Black Bull Biochar

🎉Great to celebrate a big BBB year with our Christmas party in Manchester. Squid Games 🦑 and Xmas dins 🦃, followed by karaoke 🎤… It was good to see everyone’s inner Britney and particularly great to see our latest member of the team, Darren, bringing the Mancunian house down with Oasis's 'Don't Look Back in Anger'!   🏭 Black Bull Biochar hit big milestones this year, with not one but two sites up and running, producing Santa’s special biochar🎅. Next year, we look forward to scaling our partnerships to the next level, particularly in the Greater Manchester area. #carbonfinance #manchester   👏 And a big thank you to my incredible colleagues for your hard graft and commitment (Emma, Shefali, Adrien, Nicholas, Darren, Alex and Hamish). See you all in 2025! 

🎄✨Ho ho holiday cheer at Black Bull Biochar 🎄✨ It was great to welcome our friends from Supercritical to our first pyrolysis unit for their Christmas party. Hosted kindly by Ahlstrom, we were able to showcase the hard work and dedication that goes into the product and systems that we create, particularly when it comes to carbon integrity 💪 Who are Supercritical? Supercritical is revolutionizing the carbon removal market with their commitment to radical transparency. Their marketplace provides live pricing and availability data, ensuring businesses can make informed decisions with confidence. Trusted by forward-thinking companies like The Economist and Virgin Atlantic, Supercritical is driving immediate climate action and helping to scale carbon dioxide removal to meet global targets. 🎯 Our founders, Hamish Creber and Alex Clarke share a similar vision to Michelle You and Aaron Randall. Trust and transparency are fundamental to the success of the carbon removal industry. 🤝 A big thank you to the Supercritical team for joining us. We look forward to more collaboration with you in the future, and we hope you enjoyed your biochar-coal from Santa! 🎅

🎄✨Ho ho holiday cheer at Black Bull Biochar 🎄✨ It was great to welcome our friends from Supercritical to our first pyrolysis unit for their Christmas party. Hosted kindly by Ahlstrom, we were able to showcase the hard work and dedication that goes into the product and systems that we create, particularly when it comes to carbon integrity 💪 Who are Supercritical? Supercritical is revolutionizing the carbon removal market with their commitment to radical transparency. Their marketplace provides live pricing and availability data, ensuring businesses can make informed decisions with confidence. Trusted by forward-thinking companies like The Economist and Virgin Atlantic, Supercritical is driving immediate climate action and helping to scale carbon dioxide removal to meet global targets. 🎯 Our founders, Hamish Creber and Alex Clarke share a similar vision to Michelle You and Aaron Randall. Trust and transparency are fundamental to the success of the carbon removal industry. 🤝 A big thank you to the Supercritical team for joining us. We look forward to more collaboration with you in the future, and we hope you enjoyed your biochar-coal from Santa! 🎅

BBB Level Up - Site #2 #Commissioned 🚀 Just the other month, another big milestone popped up. Little ol’ Black Bull Biochar is not so little. With our second site up and running, we have quadrupled our output. This is game-changing for the UK biochar industry. With one site, we proved a concept, our operational skills, and the efficacy of our tailored biochar product. But with two sites, we start to realize our vision of a network of biochar production sites across the UK, removing gigatonnes of carbon, and improving millions of hectares of farmland 🌍. Welcome to A. W. Jenkinson Forest Products’s Newton Rigg, a former Agricultural College in Cumbria, which now hosts the first C500-I pyrolyser ever made by BioMaCon GmbH. This is the first Biomacon to enter the UK market and the largest ever built. A huge thank you goes to Thomas Jakob Hoffmann from Decarbo-Engineering GmbH for enabling this journey and to Ulrich Suer of Biomacon for providing us with this excellent bit of kit 🔧. Prior to BBB, this shed had a disused district heating system and a defunct biomass boiler. Our pyrolysis unit now supplies renewable heat to an office block and a sports hall. From start to finish, this has been led by my Co-founder, Hamish Creber, and our new Head of Ops, Nicholas Hughes, but huge credit also goes to Daniel Firman for handling design, Alistair Burrowes for project management, Richard Errington for overseeing operations, and David Hodgson for making it happen 🔥. For those who know us well, you will know that partnerships are one of the things that make us special. 9 times out of 10, if you want to deliver impact, your partnerships, team, and customers are more valuable than anything else. We wouldn’t be here without the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero delivering catalytic funding, Ahlstrom for hosting our first site, Pyreg GmbH for our first pyrolyser, Arla Foods for innovating with biochar, SRUC for trialling our products, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) for analysing our results, The University of Edinburgh for modelling our carbon, and dss+ for building our Life Cycle Analysis [pause for breath] 🤝. This is just the start for BBB. As we leverage new funding, we will look to expand all elements of our business. If you want to get in touch to find out more, reach out to Nicholas Hughes & Darren Christopher F. for all things Operations, Megan Evans for finance, Emma Chang for recruitment, Hamish Creber for biochar innovation, Shefali Bagaria for carbon credits, and Adrien Koo for software integration 📈. Last but not least, why are we doing this? Our mission is to rapidly remove carbon and create the highest quality biochar and carbon removal credits in the world. We have plans to remove >40,000 tonnes of carbon per year by 2030 and the beauty of biochar is that it can be done now. This is not a wing and a prayer. This is real. You just need a great team, great partnerships and a great biochar system 🌱.

