On a cool morning on the Colorado plains, six stray dogs roam the seventeen acres of Biochar Now. The company headquarters sits on a modest rise facing west toward the Rocky Mountains and exposing it to a biting wind that carries a hint of smokeless tobacco. As he walks the property, Gaspard, who has a bright-red face, a graying goatee and a throaty laugh, is unfazed by the breeze, the chill or the dogs. To his right is a large clump of discarded Christmas trees, and beyond that a much larger pile of blackened pines from the December 2021 Marshall fire. Among the largest conflagrations in the state's history, it killed two people, consumed 1,000 homes, and left behind $2 billion in damages. Following such disasters, charred trees are often abandoned to rot or hauled off to landfills, where they release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and add to global warming. When termites eat the wood, they release methane, placing even more CO2 into the environment. In 2022, according to the International Energy Agency, worldwide CO2 emissions reached 36.8 gigatons, the most ever recorded.
After the Marshall fire, Gaspard collected burnt trees from backyards and elsewhere, transporting them to his business outside Berthoud. The wood is being turned into biochar, a form of pure charcoal created in rows of black kilns and giving off the faint smell of barbecue. Biochar can increase the earth’s capacity to retain moisture, lower farmers’ dependence on herbicides and pesticides, sequester carbon in the ground, and help rebuild topsoil, a third of which has disappeared from the earth’s surface since the 1970s. (Worldwide desertification has created nearly a billion refugees.) Through a chemical process known as pyrolysis — breaking down biomass in the absence of oxygen — biochar reduces wood into something so granular it almost feels like water. Gaspard then sells it to corporate customers around the United States, in the Middle East and Thailand.
Next door to Biochar Now is a former munitions plant that currently tests satellite rocket motors. Each test unleashes a wave of sound beyond serious thunder, but Gaspard isn't bothered by this, either. He’s outspoken, fiercely independent, has an edge of defiance and isn’t fazed by much of anything — which is useful, because in his line of work, a lot of people are trying to faze a lot of other people in the belief that they’re doing something wrong when it comes to carbon sequestration, carbon credits and rescuing the planet. Too many saviors can spoil the mission. Gaspard, the kind of man who works with snuff in his pocket and mud on his boots, shuns the disagreements and the groups behind them.
“They have their own rules, and I don’t want to be a part of that,” he says. “I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me.”"They have their own rules, and I don't want to be a part of that."
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Gaspard is one of countless private citizens trying to lessen global warming by doing it his way. While ignoring all the static around him and looking for solutions inside of problems, he’s gained national attention. Biochar Now has been featured on the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, has won a People’s Choice Award in the Global Impact Challenge, and has finished in the top ten for Clean Technology in a competition with 500 contestants. Instead of the Marshall fire leading to more greenhouse gas emissions, Gaspard turned the disaster’s biomass into a substance that holds and utilizes carbon in the ground for decades, if not much longer. According to Chemists Without Borders, a nonprofit group of scientists fighting climate change, a ton of biochar sequesters three tons of carbon dioxide.
“In addition to reducing soil emissions of greenhouse gases,” its website reads, “biochar serves many purposes in regenerative agriculture from improving soil quality, livestock feed productivity, and water filtration treatments…soil water retention and reduction of nutrient runoff.”
Gaspard isn’t the first to use biochar.
More than 2,000 years ago in South America’s Amazon Basin, agrarian civilizations smoldered agricultural waste and placed it underground to enhance nutrient-poor land. The dark soil, known as “terra preta,” or black earth, enriched crop yields and became the foundation of societies that flourished from around 400 B.C. until roughly 500 years ago, when the Spanish arrived. In the 1500s, Francisco de Orellana led an expedition into the Amazon deltas and was surprised to find sixty-foot-wide highways, fertile farms and thriving cities holding a collective population estimated near five million. The Spanish brought diseases, leading to a pandemic that ravaged the populace; by the 1980s, it had fallen to less than 200,000. Many of the people vanished, but not the biochar. Agronomists who’ve lately studied the soil amended centuries ago have found that it remains nutrient-rich.
