Wendy Owens is the founder and CEO of Hexas Biomass, a producer and distributor of sustainable biomass that can supplement or replace wood in multiple applications. Wendy’s team is dedicated to using sun, water and land to benefit people and the planet through renewable resources. Today, she joins Ross to discuss the process of growing giant reed for use in products or to produce energy.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
🎧 Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
Paid subscribers get this episode ad-free. The ads in the free feed are inserted by Spotify when you press play. They are not in the file I make.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: 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.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Wendy Owens, CEO of Hexis Biomass. Wendy, we’re going to get into all of what that is and what is good biomass, what is bad biomass, how does this whole process work? Also, listener, it’s just me today. Kristoff and Alessandra are on vacation, slacking, hopefully taking some much deserved time off. I don’t think I’ve done one by myself, Wendy. Will you be nice to me?
Wendy Owens: I will try.
Ross Kenyon: You’ll try. You’re not going to be. No promises. Yeah. If there’s a big lacuna where no one’s talking, it’s because it’s just me and I have no one to fall back on. So Wendy, as you might know from listening, we’d like to start with people’s story. What got you into biomass? Where did you come from? Give us a nice foundation to work on.
Wendy Owens: Sure. I guess I started with materials engineering experience and working with various materials to prepare them for use in manufacturing processes, specifically advanced materials engineering for composites. And had patented technology and worked through a startup with that. And then my next iteration took me into biotech. And so I spent some time in biotech. And I saw this convergence of the two with an opportunity that I ran into through a friend of a friend and saw this plant. And this plant was really, really cool because it had a lot of functionality in terms of not just being ecologically sound, But also being something that had multiple applications.
And so I decided, okay, I’ve done the biotech thing. I’ve done the materials engineering thing. I was ready to get back into the entrepreneurial spirit because I had actually started my first company out of graduate school. And thought it was a good time to jump off and start this again. I just saw in terms of timing where we are with the need that’s out there for a cleaner environment, a better environment. And this is where I ended up.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm. And now it’s hexis biomass.
Wendy Owens: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: That’s what you’re working on. You should see the table here where we’re set up because there are a whole bunch of physical materials here. One looks like a big piece of bamboo. I have been informed it is not a piece of bamboo. I’m scolded very fervently against thinking it is bamboo. So what exactly is this plant? How did you land on this one of all the different types of biomass? I know there’s a lot. And I know people argue about how good various ones are. The life cycle assessments of these are detailed and very important.
And we’re going to dive into that. But how did you find out about giant reeds?
Wendy Owens: Yeah, giant reed is a grass, actually. It’s a perennial grass. It grows from a rhizome. It’s actually sterile grass. It’ll produce seeds, but the seeds will not produce other plants. So it has to be produced by the plant itself. And I came across it, again, I found out about it through a friend of a friend and had done a little work with one company and looked closely at it. And as I looked more closely at it, I found that it wasn’t just your average run-of-the-mill biomass. It is something that has a lot of positive impacts, not only on the environment, but also in the soil that it’s planted.
And it has extremely high yield. And I think that’s what attracted me to it the most is that you can use the least amount of land to get the highest amount of biomass out of this plant at one time. And then you can use it in multiple applications. And it’s really very hardy. It grows in marginal soil, so soil that cannot produce food crops, so we’re not displacing food crops with it. It also can grow in soil that is a high salt content, so highly salinated soil. And you can grow it in...
And wastewater, whether that’s from like a winery, for example, or whether that’s from a pig farm, like animal effluent. And it will take up the chemicals out of the water and remediate the soil. So it’s very good for biomeradiation, remediation. It sort of checked a lot of boxes, and it also sequesters a substantial amount of carbon. The EPA has approved it as a bioenergy crop, so it meets renewable fuel standards. And I just couldn’t find another comparable biomass to it. So I was like, this is pretty cool.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe in terms of framing for our audience, some of you may already know, but one of the big fights in biomass is about the displacement of agricultural land, right? And this happens whether we’re talking globally or even in the United States. So it must be nice to just sidestep that whole thing and say, actually, we’re growing on non-arable or non-agriculturally producing land.
Wendy Owens: It is nice. It’s one thing when people ask me about displacing food and is it something that, you know, if we took up corn and put this in the ground, do we have to do that? And the answer is no, we don’t. The nice thing about it as well is that we have a lot of soil. Both in the U. S. and around the world where we basically sucked all the nutrients out of the soil or we’ve contaminated it with strip mining or something along those lines. Or we have soil that, for example, in northern Texas where we have some growing, they used to grow corn, but they don’t have enough water anymore.
