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Jim Doten will soon rule over one of the first municipally owned carbon removal programs.
Minneapolis may be the only city in the country with a carbon sequestration program manager on staff. Now, Jim Doten — who holds that title — is about to realize his dream of starting up one of the first municipally owned and operated carbon removal projects.
The Minnesota metropolis has just purchased its very own biomass pyrolyzer, a machine that heats up tree clippings in a low-oxygen environment and turns them into a form of charcoal called biochar. As the wood grew, it sucked carbon out of the air during photosynthesis; as biochar, that carbon becomes stable for hundreds of years, if not longer.
Biochar can be mixed into soil, and has a wide range of demonstrated benefits, including increasing crop yields and enhancing the soil’s capacity to hold water. Some studies suggest it can filter contaminants out of stormwater. The city plans to use the biochar in public works projects and donate it to community groups in “green zones,” neighborhoods with high levels of pollution and marginalized populations. It’s also in talks with other local governments that might be interested in buying some.
“One of the things we want to do is be a regional resource for other government agencies,” Doten told me, “whether it be city, county, state agencies, making biochar available for projects addressing the effects of climate change, sequestering carbon, as well as providing environmental benefits throughout our infrastructure.”
Studies say that we should be shoveling billions of tons of CO2 out of the skies each year by 2050 to keep climate change in check — and that’s on top of cutting emissions to near-zero. Scholars have compared the vast responsibility of cleaning up the carbon in the atmosphere to municipal waste management: Since the task is more of a public good than a profitable enterprise, it may be best suited for the folks we already rely on to take out the trash.
A number of other municipalities have been experimenting with carbon removal to support their climate goals. Notably, Boulder County, Colorado teamed up with Flagstaff, Arizona, and a number of other cities, to form the Four Corners Coalition, which is pooling resources to finance local carbon removal projects. But Minneapolis is the first, at least that I’m aware of, to essentially start its own carbon removal department.
Doten became a biochar evangelist more than a decade ago. He first learned of the substance’s various benefits while working in southern Afghanistan with the Minnesota National Guard in 2012. He was serving as a hydrologist on an agribusiness development team and helping village farmers rebuild soil health to improve crop yields. When he returned to Minneapolis the following year, he was eager to test out biochar’s benefits at home.
Over the decade that followed, Doten worked days as the supervisor of environmental services for the city’s health department. But on the side, he led a number of biochar passion project. He convinced the public works department to use biochar in landscaping projects along street medians. He started a partnership with the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux, a tribe that runs a compost facility, to provide a mix of compost and biochar to urban gardens around the city. He got the health department to sponsor a research trial at the community farm at Little Earth, a federally-subsidized housing complex primarily occupied by indigenous families. Though the study was disrupted by vandalism, the city gathered enough data to show that the plots with biochar-amended compost saw superior plant health, food production and water retention during August drought conditions.
Doten told me the limiting factor for expanding these programs was the availability of biochar. The city was buying it and shipping it in from elsewhere, which Doten was also not happy about because the emissions from shipping cuts into any climate benefits. Then, in 2019, he had the opportunity to see what the city could do if finding biochar wasn’t an issue. Bloomberg Philanthropies flew Doten and his colleagues to Stockholm, Sweden, where five years earlier, the charity had helped the city finance its own biochar production facility.
“So I went to Stockholm along with one of our city council members and the head of public works, and ‘I’ll be darned, oh my gosh, Jim, you weren't lying, this is a real program and it does really great things in Stockholm!” Doten recalled. He waxed on about the “Stockholm method” for planting urban trees that involves using biochar and which can help manage the flow of stormwater. Stockholm is also sending waste heat from its pyrolysis facility into a district heating system used to warm apartments.
A few years later, Bloomberg Philanthropies invited other cities to apply for funding to build similar programs. Minneapolis was one of three U.S. cities, along with Lincoln, Nebraska, and Cincinnati, Ohio, to win $400,000 in 2022 to develop city-wide biochar projects. All three are expected to begin construction on their production facilities this year; Doten hopes the Minneapolis facility will be operational this fall.
The city has made an agreement with Xcel Energy, the local utility, to collect the tree clippings from the company’s electrical line maintenance work — previously that material was getting burned in a power plant. Doten has also found a site for the facility — a somewhat isolated industrial property near railroad tracks — which was no easy feat in an urban environment. “It’s very difficult to site a place like this within the city that's not near residences, properly zoned, get the neighborhood approvals, council approvals, and make sure everybody's happy — well I shouldn’t say happy, but at least satisfied with the result.”
