Cleaning the air to heal the soils — Interview with Henrietta Moon of Carbo Culture
There are a ton of solutions to the climate crisis we hear about all the time — recycling, reducing air travel, transitioning to renewable energy.
There are other interesting solutions we don’t hear a lot about. One of those is biochar — when we talk to people who understand the value of biochar, they are ALL ABOUT BIOCHAR.
Today we want to introduce you to Henrietta Moon, the CEO & Co-founder of Carbo Culture, one of the leading producers of biochar, and find out what is so exciting about this innovative carbon technology.
Carbo Culture has developed a breakthrough method for at scale carbon drawdown: an instantaneous conversion from biomass to conductive biocarbon. By harnessing biology's photosynthesis and a conversion technology, they are working to make carbon removal at scale a reality — each ton of their CC biocarbon holds 3.2 tons of CO2 in a stable form for more than 1000 years.
Enjoy this 40 minute interview with Henrietta and learn all about what Carbo Culture is up to.
Do you know of any innovative climate solution we should feature on our podcast next? Hit us up!
Links mentioned in this episode:
Transcript:
Marc: [00:00:21] Hey, how's it going, Sarah?
Sarah: [00:00:22] Hey, pretty good Marc.
I’m excited to be here with our guest today.
You know, there are a ton of solutions to the climate crisis we hear about all the time, like recycling, reducing air travel and transitioning to renewable energy, but there are other interesting solutions we don't hear a lot about.
One of those is biochar.
And when we talk to people who understand the value of biochar, they are all about it, right? Like these people are super excited about biochar.
So today we want to introduce you to Henrietta Moon, the CEO and co-founder of CarboCulture, one of the leading producers of biochar, and find out what is so exciting about this innovative carbon technology.
Hello, Henrietta!
Hey, thank you for joining.
Henrietta: [00:01:06] Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Sarah: [00:01:12] And you are in —
Henrietta: [00:01:13] I'm in Nairobi at the moment. Nairobi, Kenya
Sarah: [00:01:16] thank you so much for joining us from Nairobi, Kenya. That is amazing. So let's dive in and I'm really excited to hear about CarboCulture and a little bit of the science of bio char, so people can understand what the heck it is and why we're all about it.
And then we'll talk a little bit about your journey. So to kick us off, you have a pretty big hairy, audacious goal stated on your website. Can you talk about what your big, hairy audacious goal is for carbo culture?
Henrietta: [00:01:47] Yeah, so Big hairy audacious goal, and everything else is one gigaton of carbon dioxide annually.
And what that means is a billion, tons of carbon dioxide draw down. And now why that is super, super difficult to get to is that carbon dioxide exists in our atmosphere at too high levels, but it's still parts per million. So trying to capture those parts per million, imagine trying to invent a solution or a technology that will capture those bits, is very energy intense and very difficult.
So what we're doing is leveraging biology because nature has photosynthesis already that knows how to capture a parts per million, knows how to take in CO2 and turn it into trees and agricultural stuff and we just convert that to stable carbon. So it doesn't escape back into the atmosphere. It's a very, very big goal, but it's like our North star that just guides what we do.
Sarah: [00:02:49] Yeah. So let's get into a little bit kind of high level, or I don't know if you consider this high level. But I really want to understand the science of what bio char is. Explain it to us like we're eight year olds… at a very high level, you say we clean the air to heal the soils, which I think is a beautiful way to message it.
Henrietta: [00:03:12] I think the first part to understand is like, how is the carbon captured? So in a normal, like without the biocarbon or bio char in the picture,
Trees draw down CO2, and then they keep it when they're alive, but when the trees die or any biomass for that matter, when they die, they decompose. And 99% of that carbon is released into the atmosphere.
And so it's like a cycle, it goes up, it comes down, et cetera. But humans have put too much carbon in the atmosphere, a few trillion tons too much to be exact.
And so we need to bring that carbon dioxide down. And now, instead of letting that— So those trees draw down the carbon dioxide again and turn it into biomass. And now we can turn that biomass into a different form. Then it looks a lot like charcoal, but is actually near pure carbon.
