Startup Series: Arbor

Carbon

May 25

Brad Hartwig is CEO and founder of Arbor, and today’s topic is BiCRS. No, not the people in black leather jackets cruising down the highway, but rather the acronym for the process of biomass carbon removal and storage, BiCRS. Arbor is developing a process that transforms organic waste from forest thinning to prevent wildfires. The company’s process converts the carbon in the waste into stored CO2, while also producing clean energy and freshwater as byproducts. Specifically, Arbor's process runs wood waste through a light thermal treatment known as torrefaction, which is somewhat akin to roasting coffee beans. They take this torrefied biomass and gasify it into syngas and then combust it with pure oxygen to produce clean water and high purity CO2, which they then run through a highly dense turbine to create carbon negative electricity while injecting the CO2 into permanent sequestration.

The plants that they will build to operate this process end to end will be significantly smaller than existing biomass energy facilities. And Arbor has an audacious vision to own and operate these carbon capture plants in a distributed nature near carbon injection wells and sequestration facilities, selling the excess power that they generate back to the grid or to the facilities themselves.

We start the conversation going into Brad's inspiring background, which includes time as a rocket engineer at SpaceX and nearly a decade on the USA National Swim Team, while also volunteering for Marin County Search and Rescue and the California Air National Guard. We cover how he surveyed the entire carbon dioxide removal space before landing on the idea for BiCRS and how his aerospace background seemed particularly well suited for Arbor's specific approach.

Get connected:
Cody Simms Twitter / LinkedIn
Brad Hartwig / Arbor
MCJ Podcast / Collective

*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on May 5, 2023.

In this episode, we cover:

[2:51] The movement of talent from the aerospace industry into climate
[6:28] Brad's volunteer work with the California Air National Guard Rescue Operations and Marin County Search and Rescue
[8:37] His personal background in aerospace and work at SpaceX
[15:24] The importance of meaningful service work
[19:57] Brad's motivations for getting into the carbon removal space and the thesis for Arbor
[25:21] Differences between BiCRS and BECCS
[27:47] How and where Arbor sources materials
[31:49] Arbor's process for transitioning forest materials into biocarbon
[35:07] An overview of torrefaction
[40:37] The "trilemma" of biomass, CO2 storage, and load demand
[43:38] How the company plans to scale based on organic waste feedstock availability
[45:38] Arbor's integrated carbon sequestration and power generation business model
[50:49] The carbon capture side of the business
[51:38] Funding to date and plans for Arbor's future capital
[54:27] The challenges of processing biomass
[56:52] Who Arbor wants to hear from

Cody Simms (00:00):
Today's guest on my Climate Journey startup series is Brad Hartwig, CEO and founder of Arbor. And we're talking about BiCRS. No, not the people in black leather jackets cruising down Highway 1 in California on Harley's, but rather the acronym for the process of biomass carbon removal and storage, BiCRS. Arbor is developing a process that takes organic waste, which today is primarily in the form of wood waste from forest thinning operations for wildfire prevention, and converts the carbon inherent in it into permanently stored CO2, while as a byproduct generating clean energy and fresh water. Specifically, Arbor's process runs wood waste through a light thermal treatment known as torrefaction, which is somewhat akin to roasting coffee beans. They take this torrefied biomass and gasify it into a syngas and then combust it with pure oxygen to produce clean water and high purity CO2, which they then run through a highly dense turbine to create carbon negative electricity while injecting the CO2 into permanent sequestration.
(01:18):
The plants that they will build to operate this process end to end will be significantly smaller than existing biomass energy facilities. And Arbor has an audacious vision to own and operate these carbon capture plants in a distributed nature near carbon injection wells and sequestration facilities, selling the excess power that they generate back to the grid or to the facilities themselves. We start the conversation going into Brad's inspiring background, which includes time as a rocket engineer at SpaceX and nearly a decade on the USA National Swim Team, while also volunteering for Marin County Search and Rescue and the California Air National Guard. And we talk about how he surveyed the entire carbon dioxide removal space before landing on the idea for BiCRS and how his aerospace background seemed particularly well suited for Arbor's specific approach. But first, I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (02:19):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (02:20):
And I'm Jason Jacobs. And welcome to my Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (02:26):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (02:31):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. And with that, Brad, welcome to the show.
Brad Hartwig (02:47):
Thanks for having me, Cody. Excited to be here.
Cody Simms (02:51):
Well, listen, I am excited to talk to you. We are both based in the wonderful city of the Angels, Los Angeles, and believe it or not, we haven't had a ton of guests on the show or frankly, we don't have a ton of portfolio companies at MCJ who are from L.A., which is surprising, given that it's the second-largest city in the US, and surprising, given the amount of experience that we're starting to see come out of places like SpaceX, which is where I know you have come out of. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about what you're seeing first and foremost in the aerospace industry movement into climate tech and how your background has followed that path as well.
Brad Hartwig (03:33):
It's exciting to see. I was just up at San Francisco Climate Week where there is a ton of talent folks that are coming into this space, really seen as the up and coming industry is sustainability and carbon removal. But down in Los Angeles, especially as you mentioned coming out of SpaceX and honestly all the new space companies, there is a skillset and a type of person that comes out of those companies or is attracted to those companies in the first place that really just, I think loves to work on hard problems and work with good people on those problems and are just really talented at building stuff.
