The Grounded podcast takes over Reversing Climate Change! Tom Previte of The Carbon Removal Show, founded a new biochar company in the United Kingdom called Restord. And like any good podcaster, he decided to make a show about it!
Grounded: A Climate Startup Journey, just wrapped its five-episode first season documenting Tom's attempts to start a new biochar company. He walks listeners through so many of the basic questions of starting a business, and specifically a business in a new category like carbon removal. What standard should one try to work within? Which parts of the life-cycle assessment matter? Who actually wants this product?!
What's especially novel about this episode is that Tom and his producer Ben Weaver-Hincks produced it in the style of Grounded, with voiceover segments and various other effects!
Tom and Ross talk about how to make podcasts about carbon removal interesting, how various design decisions impact quality and frequency of publishing, and what we can do to get more people into CDR and climate action through creative media work.
Resources
The Carbon Removal Show
Grounded
Restord
Restord's crowdfunding campaign
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Tom, I have a pitch for you. This show is going out a week from today. Would it be possible to work with Ben and make this a Grounded episode and produce the show for—?
Tom Previte: Sure. 100%, 100%. Let me just give — let me just give Ben a very quick ring.
Ross Kenyon: OK.
Tom Previte: Yeah. Now this is very Grounded right here.
Ross Kenyon: It is very Grounded.
Tom Previte: Hey Ben, how’s it going? I’m sat here chatting with Ross from Nori and the Reversing Climate Change podcast. Are you — do you want to jump on?
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m one of the co-founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace. We’re doing something weird today. Tom Previte of The Carbon Removal Show and also of Grounded, which is his new podcast about starting a biochar company in the UK. You know, I feel like I’ve stagnated in some ways where I’ve stopped experimenting with the form. The form that I set up has been very straightforward, as you’ll hear in the show. So I would avoid a lot of the post-production woes that previous video projects I worked on had fallen into.
I gave this advice to Tom several years ago when he was starting The Carbon Removal Show and he disregarded it very rudely. And he made a highly produced show with segments. That is something that I always tell people to avoid. But it made for great radio. And I’m really happy that he did because it made for a really great product. That’s something entirely different within the world of carbon removal and climate podcasting, at least as far as I’ve heard.
Tom Previte: Ross, you know I am here right now. I am here speaking with you, so… I mean, it’s always a bit funny to do these kinds of intros.
Ross Kenyon: But yes, you were allowing me to prattle on a bit about you. You waited till I finished saying all the nice things and then you decided to jump in.
Tom Previte: You just kept going, you know? It just sounded so good that I didn’t want to — didn’t want to cut you off in your stride.
Ross Kenyon: Well, OK, without further ado, here’s the trailer for Grounded.
Tom Previte: I set out on a mission to create a business that made biochar, explore the benefits it might have and document the journey. But I’m learning that making a small change involves big challenges. Is the UK the wrong place to be doing biochar? I don’t think so, but… Why does it matter if it’s produced here or not? It doesn’t. From where to do it to proving the business model, this is my very honest story of starting a climate business and everything I’ve discovered along the way. You know, it may take a lot longer than you think and there’s a lot of other moving parts, so I wouldn’t put all the eggs in one basket.
Find out how it goes by subscribing to Grounded: A Climate Startup Journey, wherever you get your podcasts. I don’t know why it’s so difficult to talk about. Maybe it makes it more real, which in some ways is very scary and I think hopefully in other ways I can find to be quite exciting.
Ross Kenyon: Happy to have you here, Tom. This is Tom Previte from The Carbon Removal Show and Grounded, which is his new podcast. It’s a great show, Tom. I’ve listened to all of it. I wish there was more. There’s only five episodes. Come on, man.
Tom Previte: I know, I know. But you know, those five take a long time. It’s taken us six months of recording, just conversations back and forth with family, friends, whoever, and then two months of just continually producing to get those five out. So it takes more than you think. Well, I mean, you know this anyway, Ross, because you’ve been podcasting for years now. But I think the average listener doesn’t understand, or isn’t fully aware of, the production value that can go into these shows sometimes.