So they used up the water that was in the ground. And so that soil has become salinated. And they can’t really grow much. They’re growing some cotton now. But now there’s a lot of soil that’s just sitting there. So a lot of farmers who aren’t earning any income off of that land anymore. So we’re looking at opportunity to revitalize that land, revitalize the soil, and also then give those farmers an income that they currently can’t achieve because there’s no longer, for example, enough water to sustain corn as a crop.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s very interesting. I’m trying to imagine the whole way through the process, all of the potential benefits that giant reed could have. Should I be saying it in that plural, singular kind of way?
Wendy Owens: Singular, giant reed.
Ross Kenyon: I said giant reed, so I’m going to flagellate for a moment here and move on, forgive myself. Okay, so say you have either like a dairy lagoon or you have some sort of tainted ground where there’s heavy metals in it or something. So you could plant giant reed there. It would clear that up. It would also store additional carbon dioxide in the soil.
Wendy Owens: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: And then you would harvest this crop and turn it into some sort of consumer good.
Wendy Owens: Precisely. Yeah. So if you had a pool of otherwise unusable things that are given to you by pigs or cows.
Ross Kenyon: So delicate.
Wendy Owens: Effluent. That’s the word, effluent. You could water it, the giant reed with it, and it would remediate that soil, take up what the chemicals that are in the actual effluent itself. It would grow. You could repurpose then that water. That water would then be cleaned And once the plant dies off in the wintertime it actually takes all the nutrients from the big stock it grows back into the rhizome and the rhizome captures all those nutrients into the ground. Also building out microbes which are really, really important for soil. And then once you harvest it, you actually do have a crop.
You can actually harvest it green and use it in an anaerobic digester, which you would then combine with your animal effluent as well for heat and electricity. If you’re on a sort of a microgrid situation, there are farms that do that. They have anaerobic digesters. They use their corn stover, which is just the leftovers from the corn stalk. This can be a replacement for that. And then you’re generating energy for not only your farm, but likely people around you as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot there. What other products might you be able to make out of Giant Reader? Or maybe we should take a step back and where does Hexis fit into the life cycle of Giant Reader?
Wendy Owens: So we are a producer and distributor of giant reed. And so we have an eco-species bank of different ecotypes. So different types of giant reed that have grown in different locations around the world. So when it grows, let’s say in saltwater, we know that it will grow in saltwater again. So that’s an ecotype. Or if it grows in a colder climate, we know it’ll grow in a colder climate again. And so we’ve collected these and we apply those to specific applications in specific locations. Right now, for example, we are growing in Hungary, as an example, to supply IKEA with Giant Reed to replace a certain portion of the wood in their particle board with Giant Reed.
So instead of using, let’s say, 100% wood, they would use 80% wood and 20% Giant Reed to make the particle board that goes into making their furniture.
Ross Kenyon: That is a very good name drop, Wendy. Congratulations. You said it’s at the demonstration level now?
Wendy Owens: Demonstration. It’s a demonstration level project. It’s for the next four years. And we’ve tested it before on a smaller scale, but now we’re using it in the large manufacturing facility, commercial manufacturing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s very exciting. This gets into some of the weedy LCA details that I wanted to bring up. What type of tree production is being displaced here? Because I know if it was a very sustainable type of tree production, it could conceivably be. Yeah.
Wendy Owens: In my talking with different companies, what they’re looking at is a lot of wood comes from public lands. And so those public lands are then the woods taken from there. That’s probably the main focus is no longer having to use wood from public lands.
Ross Kenyon: That type of like BLM land, Bureau of Land Management is often considered, you know, not always the best harvested trees. I think, I think loggers tend to abuse those lands. Don’t get me loggers. This is just what I’ve heard. I’m sure the specifics here matter quite a lot, but is that halfway fair to say?
Wendy Owens: Halfway fair to say, and I would say in Europe as well, where we’re also working, they are purchasing the wood from local governments, for example, and going in and logging in those locations. So there would be more of like a retiring effect. So you could retire these trees versus having to cut them down. We’re not looking initially at replacing trees all out because that would be A lot of giant reed that we’d have to put in the ground, given the amount of timber that’s produced every year around the world. But certainly in places where you would want to let trees grow, maybe there was a forest fire, or perhaps if there’s two different types of beetles, you have the pine beetle and the spruce beetle, or if you have drought situations, you certainly, this stuff actually is...
Giant reed is drought tolerant. So you could replace those kind of trees until they grow up once again, which is going to be 40 years before you get that level of production again out of those trees.
Ross Kenyon: How long does it take for a comparable level of production to arise from giant reed?
Wendy Owens: We can get at least 20 bone dry tonnes per acre in terms of yield annually from giant reed. You cut that every year? Every year.
Ross Kenyon: How much is an acre of some sort of particle board trees? Do you have any idea?