(04:16):
And if you look at a rocket, the end of the day, it's just a complex machine. And what we need to do now is we need to build machines that can help put more renewable power on the grid and pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. But at the end of the day, the first principles are the same, thermodynamics are the same, and it's just a different business model, different markets. But otherwise, I think in general the aerospace community is people that are really excited about these big, hairy, audacious goals. And I personally have a huge affinity for the environment and grew up in Marin County actually, which I still think is one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Cody Simms (05:02):
I've lived in Marin briefly. Here's my proof lab surfboard behind my head, as you can see, skateboard, I mean. But yeah, it's a great place up there.
Brad Hartwig (05:10):
That's awesome. I think for me personally, once you appreciate the scale of the problem and how ire it is, it's hard to unsee that. And for me that was a huge moment of pivoting into this space, was once I truly digested that, it was almost, why am I focused on trying to get off this planet when this planet is really the best one we know of and will likely ever know of, and we have a pretty serious problem ahead of ourselves.
Cody Simms (05:37):
Oh wow, Brad. So we're also investors in the micro fusion reactor company, Avalanche. And the CEO of that company was previously Blue Origin. And when I first met him, he said the same thing. He's like, "I spent a decade trying to help people get off of earth. And then I realized, wait a minute, why don't we help make earth better?" So interesting to hear you say the same thing.
Brad Hartwig (05:58):
It's crazy. And I actually went so far as started to try and become an astronaut myself, started to try and build out a resume. It's a very long process, extremely competitive, but that is actually part of how I ended up getting into climate, was actually through some of the more operational work I was doing as part of that journey. And I spent a lot of time in wildfire country, doing cleanup work in a sense.
Cody Simms (06:28):
I saw that you do also some volunteer work with the California Air National Guard Rescue Operations and Marin County Search and Rescue. Has that been a heavily focused on wildfire support in particular?
Brad Hartwig (06:42):
Yeah, I think rescue operations in general, you go where the help is needed. With Marin County Search and Rescue Team, it's a interesting, almost extension of both the law enforcement and firefighting verticals. And we were, it's a mountain rescue team that can do everything, from evidence searches to lost persons to dementia patients that have wandered off. But we've also been used a lot of times in fire season for a number of reasons.
(07:21):
Everything from getting people evacuated out of areas, so going door to door and making sure people are taking these advisory notices seriously, to doing cleanup and basically going up to regions in the wake of fires. And those are more, I think, harrowing missions because you're usually looking for who did not make it out, and you go to up to these regions, which for me was in Northern California where I grew up going to as a kid. And these forests that are near lakes you used to go boating in, and they're just completely decimated. And you have homes that were once there that are completely gone except for a chimney that's still standing. And without getting too grizzly, looking for folks that didn't make it out of there is not also the most exciting part of the job.
Cody Simms (08:21):
Thanks for sharing that. And I'm sure that that's also just helped inform your perspective on climate change and wildfires and all the work that we need to do to help, everything, that the life that we know, continue to survive for the future.
(08:37):
Talk to me a bit about your background in aerospace. I believe you were at Kitty Hawk prior to starting Arbor, and before that at SpaceX and before that at the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab. And it looks like you maybe even dropped out of a master's program in order to build the business. And so I want to hear the origin story of going through this career in aerospace into specifically starting Arbor.
Brad Hartwig (09:05):
It really starts back in college during the USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, which is a, it's a student group, student run. It is really an incredible organization. Ended up being the first student group in the world to send a rocket into space. And an exciting part of that group was we did everything from launching rockets, but also building the rockets and even building the machines to build the rocket to then launch it and all the design that goes into that. And it's a pretty unique ability to get to be that hands-on, as someone who's still going through the curriculum. And the faculty oversight was more just-
Cody Simms (09:52):
I have a feeling the building the machines to build the rockets is going to come back around when we start talking about Arbor. I want to bookmark that in my mind to circle back to.
Brad Hartwig (10:01):
It's very key. I think anytime you're talking about scaling up to gigaton scale, you are going to need a lot of hardware that gets put into the world. And so, building the machine that builds the machine is often just as important, if not harder than building the machine itself. But going back to the USC Rocket Lab, we had of course faculty oversight in the sense of, okay, don't let these kids burn the place down. But beyond that, we were a student-led organization, we picked what is our objective, and our objective was to launch a rocket into space and then figure out how to do that. And ended up leading the propulsion team within that lab. So we had groups focused on avionics, groups focused on aerodynamics, on structures, on recovery, which is, okay once the vehicle makes it to space and now it's coming back down, ho do we make sure that vehicle survives, makes it back to the ground intact.
(11:02):
And I think propulsion drew me in a lot of ways. One, I think just at the time stuff that made fire is just, that looks awesome. And it's also a really juicy engineering problem, because it lies at the intersection of so many disciplines. You have really difficult thermodynamic modeling, fluid modeling, you have structures are also key aspect of that. You have, even just the chemical engineering part of it or understanding how reactants are turning into products and how that affects everything from transfer properties to ultimately, at the end of the day is how much thrust are you producing and how efficiently so that you can get to space. But that was the foundation for my work in rocketry that ultimately led to working at SpaceX. And at SpaceX, again, was just really impressed by the folks working there. Obviously at the Rocket Lab, it was a really, really impressive group of folks that were not only really passionate about space and rocketry, but we're singularly driven towards making this thing happen.
(12:18):
Almost modern maniacal of like, we are getting a rocket into space. And no one's done it before as a student group and we're going to do it. And SpaceX was almost like the, okay, this is the big, big leagues, now we're talking about rockets that have the ability to put humans in a space that can come back and land themselves back at the launch pad. And no one had done any of that before. At least, a private company had never launched humans before. No one had landed a rocket before. And my role coming into the company was helping develop the Draco rocket engine for the Crew Dragon vehicle. So that's a vehicle that now ferries NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. And so, my product was actually these little baby rocket engines you can think of, they provide in-space propulsion.