Ross Kenyon: They absolutely do not know that at all. People ask me for advice on podcasting fairly frequently, and I say a pretty similar thing each time. But I come from a video background and there’s an impolite term for this, but it’s called frame-effing. But it’s not believed in that way per se. But there’s a tendency when you’re in the editing bay to be like, oh, we can just change like a millisecond here. Oh, we can add a little thing here. And before you know it, you’ve spent a lot of money, a lot of time. No one’s going to notice this change for the most part, but the process just dragged, and it’s asymptotic — you never reach finishing once it’s there.
And so I set up Reversing Climate Change to do it the opposite way. You interview naturalistically. You basically get what you get in the can, and if it’s good, then cool. If you sound kind of foolish, OK, maybe you can edit a tiny bit, but maybe that’s just what it is and they’re not all going to be winners. And that’s OK. But then the alternative is doing something like what you did, or what Planet Money or Gimlet’s StartUp — which is very similar to Grounded — does. But did you hear it, like that workload and that workflow for even producing five episodes? Six months of recording and what, two months of producing? Is that what you said?
Tom Previte: I mean, I’m not a perfectionist. I’m going to say that right now.
Ross Kenyon: That’s not even at that perfectionistic level either.
Tom Previte: No, I know. I know. I’m really not. I’m really not. But I mean, yeah, this latest show — I say six months of recording because I just had the idea for it about six months ago. That was shortly after I had some bad news at work. I was made redundant, and so was looking at what I can do next. I started going down this path of biochar, which I’d been thinking about and I just had in the back of my mind, like, it’d be great to just capture this content that I’m learning because I’m picking up so much stuff from so many interesting people. So at worst case scenario, I’ll just have a bank of interesting content from conversations with farmers or influential people in the space.
Farming is not farming though. Farming is a business. Farming used to be a way of life. And that’s the difference. If you’re looking at this from a global lens, the UK is not an easy place to do biochar. There are a load of limitations.
And fortunately it turned into an opportunity where we could get some funding, and we started the podcast to document our journey. And so for the last two months, we’ve really been taking all of that content, which is probably about 50 hours’ worth of content. And we’ve taken that, condensed it down and chopped and changed it into five 30-minute episodes. And yeah, at that rate, maybe that’s overkill, I don’t know. But we’re happy with it so far.
Ross Kenyon: I just did a show recently with the subject of a Ken Burns documentary and he was saying that the Ken Burns process is something like 100 hours of footage to one hour of produced, finished product. Like, wow, those editors. That’s hard too. People often think that you just record it and then deal with it in post. That’s sort of a joke in film too. It’s like, we’ll fix it in post, we’ll deal with it later. But I have a background in documentary filmmaking and it’s actually really hard — even if you have good footage, turning it into something that’s a coherent story that someone would actually want to consume is extremely difficult. There’s a lot of creative decision making. It’s invisible to the listener too. They’re so spoiled. They have no idea the sweat and tears. I’m sure that you and Ben are suffering, right?
Tom Previte: Oh, my God. Yeah. And I mean, I have to shout out my producer, a chap called Ben Weaver-Hincks. He’s a magician. Like, I basically came to him and was like, hey, Ben, I’ve been capturing all this content for the last few months. Obviously we worked together on The Carbon Removal Show. So he was like, oh, say, Tom, not more. What’s this new idea you have? And fortunately, he kind of liked the idea of telling the story of launching a carbon removal startup, and listened to some of the content that I banked and thought, let’s give this a go. So yeah, hats off to him for the hard work he’s done on helping me put it together.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t have six months to spend on an episode, but this was when I thought we could collaborate to make something a bit more interesting. OK, this is a lot of effort that has been spent recording, conceptualizing, producing. We get this question at Nori sometimes too. Of all the ways you could spend your time, why creative media? I’d be really curious to know what your answer is, both for The Carbon Removal Show and also for Grounded.
Tom Previte: Big question. You stumped every time they ask you as well?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s hard to.
Tom Previte: Yeah, there’s a lot to say about it. Yeah, that’s a thing. There’s lots of different answers. I think if I try to condense it down, first and foremost, something that became really apparent to me in 2020 when we first started looking at this was that there was just such a poor lack of understanding in carbon removal, and being able to tell a compelling story in a very simple way. Put it into lay terms, make it interesting for your average listener, for anyone — for your climate-conscious individual, to your grandma who doesn’t really know what a podcast is. If you can make it engaging, then I think that can only do a world of good for the awareness of this industry. So I think there’s a big awareness-raising thing there that drives me when it comes to The Carbon Removal Show and Grounded and this new podcast.
