Jan 19, 2024 · 49m · catalyst
Sourcing biomass for carbon removal
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Catalyst, host Shayle Kann and Carbon Direct forest scientist Dr. Bodhi Cabiyo examine the critical challenges of biomass-based carbon dioxide removal, outlining principles for sustainable feedstock sourcing, accurate carbon accounting, and supply chain transparency.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Shayle holds 30% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Shayle as informed peer 5.8 Guest teaching 4.7 Guest disagreement 1.4 Shayle pushing back 1.8
speaking balance: gold is Shayle, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 12:09 Bodhi forcefully dismisses the 'waste wood' framing
Bodhi directly condemns industry branding, stating that waste wood framing is fundamentally wrong, misleading, and an assumption that must be abandoned.
Hardest push from Shayle ▶ 40:29 Shayle pushes back on regional vs global accounting boundariesShayle refuses to accept the default dismissal of global scale accounting, pressing Bodhi to explain why harvesting trees is problematic if aggregate global carbon stocks are expanding.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 13:40 Bodhi reveals engineering realities of wood pellet productionBodhi educates listeners on the technical constraints of pelletizing, explaining that sawmills and pellet producers secretly rely on whole saw logs rather than branches or residues.
Shayle holds their own ▶ 15:04 Shayle breaks down the additionality and market displacement mathShayle demonstrates deep expertise by walking step-by-step through how harvesting non-waste timber induces market leakage and cancels out net carbon benefits.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Shayle as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Shayle pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Setting the Context: Opportunities and Pitfalls in Biomass CDR | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Shayle opens with a solid technical framework covering BECCS, wood vaulting, and bioplastics. Bodhi grounds the science with global terrestrial carbon fluxes and Keeling curve dynamics in a highly collaborative peer exchange. | |
| The Bioeconomy Supply Deficit and Cascading Uses | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Bodhi educates Shayle on the massive 11x to 16x projected supply-demand imbalance in the bioeconomy and introduces the cascading use hierarchy. Shayle synthesizes the implications smoothly without disagreement. | |
| Debunking the 'Waste Wood' Framing and the Enviva Case | 5 | 6 | 3 | 2 | Bodhi strongly rejects the industry's 'waste wood' branding as misleading, detailing how Enviva required whole saw logs rather than residues for wood pellets. Shayle distills the distinction between intentional mischaracterization and future resource scarcity. | |
| Evaluating Ecological and Social Harms of Biomass Extraction | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Shayle lays out the carbon math regarding additionality and market displacement when whole trees are felled. Bodhi builds on this by cataloging biodiversity loss, land tenure disputes, and localized pollution from pellet mills. | |
| Agricultural Residues versus Dedicated Energy Crops | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Shayle outlines the historical policy pitfalls and food competition issues of corn ethanol. Bodhi highlights technical nuances like soil carbon depletion from straw removal and the difficulty of processing cellulosic feedstocks. | |
| Mid-Roll Sponsor Messages: Bloom Energy, Engie, and Energy Hub | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following mid-roll sponsor segments, Shayle and Bodhi explore supply chain tracking. Shayle connects biomass tracking to mineral supply chains like cobalt, while Bodhi explains FSC certification and EU Deforestation Regulation mandates. | |
| Principles for Sustainable Biomass: Minimizing Negative Externalities | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Shayle presses on how to define acceptable negative externalities at gigaton scale, invoking the 'no free lunch' rule in climate tech. Bodhi provides an illustrative case study on sociocultural tensions in Estonia's maturing forests. | |
| Principles for Sustainable Biomass: Avoiding Land Use Risks and Spatial Accounting | 7 | 5 | 2 | 6 | Shayle directly challenges Bodhi on spatial carbon accounting, asking why a global boundary is wrong if net global terrestrial carbon stocks are increasing. Bodhi acknowledges the nuance and debate, while Shayle reinforces the regional boundary argument with a salmon fishery analogy. | |
| Principles for Sustainable Biomass: Market Distortions and Counterfactuals | 6 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Bodhi explains market distortions and insists that ignoring counterfactuals in biomass carbon accounting is self-delusion. Shayle agrees on the notorious complexity of counterfactual modeling and wraps up the interview warmly. |
Statements from this episode (20)
Kann: Biomass carbon removal is undoubtedly cheaper than direct air capture
“It's undoubtedly cheaper, and it could be super scalable, just given the amount of photosynthesis that takes place already in the world.”
Cabiyo: Plants photosynthesize about 400 gigatons of CO2 every year
“If you look at, like, a global scale, actually plants photosynthesize about 400 gigatons of CO₂ every year, and that actually shows up in, like, our CO₂ readings.”