And so bio char is a way, and there's a lot of different varieties of it, but, for the sake of it, at least ours stay stable for over 1000 years. So when we turn it into that carbon form, there's no microbe or no organism, that's going to come and munch it and turn it into, greenhouse gases again. But instead it will be locked in that form for a very long time.
And that's why it's such a powerful, climate mitigation tool.
Sarah: [00:04:38] Awesome. So it starts with biomass, which you're talking about as like trees. And, I wondered, on your website it says forest and agriculture industry waste. Yeah. So it could also be food waste.
Henrietta: [00:04:57] Yeah, so we've been using, for example, Walnut shells.
So our demo facility is parked behind a nut processing factory. So nuts go to food. We get the shells, otherwise scale. Yeah. So we've also used peach pits. What you don't think are actually wood, and these types of ways. So definitely the idea is not to chop down new forest, by no means it's just to use waste products that are Woody in nature.
Sarah: [00:05:26] So it has to be Woody biomass. And does this help prevent wildfires in California, for example?
Henrietta: [00:05:31] Yes. When we get to scale, I would say yes. That's a very big issue. There's the agricultural waste is currently either openly burned or taken to biomass incineration facilities.
So central Valley in California that produces about half of the U S. Produce. And a lot of the nuts in the world actually has one of the worst air qualities in the us. So a lot of this biomass is openly burned and that's why we're there as well. So we can turn it into something more useful. But for the wildfires, that's our aspiration as well in the future to use some of that forest clearings or clearings from under the power lines, et cetera, that are like the critical areas. Of course we can use that. So definitely in our scope, but clearing the forest, to actually get the biomass out is very. It's very intense. And it costs a lot.
So that's not, that's why it's not being done as much. So that's like another few steps away from where we are now.
Sarah: [00:06:36] Yeah. I'm just like seeing, I'm already starting to be all about Biochar. I'm starting to see places where it can plug into this whole system of.
Henrietta: [00:06:46] Gaps
Sarah: [00:06:46] and waste that we're producing and how that waste is causing issues all over the place.
Marc: [00:06:52] Another question , continuing the conversation as if we were eight years old, would it just be as simple as just, providing jobs to folks to then go out into maybe hard to reach areas? So then pull that biomass out. Is that what you're talking about? How difficult it is to bring the up?
Is it just people power or is it…
Sarah: [00:07:13] That's why it's expensive, right?
Henrietta: [00:07:14] Yeah. Yeah. I think the forestry service actually has a couple of programs around this and what they're trying to do is do it on site, so really bring some equipment to the forest and do it on onsite because it's much more cost-effective and for us, The ideal scenario is that the biomass is deposited in one area.
So typically like from a County, they might gather, all the biomass that's under the power lines into one location or in the case of food, of course it's centralized. And so these little deposits are like where we try to be. And that's been quite good for us. So we're modular in size, I would say.
So we have a kind of facility design where we can add more kind of like Lego bricks, as to grow our capacity. But it's not that modular that we would put it on a trailer and take it with a quad through the forest or something.
Marc: [00:08:11] So instead of recycling centers, there would be soon someday biomass or bio char centers.
Henrietta: [00:08:18] Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.
Sarah: [00:08:20] Cool. Yeah. Okay. So that's basically step one. It's already good for the environment because you're removing a source of air pollution, which would be burning this biomass waste otherwise. And then step two is processing that biomass. So I understand… we've all heard that if you apply pressure to coal, you might get a diamond.
But apparently when you apply pressure to biomass, you get coal… charcoal?
Henrietta: [00:08:47] Yeah. So I have to heat up the biomass and how it's been done throughout the times, I guess or for the past hundred years is like trying to externally heat the biomass without letting it burn. So without oxygen, if you just cook it, it turns into carbon.
That's one way of doing it. We have a little bit of a sort of. We tried to upgrade the process so that it would be capturing more of the carbon actually letting less out as tars or as gases. And so our process is like a super rapid combustion through the material. And we get to a very high temperature, which turns the carbon into very stable form.
So we're trying to do something new that can elevate what's being done right now.
Sarah: [00:09:40] Awesome. And does, does it take a lot of energy to heat that biomass up?
Henrietta: [00:09:47] No, actually, we use part of the energy that the biomass itself contains. So we lose some of the energy. So to say what the Woody waste would have, but we don't need external heat to run our process.