I think in the Grounded context, and for this new business that I’ve set up, Restord, the biochar company, I think it makes a lot of sense because firstly of that awareness-raising thing for carbon removal more generally, but then secondly, with these projects, you have a lot of lead time to build up for things. Like, I could put a deposit down on a pyrolysis machine, which is the machine we need to make biochar. And I’m going to be waiting, you know, 3, 6, 12 months before that machine is ready. So I’ve got some downtime to sort things out, and that could be anything from finding my feedstock, building out partnerships and supply agreements, finding a buyer for my carbon credits. But at the same time, I’m not physically doing the thing yet. So it made sense to put effort into building content.
And I think the other piece for me, for the Grounded side of things that made sense, was — I don’t know, when I first started looking at biochar, I thought I knew biochar. I thought I knew carbon removal, right? Like, I do a podcast on carbon removal. Therefore I must know lots about it.
Ross Kenyon: Be very careful what you say next about that, Tom, but OK.
Tom Previte: But I guess, like, naively, I was like, well, you know, I know about this, I know about biochar. And then a few weeks in I was like, holy sh— like, oh, there’s a lot more here than meets the eye. And so that sort of shock for me, having been in the industry for two or three years, made me realize people need to know more about how these projects get set up. You know, they need to understand the challenges around getting set standards and certifications, machinery, supply chain. And I think that story isn’t told ever. So I’d like to tell that story as well.
Ross Kenyon: Very similar to an answer that I would have given. Nori for a long time was just chugging along trying to get carbon credits out the door and finding ways to talk about things that people don’t fully understand — or especially when we started, carbon removal was a much newer thing, and so we’re just trying to educate people on what we’re even trying to do and why it matters at all.
I love the format of doing this though, as a business starting up. I think one of the hardest interviews to do — maybe you agree with this and maybe you don’t — but companies, as they receive venture backing and they get a little bigger, there’s a tendency towards conservatism and people don’t want to be too vulnerable in a public space because they might reveal some— One of my favorite parts of the show that I ever had was, OK, I hope you’re not going to blush: Peter Reinhardt of Charm. But I asked Peter a question about intellectual property and if he felt any difficulty with patenting bio-oil’s process, because Charm has, as I understand it, a pretty large patent in that space. Peter has a software background. People in software did not like — they like the open source ethos. They don’t actually want to be real patent-focused. And I could tell that Peter was really struggling with the idea. He needed to, but he wasn’t fully comfortable with it. And the way that he talked about that on the air, I respected that a great deal because a lot of people would have given me a much more canned answer. And it doesn’t make for good radio and it doesn’t make me trust them as a business as much.
But the way that you go about it with Grounded, honestly, it made me want to buy biochar from you, made me want to support you. I find myself connected to you specifically, not just biochar as a whole. I’m invested in you listening to this show. It’s a really successful marketing tool, I think, for you. I think it worked on me. And I know the trick.
Tom Previte: Yeah. Well, I mean, we’re selling.
Ross Kenyon: But then again, I haven’t bought anything yet. So did it actually work? I don’t know. It inspired good affection from me.
Tom Previte: Yeah, I think just — yeah, I mean, it’s something that I think a lot of carbon removal companies face, which is like, how open do you be, how transparent do you be, versus, I guess, keeping a lid on things. And I think a lot of companies lean towards the side of being, yeah, let’s keep a lid on it. And I don’t know, I’ve just taken a very different approach. And we have nothing — we have nothing special ourselves, right? Don’t get me wrong, we have nothing special. We’re just — as things stand, we’re purchasing a machine from a UK manufacturer in the name of Catcha, who have also got a bit of a turnkey solution for some of the software side of things. We’re doing this on farm. We’re sourcing biomass from local councils and other civil engineering contractors. We have no IP yet.
And I think that’s a journey that I would like to tell — we’d like to figure out what our unique selling point is, what our IP is, if we do find that. And I’d like to be able to tell the story of how we get to that point, because I think there’s such a mystery. And I think everyone talks about transparency in this market, how transparent we must be and being open to lifting the lid on things. But I’m just curious. I’m just eternally curious and want the answers to things. And so I would want the answers to this stuff if I was on the other side. So I feel as though, being on this side, I should give the answers.