(13:11):
So, allow the vehicle to fly around once it's already in orbit. And again, just a extremely impressive team. And for me, as my first job out of college, the learning curve you can imagine is almost just like a vertical line. And while I was there, it was I think pretty much for the duration that I was there, known as the critical path project, which basically means you get, for better or worse, all the attention of the company is just working this commercial crew program and trying to make sure that there are not any delays on hardware design, manufacture and delivery. And so I feel like in just a few years, I felt like that was a decades of career packed into a few years. But the culmination of being able to produce hardware that was actually going to be propelling astronauts to the space station, and the goal is eventually to the moon and to Mars for an aerospace engineer, that was really a dream come true. And it had a big enough effect on me that I actually wanted to then go and try and become an astronaut.
Cody Simms (14:27):
That critical path project experience reminds me of Josh Santos at Noya who was a project manager on the Tesla 3 launch team. And interesting, that he took that experience also at an Elon Musk run company and has now turned it into a carbon removal company startup. And you, similarly on this critical path, Elon Musk managed project have done the same. I can only imagine the amount of skills and discipline that is required to get a project like that through and into full launch. And I have to ask, I noticed for much of your life, as you've been very disciplined in these professional endeavors and then also doing this incredibly harried volunteer work that we talked about in Search and rescue, you also were on the US National Swim team. How in the world are you doing all this stuff, Brad? That's mind-blowing.
Brad Hartwig (15:24):
I definitely wouldn't say I recommend it to anyone either. I do think there is a healthy balance that is maybe more sustainable long term, but I think maybe in part I've felt to have been given the opportunities that I've had all along the way. There's a lot of things that had to line up for me to be where I'm at today. And there were a lot of people that had to help me get to where I am today. I've had really great mentors, I've had really strong comrades and teams all along the way, with folks that have been very willing to help teach me everything, from how to operate a mill and a lathe, to machine hardware, in really in all facets of my life. And I think there's a certain aspect of service community in general where I really do think there's a very strong sense of comradery around being able to work together towards helping people.
(16:22):
And the rescue space in general I think is a very extreme example of that where you have folks that are having essentially the worst day of their life. If you are, whether it's a search and rescue team with a county or with the international guard, if you are going to rescue this person, it has escalated a lot. It has gotten really, really bad. Air National Guard specifically, they're last resort, this is, no one else has been able to get this person to safety. And for that operation it could be someone's 500 miles off the coast of California, has a severe burn and their condition is rapidly deteriorating. And you need to, as a team, figure out how are we going to conduct an operation to get this person off the ship, get them as fast as possible to a trauma center that can manage this person.
(17:26):
And there is, I think a combination of feeling like you've done something very meaningful in a very tangible way. You have helped this person, whether it's live another day, or in some cases you didn't find them alive, but you did find them. And it gives a lot of closure to the family and it helps them have that closure. I think there's something very deeply fulfilling about being part of a community that does that kind of work. And it's hard to, I think when you're doing engineering projects, especially when the horizon is so long, you think about solving climate change, for example, we won't have drawn down all of humanity's legacy carbon emissions in the next decade, in the next five decades.
(18:19):
This is not a short term problem. And I think that Arbor, what we talk about a lot is the purpose of life is planting trees under whose shade you will not enjoy. That's I think, more of the selfless, let's go do that. Whereas, I almost feel like being part of a service group where you can actually see directly who you're helping, that is so tangible. It fulfills that other part of you that wants to know that you're helping and sees that it's working. So maybe, I don't know, it's almost, maybe it's just a little more selfish of actually seeing the results of your hard work.
Cody Simms (18:58):
Well, I don't think selfish is the right word for it, but I understand what you're saying and I appreciate the service that you provide. Thanks for sharing all that and providing a little bit of insight into how and why you have taken many of these extreme jumps all at the same time. Because I can only imagine it's a lot to manage, personally, and does show some pretty incredible amount of dedication toward these causes that you're working toward. So thank you.
(19:27):
You've mentioned twice that you almost thought about becoming an astronaut. And Brad, we could keep going down this path for probably the next 45 minutes, but I do want to learn about Arbor and I do want to learn about the space of biomass carbon removal and storage or BiCRS as it's called. So let's transition into that. How did you come across wanting to work on this particular problem and how did the nugget of the idea for Arbor come into play?
Brad Hartwig (19:57):
When I was getting into the sustainability space, I think like a lot of folks, just trying to figure out where can I plug in, where can I be helpful to this problem? And I looked at a lot of ways for decarbonizing the global economy as well as carbon removal for the IPCC report. We need both of those at a massive scale. And I saw that we needed a lot of technology innovation in the carbon removal side. We need to get 10 gigatons of carbon removal per year by 2050, and eventually even more than that. And we don't have any technologies that are working at the scale necessary.
(20:37):
And then also, just looking at the affordability of solutions out there. How do you get to that level of carbon removal without breaking the global economy? And I think that's why you see a lot of folks talk about the North Star of a hundred dollars per ton of carbon removal. How do we get to that level and get to that level with the technology that can scale as big as the problem is? And so that was really the foundation for wanting to jump into the carbon removal space. And I spent time reading thousands of research papers trying to understand all of the different options we had in order to start drawing down CO2 and looking at it both from a physics and thermodynamic standpoint as well as a business standpoint, trying to figure out how do you marry those two.
Yin Lu (21:27):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective, here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(21:54):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (22:28):
So you started with the broad problem of, "I know I want to work on this solution. It's the key problem of our lifetimes. What are the different pathways for carbon dioxide removal or greenhouse gas removal? I'm going to go explore each of them and then ultimately decide which pathway I want to jump down." So that was the framing approach, is that correct?