Wendy Owens: Yeah, roughly, the way I look at it is if you look at to replace one tree in different parts of the world, and different trees grow more quickly in different parts of the world, let’s say a 40-year life cycle for a pine tree, you would probably get 3,000 to 5,000 tonnes per tree out of a big pine, big, big tree, not the small, skinny, long ones that grow in the South. But we can, you know, on one acre, we can get 20 tonnes. If you give me 100 acres, you know, I’m getting 2,000 tonnes.
And that’s just in one year. So you’re not having to wait the whole life cycle of the tree to cut it down. You’re also not, by, you know, keeping that tree in the ground, You’re maintaining the ecosystem and where birds lived and squirrels or whatever it might be, the local flora and fauna supported by that tree, it’s staying there. So in terms of, you know, in 80 years, we could produce probably 50 times more biomass than you would with a tree, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, interesting. So I keep wanting to call Wild Reeds, which is a band. It’s a very good band, but a giant reed. It’s a perennial. It is perennial. You plant it once and it’s just going for its entire life.
Wendy Owens: So the lifespan is between 15 and 25 years. Usually we can get about 20 years out of that.
Ross Kenyon: And then you would harvest this either once or multiple times a year and it just keeps growing back. Like it’s like a hedge that you’ll clip and it’ll just keep going, growing back.
Wendy Owens: If you think of your grass in your front yard, the grass grows and you cut it and it grows again and you cut it and it grows again and you cut it. And so giant reed’s very similar. You plant it once and then you leave it in the ground. So you’re not tilling soil and turning up any carbon out of the soil. You can do some, a little weed work in between. But once you’ve planted, it grows up, you cut it, The next year it grows up and you cut it.
The next year it grows up and you cut it. And that’s really very simple, straightforward method for growing giant reed. That’s it. And so the farmers like it because it’s very low maintenance, but high yield. You may use some water, you may not use some water. It just depends on how much rainfall you get during the year. Highly pest resistant, so it doesn’t have a natural pest that will kill it. Just like in the United States, there’s a wasp somewhere that lives somewhere that gets at it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s the same wasps.
Wendy Owens: Darn wasps. They’re out there somewhere. They are.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. And then one of the things that I really like and one of the reasons that when Alessandra met you, we were excited to talk with you on the podcast is we like that when people see value in places that may have previously been overlooked or people thought were a waste product or just a weed and you’re able to turn this into multiple value streams that end up being quite innovative. You mentioned IKEA and replacing some of the wood that goes into their particle board. Are there other uses for this product?
Wendy Owens: Yes, so it’s a great replacement for wood on a number of levels. It can replace wood in furniture applications, flooring. Also, being an EPA-approved biomass, it can be used to make a bio-crude, but also can be used to make ethanol. So it produces three times more ethanol per acre than corn does. So if you were looking at a fuel application. It also can replace wood in energy pellets. So a lot of the energy pellets that are produced here in the US are shipped to Asia and also to Europe. So we’re actually cutting down our trees here and shipping them overseas to be burned.
And this stuff can replace that so we’re actually not cutting down our trees for that use for burning and creating maybe more of a carbon problem. That’s not our focus. Our focus is more in keeping that carbon in place and using the reed for furniture production and even insulation. There’s lots of other applications that we could consider. You could replace fiber and fiberglass with this and have a more sustainable solution for that. So more biodegradable and recyclable.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot there I’d like to chat about. I guess the first one that catches me strongly is that this may be a carbon negative use when used for bioenergy. And maybe we should even explain how does bioenergy like that work? You’re growing some sort of biomass and then you’re burning it.
Wendy Owens: Right. So biomass is any plant material at all. So when you often hear about biomass being used for energy, it’s wood predominantly. They will use agricultural waste in some cases. The trouble with agricultural waste, it doesn’t burn like wood. It has a much low burning temperature. It creates a lot of ash and ash is not a good thing in this case. So imagine if you Burn something in your fireplace and you end up with ash every day and you have to go scoop it out every day. It’s just like, oh, this is just kind of tedious.
Whereas wood produces much less. So biomass is anything that’s growing. So any weed stuck in the sidewalk, that’s biomass. But predominantly they talk about wood and they use wood right now for burning pellets, energy pellets for both heat and electricity. At industrial levels, but also you can buy the pellets for your home, for example.
Ross Kenyon: And maybe it’s worth contrasting this. So when I think about bioenergy, I’m thinking about something like BECCS, which is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. So you’re burning some type of biomass and then you’re capturing the carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases and you’re storing them in some capacity. But I think what maybe you’re suggesting is that CCS component is not necessary. It pulled enough carbon dioxide into the soil that it’s carbon negative from that alone.
