and businesses) require a lot of time to launch, but I would venture to say that biochar businesses require even more dedication not least because so few people, including lenders, permitters, and buyers have yet to even hear the word ‘biochar’. Learning how to effectively educate different stakeholders in your biochar business ecosystem can take up crazy amounts of time!

I’ve met many folks that are coming into the biochar industry for the pot of potential gold they think will be waiting for them, but which is often elusive to say the least. Many have little understanding of the challenges ahead and get disillusioned and sometimes financially destitute mid-way through setting up the first plant. While shifting from a short-term profit perspective to one closer to parenting may dampen desire for some to jump in, it seems a more accurate positioning of the challenges and actual pay-offs that can be achieved in the current biochar and larger CDR industry.