Brad Hartwig (22:49):
Yeah, nailed it.
Cody Simms (22:51):
Okay. And so what are the different solutions you went and explored?
Brad Hartwig (22:55):
I explored a lot. There's direct air capture and there's a number of direct air capture plays out there. Everything from engineered sorbent to letting natural minerals do the work, like Shashank is doing over at Heirloom. I looked at ocean alkalinity plays. So direct ocean capture, natural pathways, so reforestation, afforestation, improving soil carbon, as well as the enhanced weathering approach. Can you use olivine and other materials that can absorb CO2 just on national working lands?
Cody Simms (23:32):
You're talking through the MCJ backlog by the way. So we've had E.ON Carbon and Lithos Carbon, we've had Planetary, we've had Heirloom, we've had Noya, we've had, I know I'm missing multiple other ones that we've had on the show. So for anyone who wants to dive in, there is definitely an archive of pod episodes to go learn more and hear about all the different types of solutions Brad's talking about.
Brad Hartwig (23:53):
This is awesome. It's been honestly an honor also to start to get to meet some of these folks that are leading these companies, because it's across the board. And I think every one of those spaces has a huge part to play. And of course, we'd all like to see those at Gigaton scale. We're going to need a lot of solutions at massive scale. And for us personally, I started to build out techno economic assessments for these different technologies and kept on trying to get back to this, how do we get this at scale, at lowest dollar per ton of durable carbon removal and storage. And that was the thesis for what ultimately became Arbor, which was, we really settled on this being thermodynamically the most efficient way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. And that's really because it's energy positive carbon removal.
Cody Simms (24:51):
So thermodynamically, meaning you don't need a lot of energy to power your system, you don't need a lot of heat to power your system.
Brad Hartwig (24:58):
Correct. And it actually, it goes even further than that, in that it's a net energy and heat producer, which is quite exceptional when the world is obviously trying to deploy renewables at a huge scale and replace the global electricity economy. And so we wanted a solution that was as minimally draining on that supply as possible.
Cody Simms (25:21):
So as I understand it, Arbor is what's called BiCRS, I guess. So biomass carbon removal and storage. And it's a close cousin to BECCS, which is bio-energy with carbon capture and storage. The different orientation, as I understand it, is that BiCRS, which is what Arbor's solution is, focuses on carbon removable first and has energy production as a byproduct, whereas BECCS focuses on taking biomass, creating energy with it, and then has carbon sequestration as a byproduct. Is that the right way to high level think about the two?
Brad Hartwig (25:56):
Yeah, it's spot on. What we see as BiCRS is actually an umbrella. There's lots of different approaches to BiCRS. So the Charm team is doing a BiCRS solution. Right now, they're doing biomass to bio oil and then injecting that underground. And so that is all the way only focused on carbon removal. And that was, I think an eyeopener for the industry. A lot of folks at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have done a lot of work looking into this, like Roger Aines and Dan Sanchez from Cal, the amount of carbon in biomass and the value of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Biomass is very carbon dense, but it's fairly low energy dense.
(26:46):
And so the fact is just that biomass being a rich carbon carrier and poor energy carrier makes you actually want to look at biomass as a carbon removal play first and an energy play second. And some technologies go as far as not even caring about the energy all together. And so that's anything that stores carbon.
Cody Simms (27:07):
I've heard Peter say it's actually a good thing that it's not energy dense because you don't want it to catch fire or be flammable or whatnot. So Peter at Charm.
Brad Hartwig (27:18):
When you get biomass out of, say, a forest, say you're taking slash and other material from hazardous fuel reduction, that stuff might be as much as like 50% water content. And so half of it is water, and then of the rest of it you have a mix of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and ash constituents. But this is a living thing and you don't typically want living things to be spontaneously combustible. So, it is good for life on earth. Absolutely.
Cody Simms (27:47):
So then you all take this biomass, which, is it mostly at this point woody residue from tree trimmings or is it from agricultural waste or where are you sourcing this today? And then walk us through the process of what it looks like to transition it into biocarbon.
Brad Hartwig (28:05):
So we are focused right now on the wildfire problem in California. And there's a number of reasons for that, but the state needs to ramp up hazardous fuels reduction to start mitigating these mega fires. As you might imagine, California now has five seasons. Fire season is the newest addition to the ranks and we want to be a major part of that solution. So we see in addition to carbon removal and renewable power on the grid, it's the ability to be part of that solution is really exciting for us.
(28:38):
And so what that looks like is groups like CAL FIRE, timber operators, they have to treat lands, which includes poling, slash needles, bark, smaller diameter trees that create a hazardous high fuel loading condition in the forest. They need to take that material out of the forest, and that's an expensive operation. And the state can't so far pay for that operation on its own. And so lands can't get treated and mega fires continue to be a massive problem. And so that material isn't merchantable, and we want to make it merchantable by creating two revenue streams with it.
Cody Simms (29:18):
For the most part, this wood is too small to be used to create two by fours, for example. It's oddly shaped or it's too small, but it's important because it is kindling. It is the stuff that actually catches fire.
Brad Hartwig (29:30):
Yep, it's kindling. And right now the best way for them to get rid of it is they take it out of the forest, they put it on these landings and they just burn it, because that's the cheapest way of getting rid of it. They'd rather burn it in a controlled way on these landings, rather than have it be kindling in the forest.
Cody Simms (29:47):
And I assume no carbon capture infrastructure on top of these bonfires that are being created today.
Brad Hartwig (29:54):
No carbon capture. And it's even worse because it emits black carbon and things that have acute air quality implications.