In recent decades, those driving west into the Rockies have seen endless stretches of pines dying or already dead from a massive beetle infestation. In the mid-2000s, after beetles had killed trees on land owned by Gaspard and his wife, Paula, they wondered if they could turn the wood into charcoal. He decided to build a small kiln, but wasn’t sure how to proceed. On Google Books, he came across a 300-year-old letter written by a British official to someone in the colonies, describing a method for making better charcoal. The instructions laid out the best dimensions for constructing a kiln, and Gaspard wrote down the numbers on a napkin, taking them to a machinist for help with designing this equipment. When it was finished, the Gaspards carted it home, reassembled the kiln, fed in dead pine they'd collected in the forest, switched on the machine, and cranked the heat to between 550 and 700 degrees Centigrade. For the next ten hours, they cooked the biomass, generating biochar.
“The kiln was too hot to make charcoal,” Gaspard says, “so we created something unique in the world — by accident.”
The results looked promising, but they weren’t experts on soil fertility or biochar’s carbon-capturing properties. When they told a friend, an expert gardener, about their findings, she didn’t believe them and refused to put the substance on her plants. She contacted a lab at Colorado State University and asked its scientists to test the biochar under controlled conditions. The exam removed her doubts. A few weeks later, a Colorado State Forest Service representative was on the Gaspards’ land examining the kiln and their product. What they’d invented could convert dead pines into biochar and suck toxic metals from the ground.
The couple built bigger and better kilns and found other sources of wood bound for dumps and landfills — like the thousands upon thousands of wooden pallets and railroad ties (about 20 million a year) discarded by industries throughout the country. In 2011, they set up shop in a mobile home on a hillside overlooking the mountains and began hiring employees who agreed to work there under certain conditions: The operation does not have electrical power and runs on a generator, and the bathrooms are porta-potties.
“So far we’ve bootstrapped it all the way,” says Gaspard. “It took a lot of scars across my back to get where we are. I can tell you thirty ways not to make biochar or run this kind of business.”
One of those thirty, he explains, was putting “biochar” in the company name. In his view, there are too many bad actors in the carbon sequestration field and there's too much confusion around lessening greenhouse gas emissions.
“When I call up an oil executive in Texas and tell him the name of my business,” he says, “the next thing I hear is a click: He’s hung up.”
Exxon claims to have sequestered more CO2 than anyone else in the world, but there’s a twist. In southwest Wyoming, the LaBarge field began production in 1986 and contains high concentrations of carbon dioxide and other gases. Its Shute Creek treating plant separates CO2, methane and helium for sale while removing potentially dangerous hydrogen sulfide for disposal.
“The multifaceted facility,” ExxonMobil says in an online promotion, “has captured more carbon dioxide than anywhere else in the world to date….”
Most of the CO2 captured at Shute Creek is used in a process known as enhanced oil recovery.
“EOR,” says Brady Rodgers, CEO of Native State Carbon Capture in Houston, “stands for Enhanced Oil Recovery. That means Exxon must remove the CO2 from the oil and natural gas in order to sell it to a pipeline company. They happen to make so much CO2 at LaBarge that they can sell it to be used at other oil fields nearby or inject it back into LeBarge. Exxon claims this as carbon capture, but that’s a bit misleading. They’re pumping the CO2 into other wells to get out more oil. I don’t believe carbon capture is their motivation. They want to produce more oil.”
Through the combination of a $4 billion private equity fund dedicated to industrial de-carbonization, Rodgers’s company has raised $200 million in the ethanol space to sequester CO2.
“It’s challenging to bring everyone together to make this kind of project work,” he says, “but we’ve managed to make it happen profitably and become the first strictly focused carbon capture company at scale with the financing, the acreage and the customers signed up to start now. A lot of people go to conferences and talk about these issues, but few are investing in action. The majors have used CCS [Carbon Capture Storage] as a public relations show, but investors need to hold them accountable and seek out companies that can actually reach net negative CO2 emissions if we’re going to make a difference this decade.”
"Big oil is going to ride the carbon sequestration winners, like me."
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With the lack of action from some quarters, Gaspard has nudged forward, continuing to expand his expertise and commitment to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. He doesn’t view oil corporations as the enemy.
“I have no problem with them,” he says. “Big oil is going to ride the carbon sequestration winners, like me.”
Some of those companies are his customers, but he’s entered into agreements that prevent him from naming them; his involvement creates tricky public relations concerns for the oil and gas business.
“If the American public knew they were buying from us, they’d demand that they do more of this," Gaspard says. "Everyone in that business is now scared to death of how people look at them. That affects what they do and how they do it. Corporations need to know that what they’re spending their money on is real instead of just spending it because they’re afraid. That’s not a long-term model for stopping global warming.”