The other big piece was sourcing the equipment. As my colleague Katie Brigham has reported, there are a lot of biochar companies. According to one carbon removal database, there are more than 240 such companies around the world — more than any other type of carbon removal company. But most of them have developed fancy pyrolysis machines for their own use, to develop their own carbon removal projects. There aren’t that many offering the technology for sale. Doten said he talked to most of the ones that did, and there was one company whose bid came in far below the rest — BluSky, a small startup based in Connecticut. Minneapolis purchased the company’s equipment, nicknamed the “Vulcan” system, for $585,000.
“We really believe in what Jim is doing and what the city is doing,” Will Hessert, the company’s CEO, told me. “We want to see more cities doing this.”
Writing in The New Republic in 2022, four scholars made a case for a public model for carbon removal. They argued that if the responsibility is left to private companies, it could end up like plastic recycling, which is basically a big lie and “distracts from underlying causes while pollution continues.” Or it could end up like privately owned electric utilities who take shortcuts that end up costing lives, like how PG&E’s inadequate maintenance led to the 2018 Camp Fire in California.
“Imagine a regional, community-run carbon removal authority,” they wrote, “that simultaneously pursues wetland restoration and forest management, safely operates an industrial removal facility and associated mining and geological sequestration operations, monitors carbon levels in forests, and works with farmers to maintain healthy fields that store carbon in the soil.”
That’s not what’s happening in Minneapolis. The climate benefits are likely to be minimal. The city couldn’t provide me with an estimate, but a story about the project from last year noted that the city anticipated having a system that could handle 3,600 tons of wood waste per year, resulting in an estimated 1,500 tons of CO2 removed. That’s about 0.04% of the city’s current annual emissions.
There is a real opportunity for cities to play a role in carbon removal. A study from 2022 found that cities might be able to play a significant role in carbon removal — potentially removing up to 1 billion tons per year, though the numbers are “plagued by uncertainties” — by sequestering carbon in vegetation, soils, and the built environment. In that sense, Minneapolis’ biochar program could be one component of this larger vision.
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A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital
Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.
The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.
How do you approach working in this field given all the macro uncertainties?
It’s a really fair question. One, macro uncertainties aside, when you look at the levelized cost of energy report Lazard releases it is clear that there are forms of clean energy that are by far the cheapest to deploy. There are all kinds of reasons to do decarbonizing projects that aren’t clean energy generation: storage, resiliency, energy efficiency – this is massively cost saving. Like, a lot of the methane industry [exists] because there’s value in not leaking methane. There’s all sorts of stuff you can do that you don’t need policy incentives for.
That said, the policy questions are unavoidable. You can’t really ignore them and I don’t want to say they don’t matter to the industry – they do. It’s just, my belief in this being an investable asset class and incredibly important from a humanity perspective is unwavering. That’s the perspective I’ve been taking. This maybe isn’t going to be the most fun market, investing in decarbonizing things, but the sense of purpose and the belief in the underlying drivers of the industry outweigh that.
With respect to clean energy development, and the investment class working in development, how have things changed since January and the introduction of these bills that would pare back the IRA?
Both investors and companies are worried. There’s a lot more political and policy engagement. We’re seeing a lot of firms and organizations getting involved. I think companies are really trying to find ways to structure around the incentives. Companies and developers, I think everybody is trying to – for lack of a better term – future-proof themselves against the worst eventuality.
One of the things I’ve been personally thinking about is that the way developers generally make money is, you have a financier that’s going to buy a project from them, and the financier is going to have a certain investment rate of return, or IRR. So ITC [investment tax credit] or no ITC, that IRR is going to be the same. And the developer captures the difference.
My guess – and I’m not incredibly confident yet – but I think the industry just focuses on being less ITC dependent. Finding the projects that are juicier regardless of the ITC.
The other thing is that as drafts come out for what we’re expecting to see, it’s gone from bad to terrible to a little bit better. We’ll see what else happens as we see other iterations.
How are you evaluating companies and projects differently today, compared to how you were maybe before it was clear the IRA would be targeted?
Let’s say that we’re looking at a project developer and they have a series of projects. Right now we’re thinking about a few things. First, what assets are these? It’s not all ITC and PTC. A lot of it is other credits. Going through and asking, how at risk are these credits? And then, once we know how at risk those credits are we apply it at a project level.
This also raises a question of whether you’re going to be able to find as many projects. Is there going to be as much demand if you’re not able to get to an IRR? Is the industry going to pay that?
What gives you optimism in this moment?