Cody Simms (30:03):
So you're sourcing it from them, are you having to buy it or are they saying, "Hey, help us get rid of this stuff."
Brad Hartwig (30:09):
So there's different definitely flavors of these waste streams coming from the forest. You can absolutely get stuff for free. The problem is that you can only get so much for free. And you can imagine concentric circles of, if you can only pay $0, you can only get so much. Some people will even pay you to take the material because they otherwise have to landfill it and pay a tipping fee. But the more that you can pay for this waste material, the more you can help, the more you can be part of the solution and the more you can get.
(30:41):
And so that's what we're trying to do. It's this weird competing thing where you are trying to pay, you want to get the levelized cost of carbon removal down as low as possible, but you also want to be able to pay as much as possible for the waste biomass so you can help the state actually treat the lands so you can make it economical for people to get you the material.
Cody Simms (31:04):
To me it's just exciting that there are so many companies now vying for wanting access to this, which hopefully helps create economic incentives for the state to continue to invest more money into forest management. We just published a pod episode recently with the team at Origin Materials, which is using timber waste today to help create chemical alternatives for replacing petrochemicals. So multiple different companies vying for different ways to leverage biowaste materials. We've talked about Charm obviously already.
(31:38):
So anyway, you gain access to this stuff and then you turn it into what I understand to be basically coffee grinds. Is that the right way to think about the process that you run it through?
Brad Hartwig (31:49):
Yeah, it's a multi-stage process, and what we first do is we run it through a pyrolysis unit. It's called torrefaction. And it's basically, it's like you mentioned, it's like roasting coffee beans. It's an oxygen starved environment, but unlike bio oil or biochar or activated carbon, which are more severe forms of pyrolysis, this is like the ultra light roast coffee beans, this is super light.
Cody Simms (32:22):
And does it require heat to do it? What's the input to this process?
Brad Hartwig (32:28):
So the entire system is a closed loop, no energy needed to put into the system. On aggregate, it's a net energy producer. So I think that's the first thing we always want to mention, is just that you don't need any energy for the process. It produces all of the energy it needs inside of the boundary limit. And so what happens is we consume a small amount of the biomass in order to produce the heat needed to toast the rest of it.
Cody Simms (32:55):
Got it. So you use your own material as essentially the fire starter for the torrefaction process, but then it is self-sustaining thereafter, almost like a smoker in your backyard kind of thing?
Brad Hartwig (33:07):
Exactly. And the goal is that you're using as little of the biomass as possible to do the full toasting process. And we even want to capture the emissions from that toasting process, because that's, again, it's atmospheric carbon that you're letting go back into the atmosphere. But ultimately, we end up with this biocarbon or we internally sometimes call it spice as like a hat to the movie Dune. But we take that material and now it's really easy to grind, and so you can get it into this fine powder.
Cody Simms (33:41):
Is this a biochar, a fine charcoal almost, is the way to think about it?
Brad Hartwig (33:46):
It feels very similar and behaves very similar. The difference is, well there's a few differences. One, biochar is typically a soil amendment. And there's properties of biochar that make it a particularly good soil amendment. And some of that's the fixed carbon, it's the way that it basically enhanced nutrient uptake for the plant. This is, because it's just such a light toasting, it makes the material hydrophobic and it makes the material really easy to grind. But it's like a one on the coffee roasting scale, whereas biochar is like an eight.
Cody Simms (34:22):
Okay, got it. What does hydrophobic mean?
Brad Hartwig (34:25):
Hydrophobic means it no longer will absorb moisture.
Cody Simms (34:28):
Okay, makes sense. Fears water. Hydrophobic. Got it.
Brad Hartwig (34:31):
It fears water and it allows you to store it in conditions that are outside for long periods of time and it won't uptake water. But more importantly, a lot because you can reduce it to this fine powder with very little energy input because it's now brittle. You can use it for the downstream process, which is really where our special sauce comes in.
Cody Simms (34:57):
So torrefaction is a known thing in the world. You all didn't invent this process, this process exists?
Brad Hartwig (35:04):
Correct.
Cody Simms (35:05):
What is it typically used for?
Brad Hartwig (35:07):
So the initial reason for bringing it into existence was to convert coal plants into bioenergy plants. So you're trying to make biomass behave more like coal so that you could just have it be a drop-in replacement for coal in a coal boiler.
Cody Simms (35:23):
Okay. So in all of your thousands of papers you read, you discovered this as like, "Oh, here's one solution for..." You said it turns biomass into a coal replacement, essentially a bio coal. And so, "Hey, this exists." But rather than using it as a fossil fuel source, can we use it for other things? And then I presume that led you to the next step in the process, which was what we'll talk about as the gasification process that you do next with this torrefied biomass.
Brad Hartwig (35:52):
Exactly. So we did not invent torrefaction. And coal plants actually, as you imagine, quickly fell out of favor. And so the torrefaction technology in general became like a stranded asset or got mothballed in a lot of the world. And so what we're doing is, we now have that as the feed stock for really what we like to call as our engine. Coming from rocket engine development space, we like to think of it as a vegetarian engine. We're just feeding it organic waste, really. But by getting the material into a powder, this torrefied biomass powder, we can now put it into our engine essentially. So that's all the thermal pre-treatment of the biomass and preparation so that it can work with the downstream process.
(36:38):
And the downstream process is, as you mentioned, there's a gasifier that we're developing with the Gas Technology Institute. It's a pretty unique gasifier. And then downstream of that is an oxy combustor and a power loop. And all of that is extremely compact and just really quickly high level, using torrefaction and what's known as a, we call it R gas. It's basically a rocket gasifier And by using torrefaction in this R gas, we can take really low-grade waste feed stocks, things that are very high ash content, things that are going to have dirt mixed in there, and we can use it as an input, as a feed stock for our engine.