And that's quite important as well. So in these kinds of like clean technology projects or carbon tech as it's called now, we just went through this and it's called a life cycle analysis. So you have to look at the entire chain of what happens in the system and what would have happened without the system.
And I find that kind of like fun too, to be working with biology and seeing all the, all the kind of levers taken up and down.
Sarah: [00:10:27] Yeah. You're turbocharging nature. Helping the natural carbon cycle do its job faster and more efficiently.
Henrietta: [00:10:37] Exactly. Yeah, in a natural process, about 1% of the carbon is stored. If the tree just dies and things like these, and we're able to store over 50, 50%. So we're 50 X faster per cycle. Wow. And now when you're thinking of, in, in the carbon problem, it has to be thinking of hundred year, time span plus, and it's very hard sometimes to be thinking of those things and then you can see that.
Okay. It's The forest will grow back, but the forest can't grow over its landmass size. So if you have a forest, that's a hectare today, it's going to be a Hector in a hundred years and it's going to be a hectare in 500 years, hopefully. But it's not going to grow 10 times taller or something like this.
So that's why we need additional things to go with it that can help nature or I guess we're just mimicking nature. Actually. We're not. We're not doing anything better than her. She actually nature did pyrogenic carbon already, for tens of thousands of years of forest fires that have raged around the world that are natural, started by lightning, put out by storms have deposited this kind of a pyro genic carbon in the soil.
And so the great Plains, the Prairie, like everywhere you have this pyrorogenic carbon to some percentage of the soil. But now biochars, just doing that in a kind of safer way, like locally and more technologically, so to say.
Sarah: [00:12:05] Gotcha. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that soil contains carbon.
And the way that I understand it is when we burn fossil fuels, we're releasing a bunch of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and there's basically only three places that it can go. It can stay in the atmosphere. It can get soaked up by the ocean, which turns the ocean acidic and kills ocean life, or it can go into the soil. It's a cycle and it doesn't go away for centuries. Yeah.
So you know, now that we've produced this bio char out of the , biomass, w where it goes next is into the soil,
Henrietta: [00:12:43] Yeah. So in our case where we're targeting urban areas first, so urban blue, green infrastructure. So everything green, you see it, the city, all the trees and the perennials, or rooftops, have some sort of a soil mix and the urban areas very difficult for plants to grow in because they're typically short of space, short of oxygen and short of water and nutrients.
So biochar can help in that way, because the bio char is essentially like a mini coral reef in the soil. So it's not a fertilizer. It doesn't do anything on its own. It's more like surface area for microbes to grow on and for things to attach themselves on. So a gram of our bio char has over 350 square meters.
That's probably 3,500 square feet of surface area. That's the one gram of it. So you can imagine what that does in the soil. And another place it's used for is water treatment. So storm water filtration in urban areas. And a lot of people don't know this, but when storm water hits the city, there's all sorts of micro pollutants, plastics, heavy metals that drain with the water.
And you have to filter that before it goes (A) into your groundwater or (B) into the nature. So carbon can, again, help in that aspect and whatever we do with it, eventually it'll end up in the soil. That's just, if you look at a long enough time span
Sarah: [00:14:17] yeah. And that's the best place for it, if it's in the atmosphere, it's doing damage to the climate. If it's in the ocean, it's doing damage to the ecosystem there. And if it's in the soil, it's actually helping the soil and helping the plants that depend on the soil to grow, which includes our food.
Yeah. And plants produce oxygen. So it's a whole cycle. I love that it's a whole system of benefit all the way down.
Some of the things that I was reading, I was really surprised and now I'm all about bio char, too. But like you said, it's a filter, it filters out toxins. It oxygenates the soil so that more more nutrients can grow. It helps to speed up the composting process. And it can prevent runoff from polluting other areas.
Henrietta: [00:15:04] Yeah. Carbon is the, I think, the sixth, most abundant element in the universe. We're carbon, our food is carbon. Pretty much a lot of this stuff around us is carbon. So it's a very useful material. I wouldn't say that, there's like this vibe around biochar sometimes that it's like a healer for everything.