Ross Kenyon: It’s beautiful. It might be naive, but I share in that naivete with you. Like, I want it to be that way. We publish our methodologies under a very permissive Creative Commons license. If you want to use our DAC methodology or our croplands methodology, you can just fork it, remix it, republish it. As long as you don’t republish it under a more restrictive license, you can just run with it, because that’s not the thing that we’re trying to make money off of. We’re not trying to make money off of gated methodologies or services like that. I think that’s part of this.
So, backing up one second, one of the episodes I just listened to of Grounded, you’re talking about how you’ve been seeking non-dilutive capital by way of grants and pre-purchases and not seeking venture investment, which is good, because once you get on that C Corp way or whatever they have that’s equivalent in the UK, and you have a board of directors, they want you in many cases to have intellectual property. Because if you ever seek acquisition, that’s the thing that’s being acquired, in addition to the team in most of these cases, unless you have physical infrastructure or something else. And maybe you will, because you’ll have actual physical units out there. But they want to see that. It’s like the pressure is really there to not be collaborative at the level of intellectual property that we would like to see.
So we might all talk a good game about that. We clearly — climate is pass/fail. We need to all do it together or we don’t. But there’s also capitalistic incentives that throw a big monkey wrench into there, too, where you’re like, OK, now to please the people with money and corporate governance norms, now I have to do something that might not actually be in the climate’s best interest. That’s a really hard decision to deal with.
Tom Previte: Well, exactly. I don’t face any of those — we don’t face any of those pressures yet, because we’re funding ourselves through crowdfunding. And, well, we’re funding our pilot project. Sorry, we are starting very small, and so we don’t have those large pressures from investors, because we’re doing crowdfunding, we’re doing grant funding, we’re taking pre-purchase agreements or pre-purchase orders. And so that’s enabling us to be, I guess, quite nimble in the way that we think about things and how we talk about things.
But I think I also — I did have a conversation with somebody in VC in the climate tech space recently and kind of asked them that question. I was like, what makes a carbon removal company investable? And they were very clear: you need to be able to demonstrate that your solution is having X amount of impact in terms of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. It could be X millions of tons by a certain date. And that could be through you doing the removal yourself, or through you providing software that assists that removal, providing some sort of intellectual property that allows others to do the same — get catalytic impact. And they made an interesting split between being a company that’s venture capital sort of backable in this space, and being a project developer.
And currently, the way that we’re set up, we’re just a project developer. We’re sourcing a machine, we’re sourcing feedstock from somewhere, and we’re funding project by project. And that doesn’t make us venture capital sort of fundable. And that might well be the path that we choose to go down. We’ll see what happens. I don’t know yet, but we’re using the pilot as a way of figuring out whether we are a venture-capital-backable business. And if so, what is our IP and how do we want to talk about that? Or are we just a project developer, which is still great in and of itself, but I guess eventually we’ll need to make that decision. Hopefully we’ll start making biochar first.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it’s nice because there’s been so much criticism of the venture-backed model for carbon removal companies, because a lot of them are used to outsize software company returns. This is the cliche at this point, but you know, moving atoms is more difficult than moving electrons — essentially doing things in physical meat space, different economics, different amounts of electricity needed. It’s just not scalable in the same way. But the pressure to constantly be ramping up — I think we’re going to see a lot more of the developer model. I’ve talked to a lot of people recently who are working on various types of project finance efforts, because people realize there is this gap here.
And even for companies that are venture backed, once you get an offtake agreement that is not bankable because you have no track record and cannot receive — you can’t raise debt against many offtake agreements — then what do you do? You’re just like, cool, I have an agreement for every year for four years, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get there, or I have to raise venture capital in order to do that. But that puts me in a whole different dynamic that I might not even want for my company. Yeah. We need something like what you’re describing. I’m glad that your business model may be trying to pioneer some of that.
Tom Previte: Yeah, I do. Yeah. Well, again, it’s so early days, right? We’ve got a machine on order and we’re hoping to start to break ground and make our first batch of biochar in the summer. But yeah, we’re hoping to take those learnings and see how we can forge a path forwards. Whether that’s smaller decentralized systems, whether that’s larger, more centralized approaches with a unique approach to supply chain, I don’t know yet. But we’re going to learn as we go and hopefully document the journey, because I think that’s what a lot of people want to know.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve had enough challenges trying to figure out how we get grant money and crowdfunding money, let alone going to institutional banks for our project yet. It seems like that’s going OK for you, though. It sounds like you had one grant come in, at least as of my list, yeah.
