Carbo Culture

We create functional biocarbons from waste - our patented technology produces high quality, consistent biochar for better agricultural performance, waste and nutrient retention, and soil remediation, in a waste-to-resource, circular model.

Biocarbon, or biochar, is one of the most notable carbon sequestration methods and has one of the largest potential of all possible CO2 utilization (Nature, 2019). Our mission is to sequester a gigaton of carbon dioxide annually within a decade - by amplifying nature’s time-tested strategy for regeneration, the carbon cycle. 

Biochar promotes both CO2 reduction and soil regeneration, the latter fostering better, richer soils that retain nutrients and water and reduce soil Ghg emissions. When we apply biochar into soil we improve soil microbial health, increase soil water storage capacity and bind greenhouse gases while helping soil regain its regeneration capacity.

UN estimates that we have 60 harvests left until we have depleted all our soils. Every year we lose $100B worth of soil to erosion and degradation. This will accelerate to the trillions by mid-century.

We have a trillion ton debt of carbon in the atmosphere that is already impacting our ecosystem’s resilience - the life-supporting mechanisms that all of us rely on every day.

Besides reforestation, biochar is one of the few proven nature based carbon sinks that the IPCC recommends for large scale CO2 sequestration. 

We urgently need to re-design our food systems to be more robust, resilient and regenerative. To address climate change and the rapid soil nutrient and organic matter loss, we need new systems wide adoption of regenerative agricultural practises. 

Yet, this can be challenging for today’s under-resourced farmers and they require support, business models and easy tools to start practicing better ways to care for the land. Biochar, a stable organic biocarbon, has the ability to address multiple issues simultaneously, in a way that is both affordable, long-lasting and carbon negative. 

Carbo Culture is a biochar manufacturing technology company. We build small plant facilities that process waste biomass (such as tree trimmings or agricultural waste residues like walnut shells, or peach pits) into biochar.

The Carbo Culture production methodology is a patented technology that is based on over a decade of academic research at the University of Hawaii. Called “Flash carbonization”, the process carbonizes waste biomass feedstock in a way that retains optimal chemical properties on the end product, like high carbon yield (over 85%), low ash, no PAH pollution, high surface area and high electro conductivity.

The biochars that result from our process are high temperature (750C+), high surface area (300m2+), and high CEC (100-150cmol/kg) despite being very low in O/C (.03-.08) and H/C (.05-.2). The biochar stand out from biochars made at atmospheric pressure.

We can sell biochar directly to farmers as soil amendment. The biochar is mixed to nutrients (fertiliser or manure) and applied to ground. This will bring about long term regenerative and nutrient holding benefits to the soil. The challenge however is making it affordable enough for farmers to adopt at wide scale. This is why we are developing an indirect route to soil, by first using biochar for water treatment to capture nutrients from water runoff. This nutrient filled biochar can then be sold to organic fertiliser manufacturing or directly to farmers at a lower cost.

We've been at this for several years and have talked to 200+ customer profiles in the US, Europe and East Africa.

Our biochar has a half-life of thousands of years, our production process directly sequesters over three tonnes of CO2 into each biochar tonne produced. 

For the water filtration segment, our biochar presents a functional, cheaper, renewable and low-emission alternative to activated carbon or other filtration materials. Biochar in green infrastructures and water filtration decreases nutrient pollution and eutrophication. 

Soil depletion, soil biodiversity, and nutrient leaching make farming more difficult in the years to come. Biochar helps decrease external nutrients need and enhances soil microbiome, water holding capacity and nutrients' plant-availability leading to long term healthier soils and more resilient farming.

Our research based production method differs from competing pyrolysis technologies and makes it possible to

• Achieve high volumes of consistent quality at an economically viable price, and extend the system modularly and deploy/re-deploy easily
• Make biochar that has high purity, electroconductivity and surface area, and is low on toxins
• Is extremely stable form of CO2 sequestration, that's tested to last over a thousand years in a solid, stable form

Current biochar market is extremely diverse, with a few high quality producers, and a lot of poor quality products. These biochars will not perform as well in terms of holding capacity and soil health which makes ours more suited for demanding environmental applications. For example, our biochar tests better in terms of heavy metal absorption than a fellow European Biochar Certificate certified premium biochar.

Our innovation is a research based process engineering technology to flash carbonise biomass in a batch process. 