I'm not, I don't think it'll act on its own, but like you said, it can help a composting process, for example, where the beneficial microbes will then latch onto the carbon. So when it goes into the ground, it's already loaded with all the good stuff. So in these kinds of processes, it can be a good sidekick or a good help for the process.
But alone, it won't solve everything,
Sarah: [00:15:47] sure. But, as far as the numbers go, and as far as your goal to remove a trillion billion trillion, tons of,
Henrietta: [00:15:55] Billion
Sarah: [00:15:56] billion, tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere , I saw, I think on your website, every ton of bio char, you sell directly reduces over three tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Henrietta: [00:16:09] Yeah. So each ton of material that we manufacturer has 3.2 tons of CO2 in a stable form for a thousand years.
Sarah: [00:16:17] Wow. And yeah, that's where, once you've produced the bio char, that's where it goes. Next is you have a market in agriculture where it's sold to, I don't want to say fertilize, but to assist with the soil in the agriculture process.
Henrietta: [00:16:33] Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's the kind of Holy grail of bio char. Like how do we get this into all of the agricultural soils? The small scale farming is a little bit easier because there's a lot of stuff that's done. Like with simple mechanics. I think the great Plains type vibe is a lot more difficult.
Like how do you get something that's not a liquid or highly processed into the system? So there's a lot of challenges ahead still, but I can see that bio char is getting a lot more reception, especially because it is such a — the IPCC also highlighted it as — so, International Panel for Climate Change — also highlighted it as a very good tool for climate change. And last November Hepburn & all wrote a paper in Nature. There was CO2 utilization, okay. So once you pull it down, what do you do with it? If you pull it down as a gas, it's a huge gas, where do you store it, et cetera.
Do you make a fuel out of it? If you make a fuel out of it, it's put back into the atmosphere. So what are the actual ways that we can actually store carbon dioxide? And that's where I think bio char is like super elegant. It's just that, okay. Nature already knows how to do this. Let's just like ride with this.
Sarah: [00:17:50] Yeah, and we need to include agriculture in our conversation about solving the climate crisis. I think it's a huge opportunity that a lot of people miss, because it's not really very exciting, but it's, exciting or not, we have the hard reality to look at about food security. And I think, the UN says we are, we only have an average of 60 harvests left — Is that still true? — until we've depleted all of our soils.
Henrietta: [00:18:20] Yeah, that's regionally true. I think the UK was at that level or so. I'm sure we're going to… nothing like the last minute to get stuff done. I'm sure we can solve these problems, but. But yeah, definitely. We need to start thinking a little bit more about how do we rig our agricultural system to also benefit the long-term, not just the very cyclical very year driven, revenues because a lot of farmers are indebted.
They have to look at those yields annually and that's not necessarily equaling the good for the long-term and that's like the problem. But another thing that I wanted to point out is that when we're talking about climate change stuff. So basically the world should get to net zero by 2050.
So that means that if we're emitting something, we also need to remove something. And in this case, avoiding emissions is not enough. You need to actually physically remove it from the atmosphere. And so getting to that net zero would potentially keep us off 2 Celsius warming and why that's so important.
If I may give a half a minute rant here, is that 2 Celsius might seem like super fun in Finland or, where I'm from, where Oh, beach day. Cool. 2 Celsius more, awesome. But 2 Celsius can mean 8 Celsius somewhere, which means crop failure, which means no water, which means Arctic thawing, which means more methane, bad feedback loops.
And th— our weather patterns might be reliant on these things. So I can really push us into a loop that we can't get out of. And that's why it's so critical. So to get to this 2 Celsius, it's highly likely that we need to like, Physically remove carbon from the atmosphere. And it was not that many technologies to do that.
There's trees, which are awesome. And as long as we can keep on increasing our forest area, et cetera, we can store some carbon in the soil. Then we have a couple of technologies like ClimeWorks is working on, taking CO2 from the atmosphere, drawing it down and trying to mineralize it, which is very energy intense, but they're doing like a pretty good job in Iceland.
They have a couple of plants there, but then you have like direct air capture and all sorts of stuff. But then again, the question begs, what do you do with the CO2 once you've brought it down, do stuff it in a hole and hope that it stays there, or what do you actually do with it? And how much does it cost and how much energy does it take?