Last week, Agrecalc launched its upgraded biochar module to its >10,000 users. 🧑🌾   This marks the first time biochar’s on-farm impacts beyond carbon sequestration have been included in a nationally-recognised carbon footprinting tool. It is an exciting leap forward for carbon accounting in agriculture, providing farm owners with an advanced tool to make data-driven decisions for sustainable land management using biochar. 🌾   Thanks to everyone who contributed Hamish Creber, Julian Bell, Rachael Ramsey, Thomas Jenkins, Paul Hargreaves. Excited to see the new module in action!

🎉 ...Team News... 🎉 We are delighted to announce the promotion of Megan Evans to Head of Finance! 🌟  Over the past two years, Meg has demonstrated exceptional skill and dedication, expertly managing all aspects of our project finance at BBB while developing ground-breaking financial models for the future. 📊 Not only has Meg excelled in handling finances, but she has also been a tremendous support to the entire team, always ready to lend a hand in other areas of the company. 🤝 Navigating the unique challenges of a start-up environment, where each day is different, Meg has thrived, demonstrating remarkable growth and a passion for learning. 🌱 Her professionalism and energy are why we have promoted her to Head of Finance.🚀 Thanks to our brilliant team (Nicholas Hughes, Hamish Creber Alex Clarke Emma Claughton Shefali Bagaria Adrien Koo Darren Christopher F.), BBB has achieved remarkable milestones so far 🪨 As we look to the future, we are confident that our finances are in excellent hands with Meg at the helm. 👩✈️ Please join us in congratulating our new Head of Finance on this well-earned promotion! 🎊

✈️ Sky’s the Limit for Black Bull Biochar. Thank you Sky News for the cameo last week on the UK Government £22bn CCUS Announcement by Sir Keir Starmer and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (link in comments). This is a flag in the sand moment for Green Infrastructure in the UK, releasing funding into projects that focus on capturing CO₂ emissions at their source, such as power plants and industrial facilities, and then use that CO₂ in a process and/or store it in geological reservoirs. 🏭 Why does this matter? These are an interesting group of technologies (See the The Royal Society – link in comments) but watch out, the energy requirements can be enormous (some emit more carbon than they store/use) and these products can struggle to compete in markets without constant, sizeable subsidies from government. It is therefore no surprise that the UK has felt it necessary spread this over 25 years. 🌱 What about Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)? This a different suite of technologies that remove CO₂ present in the atmosphere. BBB falls into this group and unlike CCUS, we do not require endless subsidies, massive CAPEX costs and decadal timelines. Instead, we build our plants in less than a year, store carbon in biochar for thousands of years and diversify our commercial revenue streams through the sale of renewable heat, tailored biochar for agriculture and high-quality carbon credits. 💼 So what should the UK Government do next? Where government works best is to de-risk private funding - that’s where you get the biggest bang for your buck: The UK’s £100m DAC & GGR Programme has been instrumental in kickstarting the UK’s CDR technologies scene and reducing risk for private investors and industrial players such as Ahlstrom and A. W. Jenkinson Forest Products (see link in comments). 🔍But what happens next? The Key line in Keir Starmer’s speech was "We need to do more investments like this to secure our future, create jobs, and lead the world in green technology”. This could be good news for the biochar industry, as we do not need endless subsidies but we do need private/public finds to move faster. If the UK needs inspiration, they need look no further than our brothers and sisters in Denmark, who have just set aside €1.35b (10b DKK) for biochar carbon removal, specifically to assist agriculture and livestock (see Sebastian Manhart latest post on this - forever on the pulse). This is big news for our Danish based partners, Arla Foods and proves that our livestock focus is the key to unlocking gigatonnes of carbon removal. 🙏Last but not least, a big thank you goes to Cleudi Gossage for finding me for the Sky News piece and my neighbour Louis H., who is a PR expert at Cognito and kindly briefed me on how not to gaff on air. His dying words to me as the Sky Zoom kicked in – “Be Michelle Obama". There is only one Michelle, Louis, and it's certainly not me!