Tom Previte: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the way that we’ve gone about funding our startup so far is, like I said, through non-repayable finance. So we’ve applied for a bunch of grants and we’ve done a crowdfunder which has successfully just tipped over 100%. So I think we were trying to raise £30,000 on there so far, which is awesome. Half of that has been matched by Cornwall Council, which is the local council where we reside. They’re really bought into the project, which is awesome. So yeah, crowdfunding, R&D grants, local grants, climate grants, these sorts of things for small businesses, and then pre-purchases. And then a bit of savings — a bit of my own savings, or redundancy package, basically, is what’s going into setting this project up.
And you know, in total, we estimate that this pilot, we’re essentially going to be removing around 100 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere if we were to run it for 12 months, which means we’re probably producing about 40 tonnes of biochar. And the cost of doing that with the operations that we have and with the CapEx — so buying the machine and getting it set up — it’s about £100,000 to £150,000. So I mean, it’s still not cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than machinery and kits and projects that I’ve looked at in the past when I was doing my research. I mean, this is what blew my mind. In one of the episodes we talk about finding the right machine. Looking at machinery for a while now, you can get one machine that costs £20,000 and then you get another machine which costs upwards of £2 million.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. If you drop £2,000,000 on the machine, what else would you expect?
Tom Previte: Constant monitoring, 24/7 on time, an automated feedstock hopper, automated bagging system, a weighing scale — like everything. Flat screen TV, mate, you can get the cricket. It just kind of blew me away that there was such a big difference in price. And so, yeah, it’s an interesting kind of approach we’ve taken to funding it. I don’t know if many carbon removal companies have crowdfunded their first pilot project, but it made sense for us to do so.
Ross Kenyon: Is it crowdfunding for — is it donations, or are they buying equity, or?
Tom Previte: Yeah. Well, so they’re getting, I guess, more like Kickstarter rewards. So they get products if they like — depending on what you contribute, we’ll send you some biochar, or we’ll do site visits with you, you’ll get access to the podcast. So it’s a bit more of a Kickstarter type thing. Note, if we send you biochar, we can’t account for that in our actual life cycle assessment. So that biochar won’t be counted in our carbon removal totals, because we can’t make sure that it’s gone on — we can’t guarantee that you’ve put it into your soils. But yeah, so we might need to make it a little bit more, for example.
Ross Kenyon: I have a personal connection to the UK biochar scene actually, which I reckon is rather small, but I was one of the first buyers, in my understanding, of the Earthly kiln, so—
Tom Previte: Oh, oh, you bought one of those kilns? We did a show about it.
Ross Kenyon: I still have it. It’s in my garage. I actually should bust it out. I have a bunch of waste biomass, and so it’s time. But yeah, I felt like — I tried it several times with people from work. Never quite got the full hang of it. To be clear, I think this was user error. I think what Earthly is doing is amazing and very cool, and I think I just need more practice. I find it’s a little bit harder than people think to actually produce workable biochar.
Tom Previte: Oh, it’s not like you had to do several weeks of training with the manufacturer, essentially. Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of back and forth on really getting to grips with how we’re going to work with this machine. But when you first hear about biochar, right, you just think, oh, that makes sense. I take some biomass, I stick it into a pyrolysis kiln or system, whatever it may be, and then I turn it on and then I’ll get biochar out of it. And in reality, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
You know, you’ve got to think about the moisture content of your feedstock — your biomass. You’ve got to think about the residency time. Making sure — like, we have a batch system, right? So if you imagine this big three-by-three-metre machine, a box within a box, and inside that internal chamber we stuff our biomass, we switch it on by literally doing a small fire. And then that heats up the external chamber, which then warms the internal chamber to a certain temperature. Then you’re getting syngases coming off, which they have to funnel back into the external chamber to then run that cyclical burn process. And then you’ve got to watch it for hours to make sure that it doesn’t go to too high a temperature so that you’re melting the steel, or that it’s not dropping in temperature. And there are all sorts of things that you need to bear in mind when you’re running these processes. It’s not just as simple as making a bonfire and putting some wood on it and getting some biochar out.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s complicated.
