The Exchanges

Q that the global population of salmon is growing, and thus, if I, you know, If I kill all the salmon in the Pacific Northwest in the United States, it's fine, because globally there's plenty of salmon, but obviously we don't want to do that. Like, there's probably a bunch of reasons why that would be bad. Okay, um, final principle is avoiding market distortions. What do you mean by that?

A Yeah, this is a, this is a tricky one also. Um, so market distortions could happen in a lot of different ways. You could In theory, you know, you could have a relatively high price on biomass, and that actually disrupts the production of other goods that society cares about. So, um, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe we put a high value societally on having paper and having, having lumber, um, but if somehow in a given region, um, carbon removal fetches a really high price, um, Um, because, you know, say some company really cares about carbon removal, they're willing to pay premium price for it. Um, then you could actually have market effects where you drive up the price of other, other wood products, um, and produce less of them. That's, I think it's, it's mostly, it's mostly a carbon accounting consideration. Um, so you can imagine in that case, say, let's think about Sweden again. You can imagine a case where, um, Biomass fetch is a pretty high price, and you have shifting production away from saw timber for producing lumber into producing biomass. Um, that means that you have less carbon storage because, um, timber stores carbon. Um, and that also means that you have lower carbon stocks in your forest because you need younger trees to produce biomass than you do, you need big trees for, for producing saw timber. Um, so, so there, there are a couple kind of carbon accounting cons…

AI assessment note: “you could have a relatively high price on biomass, and that actually disrupts the production”

Q like, what, what would it take to do it right? So I just want to run through those high-level principles and talk through them a bit, starting with the first one, which is sort of oversight and transparency, which is, is probably obvious to some degree, but in this particular context, like, what does it mean for there to be oversight, and what sort of transparency is important to maintain?

A Yeah, so oversight is, is really critical here. I think it's critical with all kinds of agricultural commodities, um, but you need to know where the biomass is coming from, especially when you're talking about something like pellets that can be shipped for long distances. Um, you want to know if it's coming from an old growth forest in British Columbia, which is bad for the record, um, or if it's coming from a sustainable forest in the U.S. Southeast. Um, that's, that's kind of I, I think that is, like, the, the foundation of all of this. If you don't know where your biomass is coming from, then you can't ascertain whether or not it's going to be sustainable. Um, and unfortunately, right now, this is actually pretty hard. We have, like, we have these kind of crude oversight frameworks, or, or, sorry, supply chain, uh, transparency efforts that, um, they look at sort of the sourcing area, so you know roughly, like, Okay, we got the biomass from this pellet mill, um, and this is the woodshed for this pellet mill. But they don't actually trace it down to the forest, so you actually know, um, so you actually know that that, that biomass is coming from a sustainable forest. Um, and this is where, this is where it's important to have, to have two things. So, it's really important to have full chain of custody, which is going to be increasingly common, partially because of EU regulati…

AI assessment note: “it's really important to have full chain of custody”

Q Oh, that's interesting. In the context, you're saying, you're describing two problems. One is that they're saying something is waste wood when it's actually not, and the second is that you're saying, like, ultimately nothing is waste in a world where we have way more demand for waste. Any biomass, then we have supply of it. Is that right?

A Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the, the kind of quintessential example of waste is, you know, like a burn pile in the forest, and like, arguably, yes, that, that is waste material right now. Um, but if you live in a world of 11 to 16 X supply-demand imbalance, then you're gonna have a lot of different uses. And honestly, we're actually starting to see that today, where, um, you have, uh, you have, uh, biomass-based CDR projects that are Competing with, um, let's see, I was talking to somebody recently that they were saying they were trying to source logs that was this kind of example where there's just a pile of logs in the forest, and it's assumed that it's just going to decay there, or they're going to burn it in a burn pile. And they actually were running into a problem where they realized that somebody else wanted to source it for pallets. Um, and I thought that was a perfect, that was a perfect encapsulation where, you know, we assume that it's wastewater, we assume it's going to be burned to the atmosphere, and that makes the carbon accounting Super easy. Um, but that assumption is flawed even today and will become even more flawed into the future. Um, so, so yeah, this, this waste would, this waste would sort of framing is, is wrong and misleading. Um, and I think ultimately we're going to have to evolve past that if we're going to make useful frameworks for this. Um, bu…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think the, the kind of quintessential example”

Q And that stuff would otherwise similarly go sit there and decompose or, you know, uh, in one way or another release the CO₂ back to the atmosphere and, and thus if we divert it and, and bury it or do whatever we're going to do to it, then, then it is indeed positive. Do you think about that similarly to the wood waste story or, or is ag waste different?