And in this. These are the key questions that we should be asking ourselves, how much energy does it take for us to bring one ton of CO2 down? And so if that ratio is not good enough, then it doesn't really make sense. And another question is of course the cost, like who's going to pay for it. And how much does it.
Does it cost. So that's where bio char really is such a neglected climate tool because one ton of manufactured good contains 3.2 tons of carbon dioxide. I don't know if any one of these other systems can now do that yet. Maybe they will in the future. Good. If they can. And another thing is the cost that it's so cost competitive with anything out there already.
And this is why I think it's ludicrous that we're not looking at this option. And I think that somebody will come and take the market in the next five years.
Sarah: [00:21:43] Nice. And I think recently you were featured in Forbes and they said, considering that soil stores more carbon than all of the Earth's biomass and the atmosphere combined and is necessary to produce 95% of our food, Carbo Culture is a solution that we can all get on board with.
Henrietta: [00:22:02] Yeah, that was cool. I was about waste and how we're using it today. And I don't think anything's going to be waste in the future, because at the end of it, if you think of like these nutshells or something, okay. They seem like waste, but the amount of energy and time that's gone into growing those things is immense.
And like, why are we throwing that away? We can just, do something with it and upcycle it and turn it into another form.
Marc: [00:22:29] Awesome. Henrietta, I got to say I've learned so much about bio char just listening to you over the last few minutes. I've I did watch a number of videos on the topic, before the interview and even before just. I don't know, when I'm hanging out doing nothing, I tend to watch climate videos on YouTube, call me a dork.
But we hang out with a lot of, yeah. Of, of scientists and researchers as a creative studio working solely on, on the climate crisis. These are our clients and friends and colleagues. And, usually when we talk to Climate founders their pitch, their messaging, the way that they talk is very complex.
It's very confusing at times is full of jargon. And what we really appreciate about you and the work that we've seen on your website and on your medium publication. Is that, the messaging that you have is really tight. It's really simple. It's really to the point. And I'm going to call out a few examples.
I think your bio on your medium account is a co-founder and CEO of Carbo Culture, sequestering carbon, and putting it to use. Love it. As Sarah mentioned earlier, there's another phrase you use, “we clean the air to heal the soils” and even just an analogy that you used a few minutes ago. Using an example, like it's like coral reef, we all know what that looks like. Okay. So we have an idea of what, Oh, okay. Coral reef it's like that, but for the soil, it captures all this stuff in the little nooks and crannies of it. Another thing that you have on the website, I think this is on your homepage, sequestering CO2 for over a thousand years.
And so we really appreciate that direct to the point messaging. And where did this come from? Did you already start out this way, knowing that this was probably a very complex thing to talk about or was it, did you have to practice getting to that phase where you needed to move away from the complex and science-y jargon to something more simple?
Henrietta: [00:24:27] It's so cool to hear that you guys enjoy it because I always find myself explaining something and people might look at me after 10 minutes. What are you doing? But, my co-founder Chris Carson's, he's amazing. He's a mechanical engineer has been concerned about the climate for probably 15, 20 years already and been looking at all sorts of stuff and he Comes up with a lot of these things that are, I think he tries to simplify what the mathematics and everything that's going on in his head for me.
And he's look, this is the big picture and this is what we're doing. And so somehow. Able to sometimes tie those little, nuggets out of there. And also, our team member Charlotta, has been just phenomenal. She jumped on board from totally other stuff and started pulling our backend together and, and she's had to learn the everything that we're doing from scratch.
So I think that's why a lot of the messaging as well as is a little bit more clear because somebody had to learn it the hard way.
Marc: [00:25:30] Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a lot to say about that. Bringing on someone with fresh eyes or who isn't really deep in the trenches when it comes to the science, when it comes to all the terminology and jargon, having someone come in with fresh eyeballs to, yeah, translate it in a way that makes sense. Not only to them, but to turn around and make it make sense to the people that are going to be, you're going to be interacting with whether they're potential funders, audience, customers, et cetera.
Henrietta: [00:25:55] We just got our lab tests back and stuff like that. And, when we saw in the lab tests that it was our materials stay stable for 1000 years to 1 million years, we said, okay, we have to start communicating this.
This is so cool. And something that a lot of other people can't do.
