A billion tonnes of carbon dioxide
How Carbon Culture is tackling the climate crisis with biochar
Since the Industrial revolution, humanity has extracted and burned enormous amounts of carbon in the form of oil, coal or natural gas. The greenhouse gases released in the process are dramatically changing the lives of people around the world. Weather extremes and their effects, such as droughts, floods or wildfires, are on the rise. They destroy livelihoods and threaten people's health, lives and well-being. The global community agrees: global warming must be limited to less than two degrees Celsius compared to the level before the beginning of industrial era. That is why countries like Germany have formulated goals and steps on how they want to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in the coming years and decades. And indeed, there is progress. Emissions are falling - but so far far too slowly.
Climate experts agree: reducing CO₂ emissions in itself will not be enough. We must also remove enormous amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and thus reverse past emissions. Innovators from all over the world have already shown that this is technically possible. However, these methods are immensely expensive, often energy-intensive and frequently fail to scale.
That's why we invited innovators to join this future-relevant challenge at the beginning of 2022 - to develop a solution in the fight against climate change that removes CO₂ from the atmosphere in the long term, is scalable and can be implemented in an economic business model.
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The challenge: To remove large quantities of CO₂ from the atmosphere over the long term and bind them economically in products.
The way in which our Challenge teams achieve this goal, the technological basis on which CO₂ is extracted from the atmosphere, is up to them, be it via direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture, processing of organic materials or any other method. They demonstrate how they turn atmospheric CO₂ into raw materials or products that sequester carbon for decades; and how the process from CO₂ capture to the produced raw material or product is or may be economically viable. To contribute to the fight against climate change, it must also be able to be implemented at scale.
Without breakthrough innovations, we cannot sufficiently reduce the CO₂ content of the atmosphere. As a result, we are in danger of missing our climate goals. The SPRIND Challenge is our chance for a breakthrough.
Carlos Härtel, Chief Technology Officer, Climeworks
Participating in the Challenge will push the teams to comprehensively stress-test their idea. We therefore provide intensive and individual support. This includes funding the teams as well as individual support from a Challenge coach, who has significant experience in the Challenge area and has already implemented high-impact innovations.
In the first year of the Challenge, SPRIND will fund the teams’ work with up to 600,000 euros. In the further course of the Challenge, this funding may be higher. We provide funding quickly and unbureaucratically, so that the teams can concentrate fully on their innovations. At the end of the first stage of the Challenge, the jury decides which teams will continue to participate in the Challenge based on interim evaluations. As finalists, these teams will have the opportunity to comprehensively demonstrate their breakthrough.
Thinking one step further: Ideas with the potential for a breakthrough must be brought to market for the benefit of people and planet. That is why SPRIND continues to support projects with breakthrough potential even after the Challenge has formally finished.
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After months of intense work, experimentation, and collaboration, the three teams were declared joint winners of the Carbon-to-Value Challenge by the expert jury in September 2024. Each team successfully demonstrated significant advancements in their unique carbon sequestration technology. While the approaches varied—from creating carbon-negative building materials and seaweed farms to transforming CO₂ into hydrocarbons—all three teams have shown pathways towards making climate solutions both technologically and financially viable.
Science Youtuber Jacob Beautemps introduces the five Challenge teams of the 1st stage at Breaking Lab
Our jury of scientists and science entrepreneurs has selected the teams that have what it takes to implement breakthrough innovations.
Mark Hartney
Anne Lamp
Carlos Härtel
Henrik Pontzen
Richard Templer
Do you have any questions about the Challenge? Write to us at challenge@sprind.org.
Christopher Carstens likes to get his hands dirty. He gets sucked in and when he has an idea, he makes it happen. He wants to make a difference, he wants to solve problems.
Plants and trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. But when they rot, it is released back into the air. This is exactly what Carbo Culture wants to prevent by converting biomass into biochar. Biochar is an extremely carbon-rich version of the original biomass. You can think of biochar a bit like burnt toast. Charred, black, but somehow still toast.