Tom Previte: I actually have nightmares. I genuinely — I wake up at night time, I mean, having like the panics, thinking about like, God, are we going to — how’s it going to work? Are we getting all the wood, all the supply coming in at the right time? How are we going to process it? What’s going to happen after we’ve run the first few burns? What if the machine isn’t working? Like, there’s so many unknowns. And I mean, yeah, I guess that’s part and parcel of setting up a new project, but I’m excited to see where it goes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I am too. I’m definitely excited to listen, actually, once the machine gets turned on and it’s time. That’s why — when you’re coming back with the show, right? I imagine delivery day is probably the tapes rolling.
Tom Previte: Yeah. Yeah. Our plan is — I mean, the way that we’ve organized it so far is that the first series, the first season of this Grounded show, documents, I guess, the founding idea of Restord and getting to grips with the location, why we’re picking Cornwall as our area to grow, to run with the machinery, the financing and the sort of pre-purchase stuff. And then the second series is going to be later this autumn, where we talk about the practicalities of running this thing. By that point, we’ll have got the machine on site, we’ll have sourced our feedstock, we’ll have been producing biochar, we’ll hopefully be working with those farmers that we’ve partnered with. And then we’ll go through that whole process of getting certified. So all of that is to come in the next season.
Ross Kenyon: Sounds great. Where’s the pasties and where’s the clotted cream? Those are the only things people know.
Tom Previte: Yeah. Where is — that’s a good point. Where? Yeah, no, it’s true. Cornwall’s got a lot going for it. There’s some great — it’s a beautiful place. I’m fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time there when I was younger. So it’s nice to be spending more time back there again. And then I will be eating a lot of clotted cream and scones with some jam, and pasties.
Ross Kenyon: How’s been the reaction from the biochar community? Because we have a running joke internally, especially in the meme lab, that biochar people are a special breed. I feel like they’re the oddest of any of the people in carbon removal as a class of people. I don’t know what it is, but it attracts a very specific kind of person. Have you been welcomed into their arms?
Tom Previte: I mean, first and foremost, we’ve been — since putting this out, I mean, we’ve obviously been speaking with people for the last six months, and so have been communicating with a lot of people in biochar, whether they’re other project developers or academics and whatnot. And I think, yeah, you’re totally right. It does attract a breadth and depth of character. And I think that is testament to all the possible uses biochar has, and all the possible ways that you can make it, all the possible feedstocks that you can use. You could turn any sort of organic biomass into biochar if you had the right machinery and the right kind of process. So I think it just attracts all sorts of characters that have these interesting, inspired ideas of how to make this stuff. And some are a bit bonkers, others make a lot of sense.
And the community that I’ve at least been engaged with so far has been really positive, actually. Like, I’ve spoken to some of the largest biochar producers now in terms of carbon removal deliveries and pre-sales and offtakes. And it’s been really positive to hear their feedback from what we’re doing, which is: it’s just really nice that you guys are talking about this in a candid, transparent way. And, you know, when we went through this journey a few years ago, especially at the stage where you’re at, we really identify with some of the challenges that you have. And so far, it’s been a nice positive reception.
Yeah. Do you guys get any — I’m curious, from putting something out there like this podcast, and obviously the years you guys have been doing this, what’s like the craziest sort of response you’ve had, or the most memorable outreach you’ve had from a listener or from someone that’s engaged with the podcast?
Ross Kenyon: Oh. There’s been a decent number of those over the years. My favorite ones are the people that are still involved in the carbon removal community who got into it through the podcast. That isn’t to say the podcast necessarily — like, in some cases that means the podcast introduced the idea of carbon removal to them when they wanted to work in climate, and they made a beeline for carbon removal subsequently. And that’s really cool. But I also just like being a step on people’s way in. So there’s a version of — you reached out to us for advice about podcasting, and there’s a version of reality where I was like, podcasting is full. Don’t talk to me, Tom. We don’t need any more carbon removal podcasts. Please just go to your job.
And I think that’s pretty wrongheaded, because climate is pass/fail. We need more content. The kinds of people that might listen to your show might— The last couple shows I’ve done have been kind of odd, frankly. The show that came out today, as of recording — what was it about? — was on the philosophy of science. So we read Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and not everyone’s going to listen to that. Before that, I did a show about the Vietnam War and climate change and Carl Jung and psychoanalysis. That’s not for everybody. There’s been a bunch of shows like that where maybe I’m able to bring people in through avenues like that. But yeah, a lot of people have come into carbon removal at least partially due to Reversing Climate Change and Carbon Removal Newsroom. I take a lot of pride in that. I don’t know. What’s the same question for you? Have you had anything like that?