Marc: [00:26:15] Yeah. And even just you saying this is so cool. I think, one thing that we love to see are those cool things in the climate crisis, like those, the solutions and approaches, that excites people. That's that rallies people behind, whatever it is that people are working on.
I think there is an element of reminiscing to really cool scifi movies, star Trek, star Wars. We're starting to see these technologies come in place. And I am all about highlighting the cool newness of these approaches and solutions.
Sarah: [00:26:48] Yeah. And enthusiasm helps a lot too. I think, nobody gets excited about reading about soil, but we get excited about somebody who's really excited about soil.
Henrietta: [00:26:58] I have to disagree because so there's this really cool professor in UC Davis is called Sanjay Purik. And he actually wrote a cartoon of soil too, to try to explain how cool it is. And when I read this cartoon, I was like, Holy moly. So soil like, first of all, all land-based life is entirely dependent on soil and every form of life that ever exists on top of land also ends up in the soil.
It's amazing. It's like this, Full circle of life that I never really understood or appreciated. So yeah, it's pretty cool.
Sarah: [00:27:37] That enthusiasm is what sells the story
Marc: [00:27:41] and that, that graphic interface, putting it in some sort of a comic strip Medium that anyone can relate to. We've all read comics and enjoy comics.
And again, we're all about translating very complex science jargon to ways that people can get behind and understand, and then do something about it. And so I'm wondering how many young people you're inspiring or people in this particular industry are inspiring because they're understanding it and they get excited about it.
And they realize that it's not that hard of an approach it's very natural and anyone can do it.
Henrietta: [00:28:19] Yeah. Hope yeah.
Marc: [00:28:21] And so maybe this is a good opportunity to ask you about your background. How did you even get started in doing this? Did you read that comic as a young As a young woman.
Henrietta: [00:28:32] No. I was actually doing totally other stuff. I've been in environmental all my life or like living in, I was born and brought up in Finland is very forested. I'm a sea scout. I've been very close to nature all my life. And as a kind of captain for the Scouts as well, I've seen how. The Baltic sea, for example, has totally deteriorated during my lifetime.
But I was doing other stuff. I was just starting, we were doing conferences, tech conferences, science stuff. We did programming workshops for women. One of them. Rails girls has now been to 300 cities on all continents around the world, so all sorts of, I was just starting stuff and some of it by accident and some of it more by, consciously.
And then I ended up in this place called singlearity university. It was like, back in the days, it was a very cool nerd camp. It was three months super intense at NASA Moffett field in California. In the research side, not in the high-tech side, unfortunately, but in any case, it was a three month super-intense camp where I met my co-founder Chris Costa.
And so there's this loud, tall, British American engineer. And we had to start solving some of the world's biggest challenges by using technology as a leverage. And so we decided to focus on the climate crisis, because we thought that it's going to make all the other problems a lot worse as well. When you're thinking about global health, global water security, global, and all sorts of issues.
So it's a really — it's been close to my heart. So we just decided to focus on that. And my co-founder had been looking at all sorts of climate technologies for the past 15 years. Yeah. And just thought that this is a really elegant solution to start working on.
Sarah: [00:30:17] So you, weren't a soil scientist to start with or anything like that.
Henrietta: [00:30:23] No, absolutely not. I'm a business school dropout, very bad in that sense, I wish I had studied more, physics and chemistry and stuff like that. I was pretty good at them at school, but in any case, I thought I was going to change the world by doing international relations or diplomacy or something like this, peacekeeping, but I interned for the foreign ministry in Finland and they told me it's a very slow place. Are you sure you want to be here, or it's a very long career trajectory … I was in a fun, fun location in the ministry where we were bringing in international guests and stuff like that. So it was very good for my kind of personality, but it became really clear that maybe I need something different and I ended up in just, university entrepreneurship club sort of thing from Singularity university. And there was a bunch of kids who were just doing projects and not asking for permission and starting stuff. And it was very contagious. We had all sorts of cool startup people come over and we brought Steve Blank from Stanford and stuff like this.
So we were like soaked in this startup juice, and entrepreneurship just looked like the right kind of tool. There's a lot of different tools out there. My, my husband works for government and when he does something, he can affect the life of Millions of people immediately, but that's not my tool.