Cody Simms (37:27):
This means you don't need pure corn husks or pure rice husks or whatever. You can just take all this stuff that's pulled out of the forest, run it through your torrefaction process, and then it now becomes an input into your engine.
Brad Hartwig (37:41):
Correct. The way to think about it is the gasifier, again, it's actually a very, very small system. It's probably 95% smaller than a typical gasifier, but what it does is it basically chops out all of the ash constituents in the biomass. So anything that is not carbon, oxygen or hydrogen falls out and it falls out as what ultimately becomes a rock, a small inner aggregate. And what then moves on is this high purity sin gas and that basically has all the atmospheric carbon in it.
Cody Simms (38:18):
Is it methane like in nature?
Brad Hartwig (38:23):
It's a mix of gases. It's a mix of CO2, hydrogen and CO, primarily. And so the CO2 is already fully reacted, but the CO and the hydrogen gas, those are still combustible. They still are reactants. And what we're doing is we are doing gasification and combustion with pure oxygen instead of with air.
Cody Simms (38:51):
You have to go buy the pure oxygen and put it in tanks.
Brad Hartwig (38:55):
We generate the oxygen ourselves. What we do is, we basically, as you can imagine, a plant when it grows, it pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere, it hangs onto the carbon, but it releases the oxygen back into the atmosphere. So what we need to do is we need to basically re-oxidize the carbon so that we can make CO2 in a form that can then be permanently stored in geologic formation.
(39:18):
So what we do is we introduce oxygen partially in the gasifier, which is a fuel rich combustion, and then the rest in the oxy combustor where you have your only combustion products is CO2 and water. We send it into this power cycle, but it makes it really nice. You have an inherent carbon capture because you can just condense out the water and you have a pure stream of CO2 that's already at the pressures you need for deep geologic storage.
Cody Simms (39:43):
Then there's a power generation byproduct I assume. Is that because it is pressurized gas, so at this point you can run it through a turbine essentially? Is that how that plays through?
Brad Hartwig (39:53):
That's exactly right. And we do this all at extremely high pressures. And so, we have two turbo machines essentially that that exhaust is going through, and we do it at extremely high pressures such that the CO2 actually becomes the working fluid for the power cycle and it's at such high pressures that it actually behaves more like a liquid. It's called super critical CO2. That's the place on the phase diagram it is. And it allows for extremely small, compact machines, but as you imagine we're passing it through these turbo machines, a 50 megawatt turbo machine would fit on your coffee table.
Cody Simms (40:37):
So this is where your rocket engine experience comes into play, is building out these highly dense turbines, I'm guessing.
Brad Hartwig (40:45):
Yeah, our pilot plant will actually be the most power dense machine on the planet. And so it's basically, what you're doing is you are producing electricity by running it through this turbo machine. That allows you to generate oxygen on site, it allows you to run your grinder, so it allows you to pay for all of those processes with power you generate, but it also produces additional power that you can then put on the grid.
Cody Simms (41:10):
These plants are, presumably need to be closer to the source of the biomass that you're sourcing so that you're not having to truck that stuff all around the country, which might not put them near a grid power source. How are you thinking about where to place these and how many of them you need and what that network of plants looks like?
Brad Hartwig (41:32):
We talk about it as the trilemma of where's your biomass, where can you store CO2 and where's your load demand?
Cody Simms (41:39):
You're right. The CO2 storage, you're right. That's the third one, isn't it?
Brad Hartwig (41:42):
So it's a three leg table and you need all three of them.
Cody Simms (41:46):
CO2 storage, luckily, DAC plants need a lot of power, so they're already, storage and power pretty much are going to be relatively coupled, one would think.
Brad Hartwig (41:57):
The electricity load is what we're seeing as the least difficult problem. You can find electric load near CO2 storage sites. And so it's really, how do you find biomass that's nearby. And in general, we see that you want to truck the biomass to the machine. You don't want to truck the CO2 to the well and have the machine at the biomass. And the main reason for that is that one ton of biomass, if you're able to capture all of the carbon in it, it's actually around 1.8 to two tons of CO2 equivalence.
Cody Simms (42:32):
And you're a net CO2 creator relative to the carbon in the biomass. Did I just hear that correctly?
Brad Hartwig (42:39):
Basically, in order for a plant to produce one ton of biomass, it pulls two tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, and that's because it hangs on in the carbon, but releases the oxygen. And so, oxygen is the majority of the weight of a CO2 molecule. And so it's just from a logistics
Cody Simms (42:57):
One carbon, two oxygen. So, I guess that makes sense.
Brad Hartwig (43:00):
So from just trucking, from a logistics standpoint, you want to bring the biomass to the plant, but you just don't want it to be further than a certain radius, like a 50 mile or a hundred mile radius. You want it to be as close as possible. And how far you can truck material depends on a number of things. Everything from how much water is in the biomass, how much can you pay for biomass, how does that affect your lifecycle assessment? But there are enough regions across the world that this could reach a multi gigaton scale, with California being like an awesome starter.
Cody Simms (43:38):
A little bit of the reading I did before our episode on BiCRS, seems to indicate that the limiting factor is access to biomass in a way that doesn't require you to have to grow crops specifically to feed your engine, because that starts to defeat the purpose if you're having to spend a bunch of water and use a bunch of land to grow crops specifically to feed your BiCRS engine. Do you think you scale purely on waste forestry product and will that allow you to hit the volumes you need?