Tom Previte: Yeah, I think this was a really odd thing for me, actually. So when I was out of a job, like November or December last year, I had been spending a bit of time researching this biochar project. And ultimately, as you know, I’m now here committed to doing that, which is what I kind of wanted to do all along. But there was a period for, you know, a few weeks or a month or so where I reached out to the carbon removal network that I had. So I spoke to other marketplaces and registries and people within the industry, and had coffees and early stage interviews, quote unquote. Literally every single one of them was like, oh, it’s weird hearing your voice because I’ve listened to you before on The Carbon Removal Show. And I was like, what?
Welcome back to The Carbon Removal Show. My name is Tom Previte, and I’m joined as ever by Emily Swaddle. Today we’re going to be talking…
You know, there are senior people that are heads of departments at these amazing businesses that, when they were first hired or first getting into carbon removal, they listened to the likes of The Carbon Removal Show or the Reversing Climate Change podcast. And that was a bit jarring for me, because I was like, well, you’re interviewing me for a role and you got upskilled on this industry partially because you listen to the show that we produce, which is awesome to hear, but also a bit jarring. And I was like, well — but that was quite a cool moment, I guess, to have those sorts of conversations.
Ross Kenyon: I love those ones too. Those ones are always kind of fun. They’re like, wait, I know you. Oh, OK, I get it. I see your name. OK, I got it. That was like the one thing I loved about Grounded too, is that it made me want to start a biochar company. I was like, OK, so what if Nori doesn’t work out? What would I want to do? And one of the things that is really interesting about biochar among all the other carbon removal methodologies is that there’s many biochar producers. If you look at the leaderboard on CDR.fyi, like, oh, there’s a lot of biochar represented in there. And the volumes are often smaller, the deliveries are higher, because it’s available pretty quick relatively.
And it seems like it’s one of those things almost like concrete, where — since the LCA matters a lot — where you are in proximity to waste biomass or other feedstocks. So it means that it can take place in a very distributed fashion. It’s not like I have to raise $100 million to pump into a reservoir.
Tom Previte: Essentially, yes.
Ross Kenyon: If I wanted to do this, what should I do besides listening to Grounded? How — what are you going to evaluate if this is the right career move for me?
Tom Previte: I’d caveat this by, like, don’t take my advice.
Ross Kenyon: What? Why wouldn’t I take your advice on that?
Tom Previte: I mean, I don’t — yeah, really. Yeah. Why would you? Who would do that? Really? We’re really starting on doing a podcast about it. But I would say — this is something that I thought about, I’d kind of gone back and forth on. I think you can map all day long. Like, you can build a spreadsheet and work the numbers and work that as much as you want. And I think at the end of the day, it’s quite a knife-edge business model, biochar production. And when you pour over a spreadsheet, modelling it so much, you might just get to that point where you just see it’s too big a risk to take.
And I would say do some of that, but also don’t be afraid to take the risk and start small. So you’re not, perhaps, purchasing a multi-million-dollar machine to begin with. But start small, learn your supply chain, learn where that feedstock’s going to come from, build those early contracts, which is what we’re working on right now. And then work on the other side. You know, who’s going to utilize your biochar? Who is your customer at the end of the day? Because you need that physical biochar to be used by somebody so it can be stored somewhere, whether it’s in the soils or elsewhere. And I think there’s only so much modelling you can do before you just have to push the screw-it button and just do it. I would say don’t let that sort of financial modelling get in the way of doing something meaningful.
Ross Kenyon: It’s nice, I like that advice. I’m going to—
Tom Previte: But again, don’t take my advice. Do not take my advice here.
Ross Kenyon: OK, I won’t take your advice. Against Tom’s warnings, I kept picking his brain. I want to ask you about the directionality of biochar, because at least for now, you’ve said that you’re focused on a more decentralized, farm-oriented model for biochar production. One of the longtime things I used to hear a lot — I think I’m hearing less of it now — was that there actually isn’t a lot of availability for large scale kilns being made in biochar. Just the sort of tool and die shops have not yet started making the machines to make the machines yet. It sounds like maybe that’s changing, but is there a future where there is going to be quite serious centralized biochar production, or do you think it’s going to remain distributed like concrete is?