After a dozen years in operation, Biochar Now is not yet profitable. “We’re growing too fast to be profitable, but at least we’re winning now," he notes. "We’re finally out of the valley of death, and the battle is no longer to survive, but to expand.”
Expanding means buying more inventory and equipment, hiring more employees and taking on more overhead, but there’s one thing Gaspard doesn’t need more of.
“We have enough feedstock to create biochar,” he says, pointing to the mounds of trees that logging companies retrieve from scorched lands and transport to his business, bringing in about 3,000 truckloads a year. “We have around a hundred million truckloads of rotting dead trees across the West that need to be cleaned up and hauled out. If we don’t use them for biochar, that wood would just be sitting there waiting for the next fire to come through. It’s important to tell people that we don’t go into forests and chop them down in order to do what we do.”
Near the Christmas trees and pines recovered from the Marshall fire are stacks of wooden pallets waiting to be turned into biochar (magnets draw out the nails and bolts). On Biochar’s periphery are row after row of roundish white bags holding the product to be shipped to more than 500 clients across the U.S. and abroad. It will be used to remediate oil fields, clean up polluted Superfund sites, restore water and strengthen plastic. Thrown from aircraft, biochar balls help replenish depleted forests. The company has a mobile component so it can quickly transport its equipment anywhere there’s a disaster and convert the remains of a hurricane or fire into new product.
“Because our machines run off generators,” Gaspard says, “they can be used wherever there’s a weather catastrophe.”
In putting $35 million into his business, he’s avoided both government subsidies and the academic world, which conducts research on biochar. He holds seventeen patents, alone or with others: thirteen for his biochar process, three for using biochar for water treatment, and one for the invention of equipment.
Gaspard is relentlessly inquisitive. Quite often, after he’s explained the inner workings of the biochar process or the financial or carbon-capture aspects of the industry, he stops himself mid-sentence and asks: “Does that make sense?”
Curiosity and the right questions have moved him in the right directions. Born in Louisiana in 1960, he graduated from the University of Texas with a combined law and business degree and went to work for the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. The legal profession didn’t fit him.
“I loved the law,” he says, “but hated lawyers.”
In the 1990s, he moved to Colorado and became involved with hybrid vehicles, eventually selling that business and trusting his passion to lead him toward helping the environment — on his own terms. Inside the world of biochar, Gaspard has been called the “cowboy of carbon.”
To wander into the topic of global warming and carbon sequestration is to run headlong into a lot of talk about saving the planet and considerable conflict, perhaps inevitable as humanity faces something never faced before in recorded history. Around the country and abroad, lone individuals are trying to take on a worldwide challenge, often without much funding, without a lot of scientific certification that would allow them to proceed more quickly and profitably, and without much public understanding or support. Most have good intentions and most labor in obscurity. Their endeavors can be heroic — even if at times they seem almost foolish. Wealthy people who want to do something to alleviate the crisis like to dabble in these areas until they begin to lose too much money or can no longer use their investments as tax write-offs and finally acknowledge what they’re up against.
In November 2021, world leaders met in Glasgow, Scotland, to address global warming. To avoid catastrophe, they hoped to keep the earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, but the actual rise would likely be closer to 1.7 Celsius, leading to more flooding, crop failures, devastating heat waves and species extinction. Calamity is already here, both overseas and in the U.S. A 2022 study by NASA and Columbia University found that 77 percent of the American West is experiencing severe to extreme drought.
As the Glasgow conference unfolded, Claire Fyson, co-head of the climate policy team at Climate Analytics, told Yahoo News, “This is the critical decade we are now in. If we don’t halve emissions from now until 2030, we really start to put 1.5 degrees [Celsius] out of reach.” At the close of the event, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres echoed Fyson, saying that the battle to keep “1.5 alive will be won or lost during this decade.” A new report, released in March by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sounded even more dire — stating that “humanity is on thin ice, and that ice is melting fast” while demanding lower carbon emissions and mitigating what’s already been put into the atmosphere.
People across America sit in boardrooms and coffee shops arguing about the best way to address global warming and saying how much money they’ll raise to meet this goal. Some will raise a little; many will barely try. Others will run out of cash before they can get started, and others will start but soon crash. Some others, like HBO’s John Oliver, will go on television and chastise those who’ve created financial instruments designed to try to lessen greenhouse gas emissions. In August 2022, the comedian mercilessly took on the issue of carbon sequestration and carbon credits. His performance raised many questions, including when did joke tellers become significant commentators regarding complex scientific and economic matters?