Cabiyo: Burying biomass in clay pits can sequester carbon for centuries
“The simplest is you just take some plant matter, you take some biomass, you put it into a clay pit, and you bury it, and it stays there for centuries. That's wood vaulting or biomass burial.”
Cabiyo: Global biomass demand in 2050 exceeds sustainable supply by 11x
“There's a huge mismatch between the supply and demand there of biomass and biomass uses and that mismatch is, based on the best estimates that, that I've seen, that mismatch is something on the order of, like, 11 to 16 X. In other words, 11 to 16 X more uses i…”
Cabiyo: The Netherlands is phasing out biopower without carbon capture
“But like in the Netherlands, they're, like, phasing out biopower in favor of biopower with CCS.”
Cabiyo: True "waste wood" does not exist due to competing commercial demands
“Waste wood is not really, especially if we think about that twenty-fifty scenario, waste wood is not really a thing. There's always going to be a use for waste wood.”
Cabiyo: High-quality wood pellets require whole logs, not just waste residues
“You can't make good pellets out of treetops and branches and sawmill residues. You need whole logs to do that well.”
Cabiyo: Enviva turns whole, lumber-grade saw logs into wood pellets for export
“I have a colleague that has toured their facilities in the past and saw that they were pulling whole saw logs, which is, like, stuff you would turn into lumber, like, two-by-fours, pulling saw logs and turning it into pellets to be burned in the UK or elsewher…”
Cabiyo: Assuming harvested biomass power has zero net climate impact is flawed
“All these facilities are predicated on carbon neutrality that if you harvest biomass and burn it, you have no net climate impact which is probably a simplification that we should stop making. Oftentimes you can get close to that, but it's not always going to b…”
Cabiyo: Removing crop straw depletes soil carbon, impacting BECCS accounting
“If you are leaving straw residue on a field and letting it decompose, it actually, a lot of that carbon ends up stored in the soil, up to a certain threshold. So if you start taking it off, you can actually get decreasing soil carbon and that's usually not ref…”
Cabiyo: Cellulosic feedstocks represent the future of biomass carbon removal startups
“A lot of the most exciting startups right now are focusing on cellulosic feedstocks, and that's really the future of biomass solutions, I think.”
Cabiyo: Biomass tracking monitors regional mill areas, not specific forest plots
“We have, like, we have these kind of crude oversight frameworks, or, sorry, supply chain transparency efforts that they look at sort of the sourcing area, so you know roughly, like, Okay, we got the biomass from this pellet mill and this is the woodshed for th…”
Cabiyo: EU Deforestation Regulation will force full forest chain-of-custody tracking
“The EU deforestation regulation is gonna be probably kind of a game changer. We'll see how much the global effect is, but that'll force at least products that are coming into the EU to have full chain of custody tracking all the way back to the source, all the…”
Cabiyo: Post-Soviet Estonian forests face conflict between harvest maturity and social value
“During the Soviet era, there was a lot of agricultural land abandonment that turned into reforestation. And now a lot of those forests, 60 years later, a lot of those forests are maturing and what you have is you have forests that, you know, maybe they've been…”
Cabiyo: A Montana cobalt mine is far better than DRC child labor
“On the surface, you know, like, a cobalt mine in Montana seems like a pretty bad deal from that lens, but it's a whole hell of a lot better than the alternative, which is, you know, mining cobalt in open pits in the DRC with child labor.”
Cabiyo: Global forest carbon stocks are increasing due to CO2 fertilization
“If you look at the global scale forest carbon stocks are globally stable and actually increasing because we have we have an increasing terrestrial carbon sink because of actually because of climate change itself, which is kind of a fun a fun quirk of the syste…”
Cabiyo: Biomass CDR accounting must be measured at regional ecosystem scales
“What we came to in this report is that you should be looking at sort of a regional, like, ecosystem-defined scale, where you have you know, maybe it's the size of, like, a small U.S. State, where you have a kind of ecologically continuous forest and you have, …”
Cabiyo: Diverting saw timber into biomass CDR reduces overall carbon storage
“Biomass fetch is a pretty high price, and you have shifting production away from saw timber for producing lumber into producing biomass. That means that you have less carbon storage because timber stores carbon. And that also means that you have lower carbon s…”
Cabiyo: Biomass CDR developers ignoring counterfactual baselines are fooling themselves
“I think that if you're working on biomass CDR, and you're not thinking about counterfactuals every day, you're probably fooling yourself, or you have a really easy case that's going to get harder in the next couple decades.”
Kann: Novel biomass CDR ideas carry severe feedstock and scalability risks
“I see a lot of novel ideas around biomass-based CDR, and every one of them scares me specifically because of the question of where is the feedstock going to come from, how is it going to scale, and are there going to be a bunch of negative side effects when th…”