Wendy Owens: There could be the possibility of that. There have been a study that showed that, a pretty big study where they were going to reduce giant reeds specifically and torrify it. In other words, make it into kind of a charcoal and then use it to replace coal for energy production. And that showed... And it was very extensive in terms of the science that they used, that it would have a carbon negative effect despite transportation and the use of agricultural machinery to harvest and plant and so forth. So there is a possibility it was small, but you can use precision farming and other methods to probably get yourself to where you’re carbon negative.
Again, carbon capture probably would be still a good idea. Wouldn’t leave that off the table, right?
Ross Kenyon: But you’re saying it’s carbon negative even without the...
Wendy Owens: Even without that, yeah. That’s certainly what they found at Portland Gas and Electric, that study they did there.
Ross Kenyon: That sounds plausible to me, and if so, it’s exciting. I just wish I had Christoph here because he’s the biggest curmudgeon on this. He’s always just like, show me the LCA. I’m going to dig into this and skewer it because I trust nothing.
Wendy Owens: I can send in the PDF file, and it wasn’t us that did it, but it was something that they have all their... There are algorithms and information. And so the curmudgeon could at least get some paper on it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, sure. It seems plausible and it’s exciting if so. And I like that this would be on marginal land. It also seems like from what I’ve researched on your website that locating these close to their end users is very important to you. So you’re able to cut down. It’s not like you’re shipping this all to China. You could even put it, if it’s just marginal land, could you grow this basically anywhere?
Wendy Owens: You could basically grow it anywhere. You can’t grow it at the North Pole or something like that where it’s really cold. It does need some... Well, not yet. Yeah. Not yet. Not yet. We’re working on it. Yeah. You could. And the nice thing about that is that if you have a manufacturing facility, you can locate this crop very close to that manufacturing facility. We try and stay within a 60 miles radius. That’s 100 kilometers radius of the manufacturing facility because it doesn’t make sense in terms of if you look at just the math of shipping, it doesn’t make sense to ship this any further than that because it’s not as dense as wood.
That’s our number we stick to.
Ross Kenyon: Is there a trend in manufacturing to find fuel sources like this nearby? Is it starting? Are you trying to start it?
Wendy Owens: I think the trend is trying to find some way that you could be energy independent to some degree or to use, you know, if you have this material on hand or available, to use it for heating or electricity. It certainly makes you less dependent on fossil fuels, for example, or electricity coming from some other location. You can be sufficiently independent with an anaerobic digester or a biomass boiler, which is basically burning the biomass.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have any sense of the numbers on how much a kilowatt hour or something like that would be? I guess the details matter here quite a lot too. Sure. But is there any sense? Because it sounds like it isn’t using expensive land, so it’s probably cheaper on that front. For sure, the competition for land is low. Right. If it’s co-located with some sort of manufacturing or power producing facility, it seems like it may be able to out-compete other types of energy. Yeah.
Wendy Owens: It’s possible. That’s something that I haven’t looked at specifically. Again, our focus hasn’t been on energy use. So I know someone has. I just don’t remember the numbers.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, sorry to pose you a question.
Wendy Owens: A lot to keep in my head.
Ross Kenyon: That one did not make the outline, Wendy. It’s an ambush question.
Wendy Owens: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Sorry.
Wendy Owens: But now I’m going to go back and research. I didn’t tell you that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I mean, I asked that question because it seems intuitive to me that something like that would have natural momentum working for it in a way that, you know, having to pull natural gas out, you know, in the Dakotas or something somewhere else. And yeah, I like, I like that there’s sort of a local capacity and it also sounds like you have some sort of, what’d you call it? Like a seed bank.
Wendy Owens: Oh, an eco-species bank. So giant reed, actually, the scientific name is a rundodonax, and it only really has three types around the world. It’s very specific. It hasn’t mutated that much because it doesn’t have seeds, so it doesn’t cross-pollinate in any way.
Ross Kenyon: How does it, how does it, you can answer that after.
Wendy Owens: So it basically, it has to grow from itself. So basically there’s little nodes on the plant and if it falls over and those nodes find the right amount of water and the right amount of soil, then it’ll grow up from there.
Ross Kenyon: This seems evolutionarily maladaptive.
Wendy Owens: You would think so, but I’m telling you it’s been around forever. It’s something that they’ve been using, the Egyptians used it as a matter of fact. So yes, you would think that it would need seeds to propagate, but propagation is just a different way. Kind of an old plant. So what we have are ecotypes or eco-species collected from various secret locations around the world. Because what happens is when a plant grows in a certain location, it gets used to growing in those conditions. So whether it’s cold, whether the ground has a certain soil type, like it’s sandy or loamy.
