When you turn Trees to Timber, you make it more worthwhile to keep that carbon locked up instead of burning it. We can't guarantee a forest won't be destroyed, but we can be pretty sure the timber from a forest will be used and not destroyed. This is how Puro Earth thinks of industrial carbon removal. They focus on scaling verified industrial processes that store CO2 for the long term in already mature technologies, like biochar, wooden and carbonated building materials.
We've covered a number of other carbon removal startups in the podcast, episode one was Paul Gambil from Nori who were more focusing on soil sequestration and episode 5 was Elliot Coed from Offset Earth (now renamed to Ecologi) who were more focused on tree planting. Puro.Earth is different they don't focus on natural solutions but on industrial carbon removal.
Their removal "offsets" are based on the carbon absorbed and retained for at least 50 years in wooden building elements, for thousands of years in biochar, and permanently in carbonated building elements.
They look for the point at which it makes no sense in the value chain to destroy a store of carbon. In the case of biochar, this point is the facility where wood is pyrolyzed and its price becomes higher than coal or the original biomass. Therefore it makes no sense to release the CO2 back to the atmosphere.
Elba Horta is the Business Development Manager at Puro.Earth. She has worked for 20 years for both startups and global corporations, in Technology, Finance and Business Development roles, including 5 years in Silicon Valley. She has a Bachelors in Geosciences from Penn State University and an MBA from California State University in Los Angeles.