Brad Hartwig (44:09):
So our goal is, and the roadmap to BiCRS report does a great job showing just how much of this stuff there is. Of this waste feed stock, there's on the order of five and a half billion tons of organic waste available annually. And that's material that is otherwise going into landfill, it's being open field burned. It basically falls under this umbrella of do no harm.
(44:34):
So if you take it, it's not going to do harm to food security. It might actually have other environmental co-benefits by taking that material. So there's, in five and a half to 6 billion tons. Again, in CO2 equivalence is over 10 gigatons of CO2 removal that you could theoretically have from that material. We're definitely looking at eventually going beyond forest waste, but to this point exactly is you want to be able to take waste. And waste is almost inherently ugly. It's the stuff that no one else wants. And so that's where you need a system that can take really low grade stuff so that you don't need to grow this fine, you can imagine a perennial grass or growing corn and putting all the corn, the kernels and everything-
Cody Simms (45:24):
The husks and everything, sure
Brad Hartwig (45:26):
You can take the waste products from those grow cycles, but you don't want to take what's ultimately going to end up in a grocery store. You want that to go to the grocery store. You don't want to take that off people's plates.
Cody Simms (45:38):
It sounds like, obviously you have a lot of technology that you'll need to build or that you are building. Sounds like torrefaction is somewhat a solved problem, but I'm sure there's tweaks to it for your system. The gasifier and the combustion engine and the whole turbo pumps or turbo engine that you're building, that's your core IP of the business. But just as magical to this company succeeding, it sounds like, is going to be your ability to build these plants and manufacture them at scale and then build the logistics business around sourcing biomass, I'm guessing. Am I thinking about that the right way?
Brad Hartwig (46:19):
Yeah, those are the two things. It's like, we need to be able to develop a machine that can do the thing, but then we need to be able to build lots of those machines and have a really robust supply chain and logistics network that's supporting it.
Cody Simms (46:34):
So let's pick those apart on the ability to build lots of those things. I said I was going to bookmark this and come back to this because you said, when you were building rockets, some of what you needed to build are, what was it? The machines to help you build the machines to build the rockets or something like that. And it sounds like that skillset is exactly what you need to do here, which is how do you build these plants rapidly?
Brad Hartwig (46:55):
So the whole goal of, we want to make everything really small. And the way that you make it small is by going to these high pressures. And it's interesting, these are high pressures for the power industry. In a sense, they're low pressures for some of the rocket engine development work we've done. And so it's very manageable by the team that we're building, the temperatures, the pressures. We've kind of done all of that stuff before, but by building a machine that can be much, much smaller, we're talking about 30 times smaller than a similar traditional bioenergy facility. We can build all of the hardware ourselves and we can build it in our factory in pre-fabricated modules.
Cody Simms (47:39):
Build and own, is the goal that you are going to own and operate these plants?
Brad Hartwig (47:42):
At least to start. Our goal is to build, own and operate the plants.
Cody Simms (47:48):
So it's a vertically integrated carbon sequestration and power generation business. So truly the Tesla or SpaceX of carbon capture and storage to some extent.
Brad Hartwig (48:01):
And I think what we're seeing is, at least to start, that's what you need. This'll be a novel engine or plant, and so, no one else will, one, know how to operate it. We want to make sure that we have very close coupling with how the plant operates and how we're designing the second iteration of that hardware. If down the line we see that the world could scale to carbon removal faster, if we license technology, if we open source stuff, by all means, we'll figure out a way to make that happen. But certainly, in the early days, the business model is we develop and build and operate these plants and we sell carbon removal and electricity.
Cody Simms (48:38):
And is carbon removal, I assume is the primary product you'll be selling and then the electricity? Are you at competitive rates with renewable energy generation on the electricity side in your mind to be able to be a producer that can play in equal generation markets?
Brad Hartwig (48:57):
We are definitely not fooling ourselves that we're going to be solar during peak sunlight hours, in terms of when the sun is shining, solar is about as cheap as you can get. And we're all for solar. Well, we see this filling a major niche is that the state, the country, the world at large needs baseload renewable power as well, power that's available whenever you need it. And the reality is that intermittent can't do that today. The goal is to bring on a lot more grid scale battery storage, but it will take, one, a long time for that to hit the scale that is needed, and will also take a long time for that to hit a duration where it can be depended upon when you have long periods of time when you can't depend on solar, times when you have smoke season in California where the sky is covered with smoke for weeks at a time. And so you do get a premium. What we're seeing is being able to sell power at $90 per megawatt hour or 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. That's right where Cal ISO grid is today.
Cody Simms (50:01):
And is that, in the models that you've created, is that subsidized by the carbon capture profits that you are bringing in or are you able to generate at that cost as a separate business line for yourselves?
Brad Hartwig (50:15):
There's two ways of looking at it. Because we have two products, we always see one as subsidizing the other.
Cody Simms (50:21):
It's a cool closed loop benefit. It was interesting to think through how they related to each other.
Brad Hartwig (50:27):
If you were just focused on producing energy, I would think there are better ways to go about baking power plants. The fact is that this is just what we see as thermodynamically, again, the best way of pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and putting it underground and
Cody Simms (50:43):
And hey, you have this cool byproduct, which is that you generate energy at a relatively cost competitive rate. That's what I'm hearing.
Brad Hartwig (50:49):
Right.
Cody Simms (50:49):
That's great. And then on the CO2 that you're capturing, I assume that you're selling into the voluntary markets, you'll eventually sell into compliance markets and then you'll sell to carbon to value companies as the main consumers of the CO2. Is that the right way to think about the business there?
Brad Hartwig (51:07):
Exactly. And we'll be able to, the goal is get 45Q tax credit as well, because we'll be putting CO2 in Class VI wells.