And so what we’ve done is made a collection of these. And so we know what will grow well and what types of soil and what types of climates and amount of water or salt in the ground or something. I’ve seen stuff growing on the side of a cliff on the seaside. And you wonder how in the world is it getting any water there? But a location where it doesn’t rain that much and it’s just salt spray that this stuff is getting. So we’ve collected those and then we can use that to apply to specific locations for growing that would work best and get the highest yield so we’re using the least amount of resources.
Ross Kenyon: How does it work if you were to bring a plant somewhere where it didn’t evolve? How does one even evaluate the risk of that or if there even is risk if you were to bring in a giant reed someplace where it didn’t evolve? Is there a risk that it interjects itself into this complex system and it is a runaway invasive species in some negative capacity?
Wendy Owens: That’s a really good question. There is concern that when you bring a plant into any location that it’s not native, that you’ll have a problem with invasivity. Fortunately for this plant, we are very careful in the way we grow it. We put it in the ground and we have buffer zones where it can’t fall over and replant itself.
Ross Kenyon: There’s like a... I’m sorry, Wendy, I have to interrupt you for a very stupid thing. Did you ever watch The Office?
Wendy Owens: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I think there’s one where they wanted to have a robot in the office and Dwight insists that they make sure it can plug into the wall. So if it attacks him, it’ll pull. So it sounds like this thing can’t propagate. You can pull right it out, right? Yeah. It just falls over and... You’re safe.
Wendy Owens: Yeah, you’re safe. And also, we just chip the heck out of this stuff before we take it anywhere. So it’s chipped up to the point where it’s not going to grow. It’s the little node that I talk about from where it grows is just decimated. So it has no opportunity whatsoever to escape. There are always concerns about invasivity. One of the things they did back in the 1890s or so here in the States is they brought it in from Eastern Asia and they planted it along rivers in Texas and California to prevent soil erosion.
Ross Kenyon: They planted giant reed.
Wendy Owens: Giant reed, yeah. Because it’s great for that. It certainly holds its spot. But the problem is they just left it there and they didn’t like so many species of things that have been brought in from different parts of the world. If you just leave it there, it’s going to grow. And it liked water and it grew. And so you have a situation where we have these man-made problems created when we bring such like scotch broom in here in Washington State where it’s growing like crazy and it produces so many seeds and It’s horrible.
Or kudzu in the South, or any number of plants that people have brought in for good reasons and best intentions, but then have gone crazy.
Ross Kenyon: Like the eucalypts?
Wendy Owens: Exactly. Or bamboo, for example. Unlike bamboo, this doesn’t send runners. It’s just like, imagine a really ugly tulip bulb with hair. It’s kind of like, so it stays in one spot.
Ross Kenyon: That’s like a Lovecraftian, terrible image. It’s really... Hairy bulb. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sounds spooky.
Wendy Owens: It is kind of spooky and you’ll look at it. But we certainly work hard to preclude any invasivity. It’s the same thing you have to do with the sunflowers. You just make sure that they don’t tip over and put their seeds in the ground. So we do that and we, as part of our growing, we have a plan for prevention of invasivity like anybody would, whether they had any kind of crop. But also there is third-party certifications that we’re going to achieve in order to just assure everyone that we’re doing the best we can to make sure that there isn’t a problem with this invading a new location wherever we bring it.
Ross Kenyon: Does it compete with native plants? I mean, this thing is so lignified, right? It’s like, can you imagine trying to grow between something like this? It seems quite defensible.
Wendy Owens: No, because for us, we grow it in a controlled situation in a field. And we are not displacing food crops. And we know where we’ve planted it. And we have a grid system and we use precision farming. So we actually use drones. Okay. Go above, look where things are and what the edges look like and how it’s growing from here in different directions. I honestly have been growing it for several years in a space in my yard, and I can tell you it just kind of sits there. It doesn’t jump up and run around and go in anybody else’s yards.
It just sits there and makes kind of a...
Ross Kenyon: Just make sure it doesn’t fall over.
Wendy Owens: Yeah, exactly. Very careful. No falling over, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We can go back to that power question one more time. I had another question. You were saying that this type of bioenergy, though, is potentially very good for solving or at least ameliorating the intermittency of renewables.
Wendy Owens: Right. So if you think of plants as a giant battery, I mean, essentially is what we have with these plants. When you were talking about biomass, for example, earlier, and all plants essentially bring in that energy from the sun and use that energy and they capture it. And where you don’t have consistent wind or don’t have consistent solar, this is a great stopgap measure to just even out the electricity production. For example, you could use it that way.