It’s been 2 weeks since New York Climate Week, which brought together thousands of people across government, industry, academia, and the public for a full week of events, panels, and discussions with the goal of moving forward on our commitments to restore the climate. Alex and I had the opportunity to attend this year, for a great week of meeting old friends, making new connections, and learning from the best of the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) industry. The last two years at Black Bull Biochar have been full of lots of learnings, debunking assumptions, and finding new opportunities as we’ve navigated getting a company up and running in a dynamic Voluntary Carbon Market. #NYCW felt like a fitting checkpoint to the work we’ve done so far, getting to catch up with the rest of the industry and discuss how to best accelerate CDR at the summits held by Flowcarbon, Puro.earth, and Sylvera. A particular highlight was bringing over our BBB x Sylvera biochar 'carbon capsules' from the UK to the US, pleased to see that they were well appreciated by everyone who attended the summit! Kartik, Shona Shame not to meet this time Sancho, but hope your travels are treating you well! As BBB’s first hire back when we were just three people, my day-to-day has evolved a fair bit from when I started. From creating our infographics and implementing a human-centred design approach with our farmers to now securing grants, managing projects with partners, and developing new products as Innovation Manager, I’ve been able to learn a lot while working on real climate action with great people (now a team of 10 💪 Hamish, Adrien, Megan, Emma, Nicholas, Darren, Saran, David). Looking forward to what’s next!

Just the other week we had our funders from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to visit our Pyreg GmbH plant at Ahlstrom, Radcliffe (the first PRYEG plant in the UK!). Thank you Stuart Nixon and Gordon King for leading the tour. The site is in full operational mode these days, with a new cabin office to house the growing team. 🚀I even had the opportunity to do a 60-minute makeover of the cabin. 🎨 #notjustafinancemanager. Hopefully you enjoy the space Darren and Nicholas! As Finance Manager at Black Bull Biochar, no two days have been the same. I look after the day-to-day finance aspects whilst managing the project finance for our project in the DAC & GGR Technologies Competition, the UK’s flagship investment fund in Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technology. Alongside this, I have been building out our financial models for our latest raise. 💰 Working in a climate start-up for the past 2 years has been full of variety and exposed me to new industries and exciting ideas. I enjoy working and collaborating with such a passionate, intelligent and inquisitive group of people (Emma, Shefali & Adrien). As I’m sure most people would say when joining new fast-paced companies, it can be a wild ride. 🤠 However, with our co-founders Alex and Hamish leading the way, we have accomplished so much in such a short period of time. 👏 I can’t wait to see what happens next…

🎉 ...Team News... 🎉Congratulations Nicholas Hughes for being promoted to the role of Head of Pyrolysis Operations at Black Bull Biochar! Just 6 months ago, Nicholas Hughes joined the team as our Pyrolysis Operations Manager, to build out our Pyro Squad 🤺 Right from the start, Nick has tackled every challenge and obstacle head on - with unwavering dedication. His refusal to be beaten (no matter how beguiling the task) has led to significant improvements on our production plant and in the way we operate. 🌟 With the addition of Darren Christopher F. to the team, Nick took on the important role of mentor to both Darren and our Operations Associate, Emma Claughton. Nick has guided them through the intricacies of optimizing the performance of our pyrolysis systems, from ensuring efficient feedstock processing to maintaining equipment at peak efficiency 👨🏫 Nick has also played a fundamental role in the commissioning of our new plant, working closely with our partners BioMaCon GmbH and A. W. Jenkinson Forest Products to ensure a smooth and efficient start-up. 🚀