Born from the minds of oilfield veterans, Myno Carbon entered the biochar industry with strong intentions and great motivation in 2022. Faced with the need for change in a fossil fuel-forward energy industry, CEO and Cofounder Thor Kallestad and his team emerged with Myno Carbon, a biochar production company in Washington, with the goal of leaving the earth cleaner than they found it. &nbsp;“We’d all developed, over the years, a real kind of climate sensibility, wanting to really do something about climate change,” Kallestad says. “All of us have kids. It got us, so we started a business.”It was Kallestad’s daughter, Ella, who coined the company name. One of her earliest babbles, “myno,” was a term she used to express excitement or happiness. “We figured that was as good as any and everybody liked it,” Kallestad says. “Now, we’ve got to really make something have a big impact for her and all the other kids out there.”Biochar, Kallestad says, was always Myno’s product of choice. “Who really got us on biochar was my cofounder, Tom Casten, a big biochar pioneer,” Kallestad credits. “It sounded really attractive to me right out of the gates.”&nbsp;Kallestad and Casten began reaching out to friends from the oilfield and received overwhelming support. “Most guys had already left the [oil] industry and either retired or had kind of gone on their own climate journeys,” Kallestad explains. “So, everybody was already ripe to go at some of this stuff, and all good friends that I’ve known for a real long time.”Method to Myno&nbsp; One of the key benefits of biochar production is the ability to generate three different revenue streams—from biochar, carbon dioxide removal credits (CDRs) and syngas. Biochar production, Kallestad explains, is the lowest-cost way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. “The breakeven cost—the economics of it—are a lot lower than something like direct air capture machines. It appealed to our sensibilities.”Along with its economic benefits, Kallestad says that the team was drawn to biochar because of its physical qualities. “Biochar has commercial value and a variety of applications,” he explains. “It could help with the business model if you’re selling something rather than just trying to put all the carbon into an old reservoir for sequestration or something.”Myno’s CDRs are tied directly to how much biochar they produce. One CDR represents one metric ton of CO2 kept out of the atmosphere. “It’s basically a tangible accounting record that we can then sell to third parties to meet their own carbon removal goals,” Kallestad says. The more common carbon offset credits an entity for the carbon they’ve counteracted by paying for a separate entity’s carbon mitigation. The market for offsets compared to CDRs is vast: data from AlliedOffsets, CDP and Trencher et. al, compiled by Carbon Brief, determines that of the offsets purchased by top 50 companies, only 8% removed carbon from the atmosphere, and only 0.6% of those removal credits originated from biochar initiatives.&nbsp;Syngas is produced alongside biochar as a natural byproduct. Often, syngas is burnt off in smaller-scale power generation or turned into wood vinegar, Kallestad explains. By his rough estimate, 40% of the carbon in feedstocks become biochar and the other 60% becomes syngas. “There’s probably going to be all sorts of opportunities in new markets for that biobased syngas to displace other fossil-intensive products out there in the marketplace.”For the past two years, Myno has been in the process of constructing its first Carbon Removal Facility. CRFs bring in woody biomass waste feedstocks and convert the carbon into biochar through pyrolysis. “This is really like the oilfield in reverse,” says Kallestad. Myno’s CFO Brian Cooper coined the phrase amongst the team, Kallestad continues. “Instead of getting it out of the crust and it going up to the sky, it’s keeping it out of the sky or getting it down into the soil, in the case of biochar.”Early operations within Myno initially focused on its first CRF to operate out of Kettle Falls, Washington. Myno won a Washington State Department of Commerce Industrial Symbiosis grant in 2022, partnering with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to work toward incorporation of carbon capture, storage and utilization (CCUS) into Myno’s facility production. By utilizing the excess heat from CRF pyrolysis and concentrated CO2 emissions, carbon could be sourced from Washington’s crushed basalt, potentially producing a liming product to improve agricultural soil health.Due to initial concerns with the scalability of production and sales within its biochar production plans, Myno looked elsewhere to develop the first facility. The company landed on Port Angeles, Washington, and got to work on construction in 2023. In the same year, Myno partnered with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources to sequester carbon and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires in the state. Under this partnership, Myno will take in forest waste from DNR-managed timberlands to produce biochar and renewable electricity. Once Myno is fully operational—currently predicted for mid-2026—its CRFs will utilize 183,000 bone dry tons of sustainable biomass residuals to produce 70,000 tons of biochar and 20 megawatts of baseload renewable energy, states the company’s letter of intent.In Oct. 2024, Myno was awarded a $20.4 million Fertilizer Production Expansion Program grant by the USDA to finance the construction of the Port Angeles facility. This facility, CRF 001, will annually produce 20,000 dry tons of renewable carbon products. Recently, Myno has joined the Washington State Department of Transportation’s Roadside