Tom Previte: Oh, it’s a really good point. It’s a really good question. I mean, again, this is just speculation for me, but I do see a world in which there is both a very centralized model — so very large facilities removing, you know, tens of thousands of tons, maybe more, each year — and then there’s a more decentralized model. Like, again, I think it very much depends on the geography. You know, perhaps a more centralized model works in regions where you’re able to have that sort of large infrastructure. You’ve got large farms, large single-ownership land masses and areas where you can get a facility set up and you’ve got all that biomass in that area.
But then there are countries and geographies where you’ve got very smallholder farmers, let’s say, and they’ve all got small plots. And ultimately you need a sort of community biochar production model. And I guess the centralized people may query and question the decentralized people on their approach when it comes to the efficacy of the biochar, for example, and evidencing the LCA in the right way, because there’s a lot of challenges there if you’ve got hundreds of smallholder farmers producing biochar. But I think I do see a world in which there is sort of two types of biochar then. And I think there’s a market maybe for both, but I’m very curious to see what happens to the pyrolysis machinery over time.
Ross Kenyon: It’s weird because the climate doesn’t really care, in a way, where — it does not matter where that ton of CO2 is being removed. The climate doesn’t really care, but the customer does. The companies do care. And so weirdly, a UK-based company really likes the idea of a UK-based carbon removal project.
Tom Previte: And, you know, I’ll be the first to admit we are using this pilot project as an opportunity, as much as anything else, to test whether we believe biochar can scale in the UK. And there might be a world in which that isn’t the case, at least for us. And so therefore we need to think about a Plan B. And that could be looking abroad and working in a different geography, or it could be doing something else. But we’re using this pilot to figure that out. And so, at least as things stand, this is a big learning exercise for us.
Ross Kenyon: For us too. I think we came at this from a very aprioristic, rationalistic approach where, yeah, the climate doesn’t care if it’s produced here or there. We want this to be done as cost-effectively as possible. But buyers want more than that. In many cases, buyers want those intangibles. They want the story. The line we used to say was that no one really wants to buy a barcode. I think that’s true. An abstract climate benefit is one thing, but I think people are oftentimes buying a story. And if that story means it comes from an idyllic part of the British countryside that you romanticize because of King Arthur and clotted cream and all of that, then OK. Like, maybe that is something that you should lean into rather than scolding them, be like, you shouldn’t care where this happens. Like, maybe it’s OK.
Tom Previte: Yeah. No, I think, like, it made sense to do the thing where we’re doing it now for various different reasons, and I guess we’re leaning into that Britishness and want to really spread the project as far as we can. And I think not only to help raise awareness about us as a project, but also just raise awareness about biochar and carbon removal. Like I said, having spent a few years in carbon removal, and then also a year and a half or two years selling carbon removal through the marketplace that I used to work at, I was blown away by how few people in sustainability — like, heads of sustainability — knew about carbon removal. It just shocked me. And again, it’s a bubble, it’s a small industry. Hopefully it’s growing, but it just took me by surprise, how few people were aware of it really, given how important, I guess, the IPCC says it will be come 2050.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a hard thing to face.
That is indeed a hard thing to face, but I really respect the way that Tom is working on this. I like when people are doing their work in public and being able to show vulnerability and how uncertain so many of these things are. I think people think that it projects strength to not acknowledge how difficult these questions are. And when people do their work in public, I think it counterintuitively inspires a lot of trust. The kinds of people I trust the least are people who pretend to have all the answers and to have everything figured out. I think that’s a scary ideological position to try to defend, and I really like it when I see people who are able to work through these things openly and with an open heart in that way that you can tell. I think that really shows strength in a way that people do not commonly understand or, as business people, use to their advantage.
So kudos to Tom. Please go listen to Grounded. It’s a great podcast. The Carbon Removal Show is as well, and they have an active crowdfunding campaign going right now if you’d like to get involved in what Restord is doing. If you want to support British biochar production in the countryside, that’s a great way to do so. And thanks so much for listening. All the normal ending notes here apply — ratings and reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts are very much appreciated. Thank you so much for listening and have a lovely day.
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