The biomass is converted into biochar in less than an hour with a conversion rate close to 100% of the theoretical maximum fixed carbon yield. Achieving such a high conversion rate, without losing a large portion of the material during the process, is a highly challenging feat, thus making Carbo Culture’s technical approach unique. 

The technology was initially started to develop back in the early 2000s at the University of Hawaii Natural Energy Institute researching the ways of making high-purity carbon for Norwegian silicon industry. This is the first attempt at developing large-scale real work applications based on the technology.

The process is currently conducted in a 4m tall modular and transportable bioreactor. We have been piloting with  a medium-size farm owning thousands of acres of orchards in California, to test the biochar methodology in tough arid conditions. Next, we'll need to scale up the demonstration plant to prove volume increase and unit economics of the solution.

Literature reference e.g https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ie0301839 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229178262_Biocarbon_production_from_Hungarian_sunflower_shells

Immediate outputs include verifiable carbon removal at the point of biochar manufacture. This benefits organisations that want to buy carbon offsets as well as the world at large in achieving global warming goals. 1t of Biochar = 3.12t of CO2 sequestered.

Longer term outcomes for farmers farming soil include: strengthen livelihoods and source of income, and food security. As biochar improved depleted soils and reduced nutrient pollution, farmers will need less water and nutrient inputs to achieve the same yields, and the soil stays healthy for future crops as well, further reducing co2e emissions. Farmers can

Our climate targets are measured in Ghg emissions, not people served. So far, we've sequestered about 120 tons of CO2e. By the end of 2021, our target is 5000 tons of CO2 removed. In 5 years, 150.000 t of CO2 removed.

Our demo facility is serving several customers currently. When the next facility would be operational, it would serve 5-10 customers, indirectly impacting 100s of thousands of lives - people who benefit from better green urban infrastructure or better food security, for example.

Next year: Start and possibly complete the scale up of the demo plant.

Next 5 years: To reach stage 9 Technological Readiness Level and to have 5-10 own full scale facilities and to have made progress or even started licensing our technology forward.

• Technical: Still more R&D on the engineering work left
• Financial: Fundraising for the facility scale-up

5 years

• Market growth for biochar: The use and demand for biochar needs to grow considerably
• Unit economics: We must show that we can do this at scale in a profitable way to reach the climate goals we have for the project
• Technology licensing: We must prove that our model works and is licensable

Market development: We're engaging in field studies in several verticals and several countries to develop evidence based marketing material. We'll continue taking part in innovative research consortiums and keep testing our biochar in different applications. We envision that a large part/volume of our customers will be in the B2G market and in applications like water, where typically supplier contracts are long, and materials suppliers are not changed often, reducing customer churn.

Technology: We're designing and engineering in phases, and will spend a relatively long time on perfecting the system before starting licensing. We'll keep a close

Economics: We can use multiple feedstocks, thus lowering our dependence on particular waste biomass. We also aim to build up next to e.g forestry production to benefit from their leftover residues and sell excess heat to their operations. We can also scale our production according to demand, and e.g lower the production capacity in case demand in the region is permanently reduced. We'll be looking at increasing automation as well.

3 full time 2-8 part time

We're a founding team of second-time entrepreneurs and a network of skilled external contractors with balancing skill-sets across complementary fields. We have an extensive background in biomass carbonization technology, ramping up production processes, patenting and commercialization, as well as in business development, B2B sales and management. Carbo Culture is a mission- driven business, where profit and purpose are aligned, and people who work for us feel the integrity. That is why we get job applications from people who would be knowingly taking a pay cut or leaving a secure job. We believe in working towards halting climate change as a must – if we don’t solve this, no other businesses will matter either. 

We are partnering with a leading process engineering company Afry in the design and build of our second facility.

We work with several universities and independent researcher in Europe and in the US on product development and testing.

We're a part of the Autodesk Foundation fellowship and alumni of StartX, for peer support in building manufacturing and environmental startups.

We sell biochar in B2b contexts. We estimate that our revenues will come from three elements

• Sales of biochar: Approximately 1200 USD/ton
• Sales of excess heat: 200 USD/ton
• Carbon removal credits: 50 USD/Ton

The customer profiles and purchase volumes may vary but we sell the same product to them, thus streamlining our operations.