Sustainability Project to create and preserve pollinator habitats and sequester carbon outside of Olympia, Washington. The project aims to test different soil amendments in several plots including biochar-amended compost with Myno-produced biochar, biotic soil amendment with biochar and independent compost. Paying the Premium&nbsp; The benefits of biochar are exactly why companies are willing to pay a premium for the credits they purchase from Myno. Feedstock can rot, producing methane; offsets are difficult to scale and the efficacy of “canceling out” carbon emissions is questionable; and many companies purchasing offsets to meet legal requirements are accused of greenwashing. According to Carbon Brief, greenwashing is used to describe the false, misleading or untrue claims about an entity’s positive impact on the environment. “There’s a lot of black eyes around, you know, avoidances and some of these different credits that have gone south,” Kallestad notes.For this reason, Kallestad says that Myno is holding back on monetizing avoidance credits and is instead boosting its CDRs. “There’s no headline risk associated with this as there is with [offsets]. You can maybe get a whole bunch more avoidances for the same amount of money and make a lot of noise about that, but if it turns out the math is wrong—to no fault of their own—there is that headline risk component.”&nbsp;This added security comes at a cost. CDRs are much more expensive than offsets, because they physically remove the carbon from the atmosphere, versus paying for emissions. According to Net0’s article “Carbon Offsetting for Businesses,” the average offset credit costs about $12 per ton of carbon emissions. Myno is aiming to sell its credits for less than $100 per metric ton of emissions, a much cheaper option to alternative CDRs, with some reaching $1,000 per metric ton, albeit a jump from offsets. “It’s provable. It’s very transparent about how much carbon was removed,” Kallestad says.&nbsp;With great power comes great responsibility, Kallestad recognizes. “It’s a very important thing to us that the CDR buyers out there would purchase these credits for all the right reasons. We have very strict sustainability requirements.”&nbsp;Myno plans to become a Sustainable Forestry Initiative-certified buyer of biomass feedstock. It will take its sustainability a step further by working closely with feedstock partners to incorporate the 3-Log fiber tracking and accounting system, and, following Verra’s procurement standards, hiring a third party to audit Myno’s procurement practices and ensure its feedstock sourcing meets governmental, tribal and independent standards.&nbsp;Now, Kallestad says Myno’s focus is on market development. “There’s a general awareness that a lot of these product lines in the economy have to be decarbonized,” he explains. “But I think conceptually is the best way to think about the product, because this carbon can then displace fossil forms of carbon, be it in fertilizers or activated carbon for water filtration.” Kallestad hopes that this development will convert interest into action.Kallestad cites Myno’s biggest obstacle as getting CRF 001 up and running. “This will sound like a contradiction, but we haven’t focused our numbers so much on the longer term. It’s all about long-term success and alignment, and that long term comes together by nailing the shorter-term stuff,” Kallestad explains. “It is profitable to remove carbon. The LCA around our project is negative and we remove more carbon than is emitted by the project. And there are investor returns. That’s really the name of the game, to mix a negative LCA with an attractive IRR.”Looking Beyond&nbsp; Utilizing reclaimed wood waste and debris, Kallestad says Myno would like to produce biochar for the green steel, asphalt and concrete industries. “We see two broadly different types of feedstocks leading to two different biochar products: a premium and a commodity biochar, for these different market applications.” Kallestad says that conversations with fertilizer companies are already in the early stages.&nbsp;CRF 001 is projected to be up and running by mid-2026, and Myno aims to have six fully functioning facilities by 2030. “We’re heavily focused on precision agriculture, a little bit on remediation, metals, mine sites, etcetera. But precision agriculture for liquid fertilizers is one of the ones we’re making and sending samples out for consumer trials.”&nbsp;In the meantime, Kallestad says that Myno’s focus is making solid partnerships. “We’re actively going through a real elaborate process of market development and securing LOIs for offtake for biochar products,” he explains.&nbsp;The symbiotic relationship between Myno and the DNR connects Myno to Washington growers. Myno’s liquid biochar can be mixed directly with fertilization systems. Current trials have been encouraging, Kallestad says. “This has got us thinking about pipeline location and where else to go next.”&nbsp;Currently, Myno’s liquid biochar is used via samples for precision work in northwest Washington, but Kallestad says he hopes to see a fertilizer company-backed, biochar-enhanced fertilizer grow from their drop-in solution now. “Once people start paying a lot more for a refined product rather than something that came out of a biomass boiler, then the industry really takes off.” Author: Caitlin Scheresky&nbsp; Junior Staff Writer, Biomass Magazine&nbsp; caitlin.scheresky@bbiinternational.com

2025-01-14 - Zeroing in on Carbon (Biomass Magazine)

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Biochar production company Myno is on track to have its first carbon removal facility operating by 2026.

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