When combine harvesters sail through tall corn fields, their rotating blades slice through the stalks and filter them into the machine’s mouth, where its spinning cylinders rip the corn kernels from the husk and stems. The combine saves the kernels of corn in its body and spits out the stalk and husk remnants, leaving it to waste on the flattened field. That wasted corn residue could be a key tool in the fight against climate change.
In September, the University of Utah’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy awarded Applied Carbon its $500,000 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize.
The Texas-based startup Applied Carbon won for its mobile farm technology, which turns crop waste into a soil additive that decreases the need for fertilizer and stores the remaining carbon in the earth’s soil.
William Anderegg, director of the Wilkes Center, said one of the main selling points of Applied Carbon’s technology is its potential to be made for scale.
“The scalability is very exciting, and you can see a path for them to really scale up across many different agricultural fields in the next couple of years,” he said.
The Wilkes Climate Launch Prize, one of the largest university-run climate prizes in the world, was created in 2023 to help jumpstart promising climate solution ideas.
At a September reception in partnership with the Southwest Sustainability Innovation Engine, Anderegg awarded the prize money to Jason Aramburu, Applied Carbon’s CEO and co-founder.
“As a startup company … there’s often a funding gap, particularly in this sector, to get your technology to market,” Aramburu said at the reception, later adding that the prize money will help them produce more of their biochar machines into the field.
Applied Carbon currently has four mobile pyrolizers, a machine that can reach high temperatures without oxygen, and the company will apply the prize money to its field operations in Texas, Aramburu told The Daily Utah Chronicle. These operations, he said, work in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“We’ve got about 4,000 acres of corn that we’re working with. We will test our equipment [in Texas] and also test how effective the biochar is on the soil,” he said.
The yield and soil chemistry testing, Aramburu added, will determine if the process works and measure the impact of the technology. The project, in its first multi-season trial run, is expected to remove 100,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2026, he said.
“That figure is still a bit in flux,” he added.
What Is Biochar?
Biochar, a charcoal-like substance derived from biomass waste, is made through pyrolysis, a heat-driven process that uses virtually no oxygen and stores carbon in the waste product, according to Utah State University.
Biochar, Anderegg said, is promising as a nature-based tool for fighting climate change because its carbon storage is stable and lasts hundreds of years.
“By contrast, a huge number of companies and governments are interested in tree planting … but forests are at increasing risk from fire and drought and climate change,” he said. “We really worry about planting trees in one area that may be dead in 10 to 20 years.”
Darren McAvoy, an extension professor of forestry at Utah State University, said applying biochar at a global rate of 10 tons per acre over 30 years could put more carbon into the soil than has been released into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
“It’s a completely academic example that will never happen, but it’s useful in that it shows that we could potentially get a handle on [climate change] with just this one approach,” he said.
In 2019, McAvoy developed Big Box biochar kilns, a low-tech method for producing biochar from timber, brush and logs. He said this “glorified dumpster” reduces hazardous fuels and preserves 35% of its carbon in the soil for hundreds of years. This method, he said, only works on wood waste rather than agricultural waste.
Applied Carbon’s technology, Aramburu said, works by moving in-field with agricultural residue, but it can also run stationary and convert wood biomass into biochar. The company, he added, is interested in expanding to Utah at some point.
“There’s a huge opportunity with forestry waste and forestry residue to process, particularly for fire prevention, and there’s also quite a bit of agriculture in the region,” Aramburu said. “So we are absolutely interested in entering Utah [and] the Mountain West in general.”
McAvoy said he sees the promise of Applied Carbon’s farm technology.
“It’s a great idea. I love the principle of it,” he said. “The big questions always are, is it economical? Will the farmer … benefit enough from the service to pay for it?”
ValJay Rigby, president of the Utah Farm Bureau Federation, said he is unaware of any farmers currently using Applied Carbon’s product but supports continued efforts in research and innovation to position agriculture for future success.
“The future of agriculture will always rely on innovative solutions to the challenges we face,” Rigby said in an email interview. “We appreciate the dedicated innovators, entrepreneurs and researchers working to come up with tools to help us be successful.”
When scaling the technology for mass production, Aramburu said one challenge includes integrating the pyrolizers without slowing down farmers’ operations. Running a combine is the most expensive time for a farmer, he said, and the mobile pyrolizer could slow them down during that “small window of time that the farmer can do his work without any interruption.”
Still, Aramburu said the technology runs an acre per hour, fast enough to be commercially viable. Farmers using the technology have responded positively, with one hay farmer increasing his yield by 60%, Aramburu added.
“That was a lot more than we would have anticipated,” he said. “But the response has been really positive … [Farmers] like the potential yield benefit of biochar, and they like that they’re doing something good for the environment.”