Ross Kenyon: Like for listeners who may not know, if it’s not windy, how do you have a wind power generation if it’s not sunny? Blah, blah, blah. You may already know this listener. Are you an expert? You may be. This is our 83rd, 84th episode, something like that. So one thing that we’ve touched on a little bit, but given that it’s nori and Reversing Climate Change, we got to go into is the soil carbon gains here. Brief side note. Do you know the Land Institute? No. They probably like you. We love them.
We did an awesome episode with them. I think it’s still one of the most popular ones. But their whole mission is to foster perennial agriculture and make sure it’s... But for crops that have been historically annuals trying to breed or discover or otherwise create these perennial variations of these plants. So they may be friends of yours. I don’t know.
Wendy Owens: I’m definitely going to look them up after this for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Well, there was a question in there. Crap, Wendy, let’s rewind. 30 seconds. What did I start saying?
Wendy Owens: You started saying about the carbon capture. That’s where we were headed. Yes. Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, so is this work in a similar way with perennial crops have very deep roots or perennial plants do. And they are capable of sequestering a great deal of carbon dioxide. And so this is the same with giant reed.
Wendy Owens: Very much the same. So giant reed has, like I mentioned, a rhizome.
Ross Kenyon: What is that, by the way?
Wendy Owens: It’s honestly, it’s like a bulb. It’s much like a bulb.
Ross Kenyon: Is a tulip a rhizome?
Wendy Owens: Tulip’s a bulb more for a flower, not for a grass, but grass just have rhizomes, and so they look like little bulbs. Some grasses have actual little bulbs that they grow from, and then they propagate out from there. The one with giant reed, it actually will sit They’ll send sort of a, looks like a little flower under the ground and they’ll send it up and then something else will sprout off that and they just kind of expand out in a circle from there. It looks kind of a lot like a circle.
So what they do though is also send out an extensive root system. This is because they’re highly drought tolerant. So it’s able to get a lot of water out of the soil with this root system, including sending down a pretty deep tap root. And so it’s pulling the water as much as it can from the soil and using just whatever’s there. So it doesn’t need a lot of rain.
Ross Kenyon: My understanding of this is that I’m a total botany amateur here, so feel free to correct me, but I know annuals, they only live for a single year or less or a season or whatever it is. Thinking evolutionarily, they have to spend as much energy as possible to propagate and get seeds out there. Since perennials aren’t reseeding every year in that way, they’re not dependent upon it for its survival of species. It sends roots much farther down. It has energy available inside of its own system to devote towards getting resources deeper down.
Is that correct?
Wendy Owens: That’s correct. So what you’re talking about is that very same thing. So think about a rhizome as being an energy storage facility. Once the plant’s grown to a certain height, then the weather changes and it starts dying off. The rhizome itself will pull all that energy and all those nutrients back into itself. And it will have the root system that it keeps until the next year when it can take that energy and send up more.
Ross Kenyon: Are you saying that it stores it in the like the lignified, that just means woody, right?
Wendy Owens: Woody, yes.
Ross Kenyon: So in this like the amount of the reed that you would show, there’s resources that are stored in here. Stored in there during. And it will pull it back in and consume them itself. So this is the storage.
Wendy Owens: The stalk itself is where all the energy comes from. And so it’s green, right? So all that green, yummy stuff is up there. And then it gets pulled in. All those nutrients that are in the stalk, when it dies off, gets pulled into the rhizome. So the rhizome then can grow again the next year more stalks. And so it’s just a cycle like that. But the nice thing, of course, as you know, with these kinds of plants is that you’re not tilling the soil every year. You don’t have to remove that carbon.
Ross Kenyon: You’re speaking our language, Wendy.
Wendy Owens: Yeah. Keep going. Again, that’s one of the things I liked about this. I was like, wow, you just put this in the ground. The rhizomes themselves have a 20 to 25 year life cycle. Some people say 15, but I think if you grow it right, you can get the 20 years out of it. And so you’re not tilling that soil. You’re leaving it all in place and you’re keeping that carbon in the ground. And I think the sweet spot at the literature that I’ve read, though we haven’t tested it ourselves, is down to as far as 31 centimeters.
You’re pulling a lot of that carbon and storing that carbon a little bit deeper too, but that’s kind of the sweet spot for giant reed right now.
Ross Kenyon: And people, these are all open questions. I see people talk about just how far does carbon storage go. Some people say it’s actually a lot deeper than people think. Other people say it’s just like too hard to quantify. People are working on it quite hard, and I’m sure we’ll keep learning more. Plants are surprising.
Wendy Owens: They are. And I think we will keep learning more. And I think one of the things we will look at is that specifically in terms of carbon capture, how much does it really do? What does this plant really accomplish at a commercial level versus just a research level where you’ve got a quarter of an acre or something planted?
