Keeling Curve

Project Summary / Description:

APL‚ Local Carbon Network (LCN) initiative has been in operation for eight months. It was motivated by several factors‚Äì‚Äìthe need to deploy carbon sequestration technology as a critical tool to combat climate change, the trend of community-based economies, the difficulty of accessing conventional financing strategies to support APL‚ community-scale, distributed deployments, and to better integrate APL‚ activities with agriculture, since biochar has such a large part to play in regenerative agriculture.

The LCN is comprised of individuals and groups within a local community that transform waste biomass into renewable energy, with long-term sequestration of carbon in soil as biochar. The network includes biomass waste sources‚Äì‚Äìsuch as local green waste yards, agriculture, and forest managers‚Äì‚Äìand non-profit consumers‚Äì‚Äìsuch as urban farms, community gardens, and sponsors of the biochar product‚Äì‚Äìwhich utilize biochar within on their own sites as a soil amendment. This closes the carbon cycle locally, rebuilds organic soil matter, restores degraded soil biodiversity, and improves water retention, while also providing nutritious produce for the community. The enabling technology for the LCN is APL‚ gasification platform, which is specifically designed for small-scale, distributed deployments like this and produces pure-carbon biochar as a byproduct of its waste-to-energy conversion. 

APL has been developing the LCN in a cluster centered around its headquarters in Berkeley, but each one of its projects‚Äì‚Äìworldwide‚Äì‚Äìwill ultimately implement its own cluster. APL is using crowdfunding of biochar sponsorships to implement the LCN and engage the public, but needs the digital tools to scale the concept (explained further in #7).

Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Website:

http://allpowerlabs.com/ https://www.facebook.com/allpowerlabs https://www.youtube.com/user/allpowerlabs/ https://www.indiegogo.com/project/preview/b36a6bb9#/

Mission Statement:

APL is founded on a triple bottom line, with a unique company culture that centers around a shared mission of doing good while also doing well‚Äì‚Äìsimultaneously creating social, economic, and environmental value for local communities worldwide with innovative renewable power and products. APL designs, manufactures, and deploys mobile biomass gasification technology that operates at small and community scale. These distributed and inexpensive waste-to-energy devices allow the environmental, economic, and social benefits of the technology to accrue to the individuals, small- and medium-sized businesses, and local communities that need these assets the most. This technology has wide-ranging impacts, including gender equity in less industrialized countries. APL intends its technology to be used in real world applications, believing that a bottom-up, participatory ecology is just as possible in renewable power and products as it is in computing. We expect the impact of such creative self-determination in renewables will be no less transformational than has been in digital realms. 

APL‚ business model challenges the false dichotomy of environment vs economy. The renewable energy and fixed-carbon biochar byproduct produced by APL devices make their full power and products cycle carbon negative, one of the only such technologies at market today. APL works to ensure that the biochar produced by its machines are used as an agricultural soil amendment in local communities, increasing soil fertility and water conservation, while also sequestering the carbon in the ground for centuries. APL works to disseminate this novel and vital climate mitigation and adaptation tool as widely as possible.