Talking Climate · The Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy

22: Interview with Applied Carbon – the 2024 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize Winner

·39 min·2 clips

Applied Carbon says it built the world's first mobile pyrolyzer.

1. Talking Climate interviews Applied Carbon after the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy awarded the company the $500,000 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize. 2. Ross Chambliss hosts Jason Aramburu, co-founder and CEO of Applied Carbon, and Aramburu explains why the prize matters for a company scaling biochar machinery. 3. The episode asks how biochar can move from a long-standing soil practice into a commercial carbon-removal and agricultural tool. 4. Aramburu says Applied Carbon raised a $21.5 million Series A with investors including Microsoft, TOC, TOVC, Congruent Ventures, and the Grantham Foundation. 5. He also says the company was named one of the top 20 finalists in the XPRIZE carbon removal competition. 6. He explains that XPRIZE began with thousands of teams and now requires the finalists to remove 1,000 tons of CO2 before the deadline. 7. Aramburu traces his first biochar exposure to Princeton’s ecology and evolutionary biology program and a junior-year semester in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. 8. He says he was studying nutrient cycling in tropical soils when he learned that indigenous farmers in Central and South America had used charcoal in soils for thousands of years. 9. He describes archaeological sites in Brazil where intact layers of char remain in the soil after 2,000 years. 10. He says that after Princeton he worked in East Africa on Gates Foundation-sponsored training that taught small farmers to make biochar with simple locally built kilns. 11. Aramburu and Morgan Williams then asked why biochar was not common on U.S. row-crop farms like Iowa corn fields. 12. He says more than 50% of biochar cost can be logistics, because material made in the Pacific Northwest must travel thousands of miles to the Midwest. 13. He says wood feedstock is expensive and limited, with the U.S. producing about 68 million tons of wood waste per year. 14. He and Williams concluded that biochar for corn farms had to be produced on the farm from material already there. 15. Aramburu says biochar could sequester about 2 billion tons of CO2 per year, and he thinks that estimate may be low. 16. He says the latest research indicates biochar made above 550 degrees centigrade can store carbon for millions of years in soil. 17. He cites more than 30,000 peer-reviewed biochar studies and a meta-analysis showing about a 16% crop-yield increase. 18. He also cites increased water-holding capacity and 95% higher nitrogen retention as practical agricultural benefits. 19. The interview stays conversational and technical, with Ross Chambliss asking detailed follow-ups about prototypes, MRV, and scaling. 20. Listeners interested in climate tech, agriculture, carbon removal, and biochar will get the most from it; listeners wanting a short general-interest chat may skip it.

As heard by us

Biochar is presented as a durable climate tool with practical farm-level benefits.

Talking Climate takes on biochar as a climate tool and keeps the focus on Applied Carbon's automated machines that turn infield crop waste into biochar.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a calm, technical interview on turning crop waste into biochar and storing carbon in soil.

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