I’ll just look at the levelized cost of energy and looking at the unsubsidized tables say these are the projects that make sense and will still get built. Utility-scale solar? Really attractive. Some of these next-gen geothermal projects, I think those are going to be cost effective.
The other thing is that the cost of battery storage is just declining so rapidly and it’s continuing to decline. We are as a country expected to compare the current price of these technologies in perpetuity to the current price of oil and gas, which is challenging and where the technologies have not changed materially. So we’re not going to see the cost decline we’re going to see in renewables.
And more news around renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.
2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.
3. Columbia County, Wisconsin – An Alliant wind farm named after this county is facing its own pushback as the developer begins the state permitting process and is seeking community buy-in through public info hearings.
4. Washington County, Arkansas – It turns out even mere exploration for a wind project out in this stretch of northwest Arkansas can get you in trouble with locals.
5. Wagoner County, Oklahoma – A large NextEra solar project has been blocked by county officials despite support from some Republican politicians in the Sooner state.
6. Skagit County, Washington – If you’re looking for a ray of developer sunshine on a cloudy day, look no further than this Washington State county that’s bucking opposition to a BESS facility.
7. Orange County, California – A progressive Democratic congressman is now opposing a large battery storage project in his district and talking about battery fire risks, the latest sign of a populist revolt in California against BESS facilities.
Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?
It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.
Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.
But the biggest indicator of Trump’s thinking on solar out west was Esmeralda 7, a compilation of solar project proposals in western Nevada from NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and other developers that would, if constructed, produce at least 6 gigawatts of power. My colleague Matthew Zeitlin was first to report that BLM officials updated the timetable for fully permitting the expansive project to say it would complete its environmental review by late April and be completely finished with the federal bureaucratic process by mid-July. BLM told Matthew that the final environmental impact statement – the official study completing the environmental review – would be published “in the coming days or week or so.”
More than two months later, it’s crickets from BLM on Esmeralda 7. BLM never released the study that its website as of today still says should’ve come out in late April. I asked BLM for comment on this and a spokesperson simply told me the agency “does not have any updates to share on this project at this time.”
This state of quiet stasis is not unique to Esmeralda; for example, Leeward has yet to receive a final environmental impact statement for its 700 mega-watt Copper Rays solar project in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley that BLM records state was to be published in early May. Earlier this month, BLM updated the project timeline for another Nevada solar project – EDF’s Bonanza – to say it would come out imminently, too, but nothing’s been released.
Delays happen in the federal government and timelines aren’t always met. But on its face, it is hard for stakeholders I speak with out in Nevada to take these months-long stutters as simply good faith bureaucratic hold-ups. And it’s even making work fighting solar for activists out in the desert much more confusing.
For Shaaron Netherton, executive director of the conservation group Friends of the Nevada Wilderness, these solar project permitting delays mean an uncertain future. Friends of the Nevada Wilderness is a volunteer group of ecology protection activists that is opposing Esmeralda 7 and filed its first lawsuit against Greenlink West, a transmission project that will connect the massive solar constellation to the energy grid. Netherton told me her group may sue against the approval of Esmeralda 7… but that the next phase of their battle against the project is a hazy unknown.
“It’s just kind of a black hole,” she told me of the Esmeralda 7 permitting process. “We will litigate Esmeralda 7 if we have to, and we were hoping that with this administration there would be a little bit of a pause. There may be. That’s still up in the air.”
I’d like to note that Netherton’s organization has different reasons for opposition than I normally write about in The Fight. Instead of concerns about property values or conspiracies about battery fires, her organization and a multitude of other desert ecosystem advocates are trying to avoid a future where large industries of any type harm or damage one of the nation’s most biodiverse and undeveloped areas.
This concern for nature has historically motivated environmental activism. But it’s also precisely the sort of advocacy that Trump officials have opposed tooth-and-nail, dating back to the president’s previous term, when advocates successfully opposed his rewrite of Endangered Species Act regulations. This reason – a motivation to hippie-punch, so to speak – is a reason why I hardly expect species protection to be enough of a concern to stop solar projects in their tracks under Trump, at least for now. There’s also the whole “energy dominance” thing, though Trump has been wishy-washy on adhering to that goal.
Patrick Donnelly, great basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that this is a period of confusion but not necessarily an end to solar permitting on BLM land.
“[Solar] is moving a lot slower than it was six months ago, when it was coming at a breakneck pace,” said Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity. “How much of that is ideological versus 15-20% of the agencies taking early retirement and utter chaos inside the agencies? I’m not sure. But my feeling is it’s less ideological. I really don’t think Trump’s going to just start saying no to these energy projects.”