I think the climate crisis is clearly the biggest problem of our time,says Carstens, CTO of Carbo Culture. For more than 20 years, he has been working on what to do about it. His approach is to store as much carbon dioxide as possible permanently.
Plants and trees absorb carbon dioxide as they grow. But when they rot, it is released back into the air. This is exactly what Carbo Culture wants to prevent by converting biomass into biochar. Biochar is an extremely carbon-rich version of the original biomass. You can think of biochar a bit like burnt toast. Charred, black, but somehow still toast.
Our biomaterial goes through our Carbolysis™ process and the end product is basically a carbon copy of the original material. Even under an electron microscope, you can see that wood, for example, still looks like wood. Only now it's pure carbon,explains Carstens. In principle, the company can convert almost any type of biomass into biochar. They have tested loads of different materials from agricultural sources like walnut shells and sugar beet, to a variety of different forestry side streams. And depending on the type of waste, the resulting biochar has different properties:
Part of our SPRIND project was to find out how biochar can be used in concrete. If we want to replace the cement content, pine pellets are the most suitable starting material. And if we want to replace the sand content in the concrete mix, we use walnut shells,says Carstens.
The use of biochar as a substitute in concrete has enormous potential: the stability of the concrete is maintained, but instead of the normally significant carbon footprint, the concrete becomes carbon neutral. Carbo Culture has also been able to improve the properties of the concrete:
We have found that our material is electrically conductive. This means that we can turn the cement slab into a large resistor, conduct electricity through it and heat it up.
One possible application: instead of gritting roads with salt, they could be heated in future to prevent accidents caused by black ice.
We can not only heat the hardened concrete, but also accelerate the hardening of the concrete overall,says the 44-year-old, explaining:
In Europe, it is difficult to pour concrete in winter because of the cold. But we can feed electricity into the wet concrete so that it hardens very quickly and there is no frost damage.This makes it easier to build all year round.
But the possible applications of biochar are not limited to concrete. Carstens and his team of almost 40 people are focussing on very different areas: In agriculture, biochar could replace peat in growing media mixtures. For the steel industry, it is a possible replacement for petroleum coke and biochar is also interesting for water treatment. This is because biochar can be used as a filter to remove heavy metals and pharmaceuticals from water.
And then there are a number of other industrial applications that we are looking at: We have found that we can use biochar to replace carbon black, synthetic graphite and some other industrial carbon materials that are used in batteries and capacitors,Carstens gives an outlook.
However, the main focus remains on biochar:
Carbo Culture is currently working on the first commercial facility, with the scope to establish multiple facilities by 2026 under a project platform model. Thanks to SPRIND, the inventor, his co-founder Henrietta Moon and his international team have been able to focus on solving problems.
My goal is to capture 99 per cent of the carbon in biomass, not 50 per cent as we do now.Because Carbo Culture has set itself an ambitious target: to remove one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
There are a lot of companies talking about taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. At Carbo Culture, we believe that nature has already found the best solution,says Carstens.
In the field of biochar, it has become increasingly clear over the past three years how durable this carbon is. Because of our manufacturing process, our material is the most stable biochar produced. More than 99 percent of the material lasts for more than 1000 years.
Carbo Culture is currently working on the first commercial facility, with the scope to establish multiple facilities by 2026 under a project platform model. Thanks to SPRIND, the inventor, his co-founder Henrietta Moon and his international team have been able to focus on solving problems.
But how exactly is biochar produced?
Basically, we burn a small portion of our biomass in the reactor to generate enough heat to convert wood waste, for example, into carbon,explains the mechanical engineer. At around 800 degrees Celsius, half of the carbon remains in the resulting biochar, while the other half is converted into an energy-rich, biogenic syngas.
We either burn this syngas to generate energy or use it as a feedstock for other processes,says Carstens and adds:
In the future, we want to look at other ways to improve our gas mix and ultimately make it as carbon efficient as possible.
I love SPRIND because it makes it easy for engineers and problem solvers to work. Thanks to SPRIND's funding, you can focus on the essentials without being distracted. That's the only way to solve problems.
- Christopher Carstens
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