Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

The Trollworks Bioenergy + carbon capture and sequestration is the culmination of several decades of work in the field of community-based forest restoration work and the need for value-added products made from low-grade woody biomass. Our objective has been to integrate the social, ecological, and economic needs of rural communities while supporting proper forest management in a way that reduces the need for governmental subsidies while creating a high-value product. This system is now also adaptive to a wide range of other community and resource settings, enabling a rapidly scalable distributed model of bioenergy and carbon capture and sequestration system suitable for both rural and urban community use.

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The Trollworks Founders are based in and understand rural and low income communities and the unique economic challenges these areas face. Many of these places‚Äîboth rural and urban-- have been overlooked or passed over by the economic development focused in more affluent areas. In addition to the economic impoverishment this disinvestment creates, it also pushes the best and brightest young people in these rural and urban areas to leave their home communities in search of better opportunities. 

The TW community-scale bioenergy + biochar systems can create new economic and social opportunities in these types of communities. Utilizing what are otherwise considered waste products in their surrounding areas‚Äîbiomass‚Äîlocal entrepreneurs can now turn these resources into a high value renewable thermal fuel (biomass pellets) that can be used to displace fossil fuels and produce a valuable co-product sought after for both urban and agricultural soil regeneration and carbon sequestration. Biochar also has a wide variety of other valuable uses including as a feed supplement, toxic waste clean up resource, and agricultural runoff neutralizer. An important feature of the TW system design strategy is to create systems that are affordable at relatively small scales and can be expanded incrementally through modular build out as both supplies and markets change. TW is also exploring innovative financing mechanisms that can increase access to initial system acquisition by potential production network members in lower-income or otherwise disadvantaged communities. 

The development of the family-oriented micro-scale unit, the BioCharBQ is well suited for and initially developed to serve low-income communities in northern Mexico that were otherwise cooking using propane or on open wood fires. These communities, like many other low-income communities in developing areas, are surrounded by large volumes of low-grade biomass resources (pecan shells). The primary cooks in these households are women who experience significant health impacts from both the sustained exposure to wood smoke, as well as the substantial logistical challenges of maintaining consistent supplies of wood. One of Trollwork‚ development objectives is to improve the economic and social options for women in the developing world through access to technologies that use abundantly available low-grade biomass that can be used both as essential cooking and heating resources and potentially as a resource to regenerate local agriculture and support measurable levels of carbon sequestration. 

TW also embodies these values and objectives in its current business relationships. It is working with two woman-owned and operated small scale farming operations locally to perform long-term biochar+compost experiments to improve farm productivity and reduce costs

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