A Um, ag waste is in some ways is simpler and in other ways more complex. Um, I, I will, I'll caveat this by saying that I'm a forest person, so there, you know, there are people that spend their entire careers thinking about ag waste, um, and for this, for this report that we published, we focused explicitly on forest waste, partially just to create kind of a tractable boundary around the problem. If you, if you set a global scale for your assessment, like, it's hard to, uh, hard to actually gain traction, um, in terms of finishing the, finishing the thing. Um, so we did focus on forest waste, but, or forest biomass, rather, Um, but with ag waste, I think it's simpler in some ways. If you have, like, true agricultural residues, like in California, for example, we have a lot of orchards in the Central Valley where they, um, you know, they have, they, they grow their crop like almonds for several years, decades, I actually don't know, um, and then they have to tear it up, and oftentimes that actually gets burned. So there are a lot of startups that are working on converting the agricultural waste into And I think that, in that case, it actually is waste, um, into durable carbon removal. Um, there are some trade-offs sometimes. So, for example, if you look at, um, some, you know, some facilities are looking at using straw, um, in Beck's facilities, bio-driven carbon capture and sto…

AI assessment note: “ag waste is in some ways is simpler and in other ways more complex.”

Q for power. So because of the, you didn't, Affect the demand for all the other things that we need wood for. The presumption is that on net, one more tree got cut down in order to do this, and so why is that an environmental benefit? It's not carbon removal if that, if you've caused by cutting your tree down another tree to get cut down. Is that basically right?

A Yeah. Yeah. So I would think about, I think about the potential harms in two distinct categories. So there's like the carbon math, right? Which I think you were, you were start, you were alluding to there. Um, just are we actually doing the right calculations to figure out that this is going to be carbon negative or in the case of biopower facilities, carbon neutral, um, which is these, all these, all these facilities are predicated on carbon neutrality that if you harvest biomass and burn it, You have no net climate impact, um, which is probably a simplification that we should stop making. Um, oftentimes you can get close to that, but it's not, it's not always going to be the case. Um, the other bucket, uh, of, of bad things is, like, the bucket of, like, social and environmental harms. Um, so this includes, uh, on the environmental side, this includes things like, you know, harvesting high conservation value forests, Um, places that have really high biodiversity, um, or, you know, maybe they're, maybe they're old growth forests or primary forests, um, that should not be cut down, and for whatever reason, that demand for biomass is enabling that forest to be cut down. Um, on the social side, you could, um, you know, you could be harvesting areas that, uh, maybe have sort of insecure land tenure, uh, maybe they're, Um, you know, maybe it's, uh, maybe there are land tenure issue…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Yeah. So I would think about, I think about the potential harms in two distinct categories.”

Q probably a slippery slope there. Like, it's tough to minimize, it's tough to eliminate all negative externalities. You're gonna be using a lot of biomass if you're gonna do this at scale. If we're talking about gigatons of CDR using biomass, there are gonna be negative externalities. There's, like, no question in my mind. So how do you think about, like, what is the line that you can draw there?

A Yeah, I mean, thinking about social externalities first, um, it's, it is, it is a tricky line to draw because, uh, sometimes it's hard to know, like, what level of community engagement is, is, is appropriate, right? Um, you know, if you, say, if you start, um, industrially managing a forest that wasn't previously managed, and the local community doesn't like that, is that, you know, how do you, how do you weigh those relative values of, um, Um, having an effective climate solution with the local impacts on the communities. There's actually, um, there's a, there's an interesting case in Estonia right now where, uh, they, they have a lot of what we call in forestry, we call structurally overstocked forests. Um, so basically what happened is during the Soviet era, there was a lot of agricultural land abandonment that turned into reforestation. Um, and now a lot of those forests, 60 years later, a lot of those forests are maturing, um, And what you have is you have forests that, you know, maybe they've been around for like a whole generation to, to somebody like you or me, like those forests have been there forever. And it's just, you know, it's, they might as well be old growth forests. Um, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of social value in Estonia placed on those forests. And now they're starting to be harvested partially because they're, they're mature. Like they're, they're…

AI assessment note: “how do you weigh those relative values of, um, having an effective climate solution”

Q of the corn that we grow in the United States goes toward the production of ethanol, when presumably otherwise, either that land would be used for something else, or it would be corn that would be used for food. So that, That's basically the concern that has emerged, and it's a big part of what we're trying to avoid if we're going to scale up biomass use for CDR, right?

