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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 VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”