Ross Kenyon: Sure. And then for Hexas’ business model, generally, you’re growing it yourself with Hexas Biomass or are people coming to you and saying, hey, we have this available marginal land that’s heavily salinated. Can you please make it valuable? Are you consulting? Like what part of the business do you find yourself in?
Wendy Owens: So what we do is usually find a customer that wants to use Giant Reed to replace wood in some application. That’s our initial focus. And then we contract with farmers who would have this marginal soil and we would access that. Not using the soil, perhaps. Or they would be maybe just leaving it fallow. And we would contract with them or grow it ourselves if we lease land and grow it ourselves. That’s another option. But usually we wait until we have a customer and the customer says, we’re going to need X.
And we’ll say, okay, why grow it unless somebody needs it? Let’s put it in the ground. And let’s grow it and create a situation where, one, our farmers have long-term contracts at a set price, and they’re using land that they otherwise would not be using to generate revenues. So in a pie-in-the-sky sort of wishful thinking, we hope to do some rural revitalization by having this land that no longer can be used for food crops to be replaced with a product that can then also replace wood. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Do you have a sense of how much land is just, I don’t know, been taken out of production because of the way it’s been farmed and that might be suitable for this?
Wendy Owens: You know, the problem with that is defining marginal, marginal land. So that’s a terminology that is pejorative, yeah. Marginal stuff is sitting over there. So it’s not clear specifically how much of that land it is because people... People use different definitions for that, but there’s a pretty good amount. You can only farmland so much and take so much out of that land without it just being depleted of nutrients and microbes and so forth. And some of it might have too much water in it for certain parts of the year, or might have too much salt, or it has something leach into it.
The Mississippi River being such a source of life has also become a source of issues with all the nitrates that’s been put into the river. So how much land is not being used because of some damage to it specifically? I can’t quantify it. No one’s really been able to. I’ve looked it up. I’ve tried. I’ve tried.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, definitionally, I guess it must be difficult for people to converge on what is marginal. Is there any risk with using giant reed for, do you call it remediation or I’ve also heard bioremediation? Bioremediation, yeah. Okay, that is correct. Products that are made out of giant reed that was used to bioremediate a piece of corrupted land or Polluted land, that product interacts with an end user in a negative capacity. Is this a realistic concern?
Wendy Owens: I think it would be a realistic concern. It depends on what’s in the soil.
Ross Kenyon: So you can’t do plutonium bioremediation or something.
Wendy Owens: That would be really cool. Yeah, we can definitely get some chlorine and stuff and so forth out of it. In terms of reusing it, it depends on the application and how we would break down the plant itself. And the question is, would if we dried it all out and If it stayed in the stock, would it remain inert in whatever application we would be applying it to? So this is something we’re exploring, something I don’t know. This is pretty new, you know, looking at something from this perspective as having this dual purpose of remediating and fixing a soil.
And then also, can you also take within what’s been grown And apply it to another purpose without causing, as you say, more harm. Somebody told me I should do it for rare metals and go and have those taken up to the plant and then have those removed from the plant stock. And then resell the metals. And then resell the metals, you know, and make cell phone stuff.
Ross Kenyon: You get like cadmium giant reed. Right, exactly. You can sell to phone companies.
Wendy Owens: Precisely.
Ross Kenyon: You’re creative, Wendy. I admire your entrepreneurial vision. Yeah. I have a buddy who’s a geologist and I’m pretty sure that he’s worked on some bioremediation projects or maybe he was just telling me about this, but I know people can do it through fungi and I guess they can do it through plants. And I’ve also heard some of it is quite bad and they’ll just dig up all the dirt and then just put it somewhere, air quotes, safe. Yeah. Is that how it’s conventionally done now? It’s mostly the latter. I think the fungi applications are coming, right?
And then this is, I’m not sure, like what is the state of bioremediation is maybe the best way to frame this.
Wendy Owens: I think it’s changing because the question is, you know, you can... Take a biochar and use a biochar versus using a plant for remediation. I know there’s one company that makes these plant mats that remediate water, for example. As to the disposal methods and where that all goes. I think there’s a variety of different ways that it’s done. So for us, again, we’re new. We’re looking into that. We see it as a benefit to using this in marginal soil is perhaps taking up something that’s not right in the soil, but also introducing the microbes back into the soil.
So in terms of bioremediation, I think a lot of people are looking at different ways of doing it, different plants. Whether it’s then those are scooped up and properly deep-sixed, I can tell you.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, thanks for entertaining my fancies. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t actually know all that, how that works, but I’m sure we’ll have to have someone on the show at some point to let you know. I think we were thinking about doing some sort of episode about mushrooms and fungi. I think we met someone, so maybe he’ll have the skinny on that. I can release you from your obligation.