A Well, and the other thing to, to be aware of there is that there's actually a lot of energy that goes into the production of that corn. So you're, you're producing corn, you're not actually harvesting the cellulosic part of the corn. You're leaving that, um, presumably they leave it to decay and, and plow it into the fields. Um, so you're just harvesting the corn, and there's a lot of fertilizer and There are a lot of, there's a lot of mechanical input. Um, so if you look at the carbon balance of that, it's, it's okay, but it's certainly not great. Um, it gets better if you add CCS to those operations, um, where you're capturing the mostly pure stream of CO two that's coming off of a corn ethanol facility. Um, but just, just based on the carbon balance alone, it's not really a great deal. Um, but it turns out that it's easier to make ethanol out of corn than it is out of Cellulosic feedstocks like wood and wood and corn stover. Um, so I think that's, that's kind of, uh, a lot of the most exciting startups right now are focusing on cellulosic feedstocks, and that's, that's really the future of biomass solutions, I think. When building a data center, the two hardest problems aren't technical. They're speed to power and earning community support. And that's where Bloom Energy comes in. Bloom's fuel cell platforms deliver fast, reliable electricity without combustion. For local com…

AI assessment note: “a lot of the most exciting startups right now are focusing on cellulosic feedstocks”

Q it was grown, or, you know, what it replaced, that kind of thing, caused negative impacts that were perhaps bigger than the positive impacts of the things you did with it, and so, on balance, maybe you shouldn't have done it in the first place. Can you, like, run through a couple examples of that? Like, what, what have we seen publicly that has been how to do this wrong?

A Yeah, for sure. Um, lots of, lots of bad examples, and, um, I think that's, that's why there's been kind of an emergence of regulatory frameworks around this issue. Um, maybe just to back up a quick step, the thing I, I want to highlight that Most of, most of these biomass programs, they often claim that they're sourcing waste wood. Um, and so that's kind of, this is, that's like the shield they use. It's like, oh, this is, this is all residues. It's like, you know, the leftovers from a sawmill where they're, they're producing sawdust. We're just going to take the sawdust and turn it into pellets and then bury the carbon. That sounds great. Waste wood is actually, I think, a fairly problematic concept, and in each of, in each of, like, the, the, Sort of negative cases that we've seen. They always use the waste wood branding, um, when in fact it's definitely not waste wood. And waste wood is not really, especially if we think about that twenty-fifty scenario, waste wood is not really a thing. Um, there's always going to be a use for waste wood.

AI assessment note: “in each of, like, the, the, Sort of negative cases that we've seen.”

Q use biomass for a variety of other purposes, including a number of others in climate tech. Maybe it's, it's sustainable aviation fuel without the carbon capture. Maybe it's bioplastics, whatever. Um, as we talk about sort of sustainable biomass sourcing, do you think that the principles here apply No matter what you're sourcing the biomass for, or are there some that are unique to using the biomass for carbon removal?

A Yeah, I think this question gets it. Um, it's a really good question, and it's one that, if I'm being honest, it's one that I think we actually haven't really grappled with well enough as, as a community. We haven't grappled with it well enough in a regulatory context. Um, there are a ton of different uses of biomass, ones that Um, ones that we're all familiar with on a daily basis, like my desk right now, it's made out of wood. I think sometimes people, people forget that fact when they talk about harvesting trees, and like, talk about harvesting trees like it's a bad thing, but they're writing that critique from a wooden desk. Um, but like, if you look at all of the different plans for using biomass, um, if you look at the potential bioeconomy, is what we call it, in say, There's, there's a huge mismatch between the supply and demand there of biomass and biomass uses, um, 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 in a, in a bioeconomy for biomass than there is biomass. Exactly, yeah. Like, if you look at, like, all of the possible sustainable forest management we can do, and, like, all of the, like, dedicated biomass that we can grow in twenty-fifty, There is 11 to 16 times less of that supply than there is potential demand that we would have throug…

AI assessment note: “it's one that I think we actually haven't really grappled with well enough”