My tool is entrepreneurship. So there's different kinds of ways. And this was my path, at least for now.
Sarah: [00:31:54] Yeah, I think that's really cool. Cool. And I think there might be a lot of people listening to this who are entrepreneurial and care about climate and get discouraged when they hear about these climate solutions that are very science heavy, but we just walked through the science at a high level of Bio char and none of us are scientists by any means, anyone can do this. And I think that's the thing that I really want people to take away from this is that there are some amazing solutions out there. You can gain the expertise as you go. You can just jump in as an entrepreneur and you'll learn what you need to know and you'll build a team and you don't have to do it all alone, but you can start from where you are right now.
And everybody can do something to work on this crisis.
Henrietta: [00:32:42] Yeah. And for four years ago or something, I was presenting at a scientific conference and I like totally embarrassed myself because I couldn't, I couldn't answer any of the questions that the older scientists were posing to me. And I was, it was, I had like nightmares about that situation for years after, but Hey, that's like part of it, Yeah, I've devoted now my past year is to do this project and then you learn as you go.
And no, there's stuff that we are discovering as a company that nobody has discovered before. Like nobody in science. And that's the coolest thing when you can actually be at the front lines or you're like, okay, even you guys don't know about this, so why don't we just look into this together?
Sarah: [00:33:27] Yeah,
Marc: [00:33:27] and I love that too. The way that I talk about it with people it's because this climate crisis is very new, we've never done that. We've never had this crisis before. We've never had this challenge before, and there is no guidebook rule books, somewhere on some mountain top with all the answers.
And we need to figure out how to do this now, but also just. We need to start, we don't have time to crunch the numbers and do all the things in the studio before we, we set forth and practice, whatever it is that we're doing. And so we're probably going to screw up a few times. We're probably going to fail a few times.
We're probably going to not have all the right answers right off the bat. But through that failure, obviously in some cliche right now, but through all this failure, we're going to learn so much. And so I just love how , hearing your story about you just. Saying, Hey, I don't know, but that's not going to stop me.
I'm going to just keep going and move on and, yeah. And see what else I can learn and what else I can share with other people.
Henrietta: [00:34:29] Yeah. Definitely perfect is the enemy of just getting stuff done. So if we were evaluating all the bad sides about bio char and stuff like that, we would probably still not have a company and not be doing these things.
So yeah. Yesterday was a good time to start something.
Marc: [00:34:49] Nice. Love it.
Sarah: [00:34:51] So, what's in the future for carbo culture?
Henrietta: [00:34:55] Yeah. Good question. A lot of stuff. So we're planning a scaled up facility. So right now we're running something that's demo size is not profitable yet. So two things that we believe the climate crisis, or At least in our part, what needs to happen is one, it needs, we need to leverage biology to get that massive draw down.
And two is, it needs to be profitable. So right now we need to scale up our systems so that we can get to a means of breaking even. And then from there scaling out and replicating our success. So really that's what we're all eyes focused on right now. We're looking at funding and hiring.
How do we build this massive system that, that we haven't done before? And it's exciting. And at the same time, it's quite, quite a big thing. So there's going to be a lot of things happening in Q1, 2021.
Sarah: [00:35:51] Yeah. Anyone listening to this, If there's anything that they can do, if they want to help you, how can they find out more about what you need?
Henrietta: [00:36:00] Yeah. Follow us at least on Twitter at @carboculture. We're generally pretty good at answering stuff. You can also email us hello@carboculture.com. We're also on Instagram a little bit sloppy there, but you can write us @carboculture. And there's a list on our website actually it's called the Carbo Collective.
So it's not an email list per se. It's actually a list of people who would be open to help us. So if we're running an event in your town or. We want to reach somebody from there, or we need some local help. That's who we're going to reach out to. So it's a little bit dormant, but you can join it and we might call you up someday.
Sarah: [00:36:45] Perfect. Join the community. What did you call it? The Carbo Collective.
Henrietta: [00:36:50] Yeah.
Sarah: [00:36:51] Amazing. Thank you so much for taking this time to chat with us today, Henrietta.
Henrietta: [00:36:56] Thanks. This was really fun.
Marc: [00:36:58] Yeah, I appreciate it.