Cody Simms (51:18):
So that's that $180 a ton storage credit.
Brad Hartwig (51:20):
What we've seen so far is we'll only get $85 per ton.
Cody Simms (51:24):
Oh, right. It's worded differently for DAC specifically, isn't it?
Brad Hartwig (51:28):
Is very specifically a DAC-
Cody Simms (51:29):
And CCS, I guess.
Brad Hartwig (51:30):
Yes. And we're excited even for $85 per ton. We're like, "All right, that's more than zero."
Cody Simms (51:38):
And probably room to lobby on that in the future, I would guess as well. Okay. I'm conscious. We've been chatting for a while, I could keep asking all these questions. So if you were planning to build, own and operate these plants, you've raised some venture capital to date, but presumably you're going to need to scale this with different kinds of capital structures in addition to Topco equity, right? I'm guessing there's project finance, there's offtake, there's different ways of funding, different parts of your business. How are you thinking about that as the CEO?
Brad Hartwig (52:09):
Right now we're in the equity stage for sure, as well as grants, trying to get as many grants on board as possible. And there are, luckily in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, there is a lot of non-diluted capital out there, which is to help get basically these technologies through the technology readiness levels as well as get your first plant on the ground. Grants are a lot of work as well, not only to get, but also to manage in the wake of that. We do see a lot of awesome strategic partnerships in getting some of these grants as well, being able to partner with different folks in the government and be able to address some of the key problems that they're having to manage. But as we move into first commercial plants and want to start putting down lots and lots of these projects, we are going to absolutely be looking at project finance and more conventional debt lenders.
(53:03):
And so, as we've talked about before, there's a bit of a gap still that's needed for getting us through first of a kind, first commercial plant in a way that is not so onerous on, basically founders having to go raise equity dollars. These are going to be expensive first of a kind systems. And hardware is really expensive, not only to deploy but to develop. And so, we are absolutely looking at lots of different ways of financing, not only these first projects, but also as quickly as possible get to what are more conventional documents, things like, we'll be able to have a traditional power purchase agreement. We'll also ideally be able to show that these tax credits 45Q from the federal government are bankable, but then also these long-term carbon offtake agreements. The goal is, make those a key bankable.
Cody Simms (53:59):
Any long-term agreements on the carbon sales side you can speak to yet?
Brad Hartwig (54:04):
So far we've done pre-sales of carbon removal. And so, we were part of Frontiers most recent cohort.
Cody Simms (54:11):
Congrats.
Brad Hartwig (54:12):
Thank you. We're extremely excited to be working with, right now Stripe and Shopify, who have purchased from us and hoping to get a lot more folks signed up soon. And now, just starting conversations on those longer term off take agreements.
Cody Simms (54:27):
We talked about a bunch of the tech that you're developing across your stack. Where is the business today in terms of technology readiness? How far have you gone from an end-to-end perspective?
Brad Hartwig (54:39):
So our goal is to have our first fully operating system turning biomass into power positive carbon removal by end of 2025. So, depending on how you look at it, sometimes it feels like a long time. It's also probably what would be the fastest development timeframe for any new power plant clean sheet. But that is our target right now. And we've been doing a lot of work. Actually, some of the hardest parts of this are actually processing the biomass itself, taking this very heterogeneous feed stock and running it through a pre-treatment process. I'm sure Peter at Charm can talk to you at length about how difficult that is.
Cody Simms (55:23):
I've heard him reiterate the same.
Brad Hartwig (55:25):
So that's been a lot of our attention, is pre-treating the biomass, running it through torrefaction, grinding it and feeding it.
Cody Simms (55:30):
The Origin Material guys said the same thing. They said that the challenge with biomass isn't that it's dense. The word they used was that it's fluffy, which basically means it's awkward to move and awkward to manage, which I thought was an interesting adjective to use. Fluffy.
Brad Hartwig (55:47):
It's in a lot of ways a mechanical engineer's worst nightmare. It's very, not consistent properties at all, but that's been a lot of our focus is getting it basically almost like what we call like a spice injector. Once you can get it into the engine itself, that's where our team is our bread and butter, is being able to do these high pressure, high temperature combustion devices and turbo machines and converting that into power.
(56:13):
And so, we're actually going to be, later this month, going and doing some demonstrations of our oxy combustor out in the Mojave Desert, kind of like a conventional rocket engine test campaign. And a lot of our biomass processing, torrefaction feed system work is being done in Illinois with one of our partners, Gas Technology Institute.
Cody Simms (56:34):
Well, Brad, I've learned a ton. I so appreciate you taking the time to come on here and share more about what you're building with Arbor. Any last things I should have asked? Any asks for help you have? Anything else you want us to know about Arbor, about what you're building, about where you're going? Shout it out.
Brad Hartwig (56:52):
Obviously it takes a village to get any one of these projects built, let alone scaling it to gigaton scale impact. And so we're just excited in general to be socializing what we're doing to get other people excited to come and join the space. We're definitely targeting a lot of the aerospace talent out there right now and trying to get them excited about maybe pivoting into a career in climate. And so some of our work in the near future is going to be continuing to make that happen and make this something exciting, is yes, you can take your skillsets that you've built over your career and now apply it to this problem in a very real, tangible way.
Cody Simms (57:32):
Well, thanks for joining us today and look forward to continuing to get the updates on how things are going.
Brad Hartwig (57:38):
Awesome, Cody, thank you so much. Thank you again for having me as well.
Jason Jacobs (57:42):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (57:46):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about power and collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (57:55):
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Yin Lu (58:08):
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Cody Simms (58:18):
Thanks and see you next episode.