Wendy Owens: Thank you. I love mushrooms. The whole idea of mushrooms is really The things that they can do are magical. So I hope you, yeah, I’ll definitely listen to that episode.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. Yeah.
Wendy Owens: Got to get that listenership up right there. Magical mushrooms.
Ross Kenyon: That’s right. In a different kind of way. Right. Yes. Well, what’s next, Wendy? I guess you’re working with IKEA on this demonstration. Right. I imagine that’s taking up a lot of your time. You’re probably going to Bratislava.
Wendy Owens: Actually, yeah, we’re actually growing in Hungary, in northern Hungary, in what’s called the Little Hungarian Plain. It sounds so cute, doesn’t it? It does sound cute, yeah. And then it’s less than 60 miles, less than 100 kilometers to ship it up to the location just outside Bratislava in Slovakia. Next for us is we’re just getting more customers, promoting this as an opportunity to perhaps be more sustainable than using trees. There certainly is the consumer demand for less tree use and more sustainable sourcing for materials. And so that’s our goal is just the next steps.
We’re finishing up through an accelerator through the end of the summer. And going on from there. So we were talking to lots of folks that are currently our timber companies, because they think they see that one, we can certainly lower their cost. And two, it’s a nice feather in their cap to be more sustainable, maybe not using as many trees as they’re currently using.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that does seem like an industry that hasn’t always had the best reputation. I think environmentalists have clashed with them more than a few times. Yes. One might say, watching my words carefully. Yes. But of course, I mean, if you’re one of the good ways of solving problems in the way that you’re going about it is you’re offering them, hey, like you can serve your shareholders and make money and also cost and everyone will think you’re a good guy. You run the risk of greenwashing, obviously, not you personally, but if it’s actually like a real solution, I think that’s a very quick, effective way to make change.
Right.
Wendy Owens: Yeah. And the important thing to me about Giant Reed is it’s a drop-in solution. For the most part, the testing that’s been done with the boards that we’ve done has been, we just dropped it right in. We didn’t change anything about the manufacturing systems or the farming or the resins that are used to produce the boards themselves. It makes it easy. That was the other thing that was very attractive to me is that we didn’t have to go in and change the light fixture in order to use this new light bulb.
Maybe we just use this new light bulb really as a replacement. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s maybe a good comparison there. It does seem relatively simple to switch some of this out, especially I imagine the pelletized version of a giant reed is similar to pelletized particle board inputs.
Wendy Owens: Right. So we would chip it up for a particle board, a certain size chip, and they throw it in the dryer, mix it with the wood and the wood, and it just flows through the commercial manufacturing system. And then if you were going to use it for pellets, for example, for energy, pretty much the same thing. You just grind it up and make it into a pellet just at a regular pellet plant. You can mix it with wood there too.
Ross Kenyon: And I’m clearly revealing my ignorance of what one pelletizes various things for.
Wendy Owens: I tried to cover for you.
Ross Kenyon: You tried, it’s still going to be cut and I’ll probably leave it in on people to know. I’m still learning. That’s part of the fun of Nori and this podcast is I get to have smart people on. Wendy, you’re included in that elite club of our smart guests who teach me things. Wendy, if someone is excited about what you’re doing, how might they find out about how they can buy from you, how they can partner with you if they’re just curious what you’re doing? How do they do this?
Wendy Owens: The easiest way is to go to our website and it’s very simple. It’s hexas. com. It’s H-E-X-A-S. com. And you can contact us through there, which is probably the easiest way. There’s a phone number and email and otherwise learn about what we’re doing. And we’ll update every once in a while with new news and new exciting things that are going on. Great.
Ross Kenyon: I’m sure we have another podcast called Carbon Removal Newsroom. That’s about 15 minutes and it’s newsy. So if you ever do have something that you can frame it as carbon removal in a credible way. We’d love to have you back.
Wendy Owens: No greenwashing. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Kristoff is the greenwash police. He’s just like, this sounds good, but actually no. And I refused to do this. I’m like, okay, Kristoff, I’m glad it’s you. Cause, cause he knows that I’m, I’m a little bit more of a doofus on them.
Wendy Owens: Well, I’m maybe I’m glad he is on vacation.
Ross Kenyon: And so I, I think, I think he probably would have passed his sniff test. We’ll have to see. Okay. Kristoff, we love you. We clearly miss you. I feel like I’ve taken you for granted. I’m gonna give you a big hug when you get back, buddy. Okay, so in an effort to not become as maudlin as I’ve become, I think it’s time, Wendy, that we conclude this episode. Thank you for being here.
Wendy Owens: It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Ross Kenyon: It was my pleasure too. That was a lot of fun. And if you like the show, please tell your friends, subscribe, give us a great rating and review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. And thanks so much for listening.