Carbon credits, or offsets, allow corporations with the stated goal of lowering their carbon footprint to take alternative action when they fail to meet this goal. In Europe, purchasing the credits from registries is mandatory, but in the U.S. it remains voluntary and the markets are unregulated. Until recently, other continents have been more aggressive in their backing of biochar for carbon sequestration strategy. The European Biochar Industry Consortium is predicting an annual growth rate of 70 percent in production plants until 2030, surpassing the European Commission’s current objective for industrial carbon removal. Pro Natura International has designed, funded and implemented numerous agro-ecological projects in Africa, the Americas and Asia, using biochar to fight climate change and strengthen food security. The African Union is developing the Great Green Wall, an 8,500-kilometer-long forestation project intended to become the world’s largest user of biochar.
America is playing catch-up.
"In this culture," says Brando Crespi, founder of Pro Natura International, "things are not real unless they make money.”
Things are beginning to get real. First came the August 2002 Inflation Reduction Act, and last December Congress authorized $447 million to research and demonstrate large-scale carbon removal. Carbon credit markets are developing — amid deep turmoil."In this culture, things are not real unless they make money.”
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Companies can now buy these credits from registries, with the money going back to biochar producers to help fund their operations. The corporations can then claim they’ve done their duty in fighting climate change. They might even tout their businesses as “carbon neutral” or “carbon negative” — without actually taking the steps to diminish their carbon footprint. The buzzword for this is “greenwashing”: looking as if you’re doing something positive when you really aren’t. Promoters have called these credits a carbon tax on a corporation. Critics have labeled them a “get out of jail card.” Gaspard refers to the offset markets as “the wild, wild West” — along with a few harsher characterizations for these registries, which he shuns.
In his HBO takedown, Oliver spoke of how in 2020 JP Morgan bought $1 million worth of offsets in order to “protect” a Pennsylvania woodland known as Hawk Mountain Preserve, which wasn’t under threat of deforestation.
“It was a preserve,” Oliver said, “and not called Hawk Mountain Chop Zone or Tree Murder Playground. … On some level, you probably know that carbon offsets are bullshit, both because you’re a reasonably intelligent person and because you know exactly what show you are watching right now. I don’t open my beak to squawk out good news. ... Fundamentally, we cannot offset our way out of climate change.”
More seriously, The Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, recently completed a nine-month analysis of “scientific studies of Verra’s rainforest schemes.” Verra, the world’s leading registry for the $2 billion offsets market, approves three-fourths of these transactions. According to the investigation, more than “90 percent of their rainforest offset credits…are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.” They could “make global heating worse” because “94 percent of the credits had no benefit to the climate.” Three companies mentioned in the report were Gucci, Shell and Disney. Verra has rigorously disputed the investigation and defended itself against the allegations. It contends that the methods used to measure the results do not reflect the actual impact on forests and says it’s already addressed the criticisms raised in the study.
Like the registries, biochar has faced its own headwinds. In her September 2013 article published by Earth Island Journal, Rachel Smolker took direct aim at the fledging industry. The piece was titled “Biochar: Black Gold or Just Another Snake Oil Scheme?," with this subhead: "There’s little basis for claims that biochar could solve our energy, food, and climate woes." The tone of the piece was set early on: “Biochar enthusiasts are a hopeful bunch. They claim that charred biomass will be a win for climate, a win for soils and crop yields, hence a win against hunger and poverty, and a win for renewable energy generation. They are convinced that burning ‘biomass’…could solve our energy, food, and climate woes….”
While disputing that biochar sequesters carbon or improves yields, Smolker wrote, “Biochar enthusiasts usually insist they won’t cut forests or convert ecosystems to provide burnable biomass. ... They prefer to talk about burning ‘wastes and residues.’ But there is no such thing as ‘waste’ in a forest ecosystem — all is recycled, via decay, to support regeneration and regrowth….”
She concluded: “No amount of biochar, no climate geoengineering tricks, no technofixes or markets or ‘private sector engagement’ or fancy carbon accounting will be a ‘win win win’ for us.”
“This was a famous article within the industry, and it highlighted a lot of the issues with the industry at the time, but it overly focused on the negative aspects," Gaspard says. "Since then, more than 15,000 peer review papers have been published that have shown the many benefits of biochar.
“It's true that there is no ‘waste’ in a natural forest ecosystem, but there are no longer natural ecosystems," he continues. "They have been mismanaged for many decades, resulting in forests that are incredibly overgrown, insect-laden, diseased and under stress in ways that would not have occurred in natural ecosystems. The overgrowth causes fires to occur hotter than what happens in natural ecosystems, and this will sterilize the soil. If the overgrowth somehow escapes fire and begins to die and rot, then there is so much material decomposing it will change the characterization of the soil. We need to remove most of the dead trees and overgrowth to allow the forests to regain the status of a natural ecosystem, and we need to recognize the role of fire in a natural ecosystem to regenerate forests.
“The conversion into biochar of many of the dead trees from our overburdened and mismanaged forests, the numerous charred trees left from forest fires, and waste wood destined for landfills can effectively remove gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere and place that stable carbon in the soil, where it belongs.”
In the 1980s, visitors to Denver couldn’t help but notice the smog hanging over the city or lingering at the edge of the Rockies. Known locally as “the brown cloud,” it was the subject of many jokes and worries. In response to the pollution, state and local health departments developed strategies to clear the air — cutting street sanding in half, installing low-nitrogen oxide burners at power plants, placing restrictions on wood-burning, and expanding the bus system. Since the late 1990s, Denver has seen an approximately 33 percent decrease in particulate matter, and the brown cloud isn’t nearly as evident. Through a mixture of cooperative programs and technologies, people have found a way to confront and diminish an environmental hazard.
Still, the more you delve into the conflict surrounding carbon sequestration, the more you understand Gaspard’s desire for independence. He has his own judgments about others in his business.
“When I talk about poking the bear,” he says, “I mean that not all biochars are created equal. Some are garbage, but a lot of people are throwing money at them because they believe everything they read or hear. People in my industry hate it when I talk about quality, but if you create quality, people will buy quality because it creates value. We keep our carbon at an optimum conversion temperature for a longer time period than other known conversion systems, so we have a unique set of properties over other carbons.
“Customers and environmentally minded people that are interested in biochar will read on the Internet and from other sources about all the benefits of biochar. Because they usually have a specific need for biochar, they will often purchase it from a questionable manufacturer. Certainly, the benefits of biochar are real if you purchase quality biochar. But there are people selling poor-quality biochars that were not produced correctly, and those biochars do not possess the required beneficial properties to solve the problems of the customer. Customers are then upset that the biochar did not work in their applications, and you lose a potential customer of the industry.”
Gaspard is too busy trying to save the world to talk about its potential end.
All the doom and gloom around global warming “creates a lot of anxiety for the public," he says. "My job every day is to figure out how to break through the noise. We don’t need a silver bullet to solve this problem. Affordable technology exists right now to do that, and sunlight is the best disinfectant. Educating the public about biochar is what’s important. Shine a light on what’s wrong with our industry and on what’s right. I’m excited because the tech exists to solve these problems.”
Last year, Biochar Now turned out 10,000 bags of product to be shipped off for consumption. The next step for the company, as for so many others trying to bring environmental innovations into the marketplace, is scaling up to make more of an impact.
“The problem with carbon credit markets,” Gaspard says, “is that when people see that they aren’t doing what they claim to be doing, it dries up the limited capital out there to help grow legitimate companies like mine. Another problem is that if you lose your money in a carbon credit deal, that money is just gone. There’s no blowback for the registries. I insure my products against failure, so if something doesn’t work right, you’ll get your money back. We’re creating a financial instrument for corporations that are actually spending their money to do the right thing.”
He doesn’t apply for government grants and isn’t involved with federal subsidies, but some of his customers could benefit from provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. Since 2011, he’s depended on private investors, has amassed hundreds of them, and is looking for more.
“If I had thirty million dollars, I could ship out six million bags of biochar a year instead of ten thousand — not just in this country, but internationally," he says. "That would begin to make a difference. As long as I can draw breath, this tech is going to happen. We've got to clear the air around biochar and take all the shit out of carbon sequestration. We've got to tell the public what it needs to know about our business so it can go forward. It’s just a matter of dropping the scales from our eyes, because the solution is already here.”
He’s recently received some help near home, with Colorado adopting rules for putting biochar down abandoned oil wells for carbon capture.
“Things," he says, "are looking up."
