Biotech trees: the new frontier
This week on Carbon Removal Newsroom, we sat down with Maddie Hall, CEO and co-founder of Living Carbon, to discuss how her company enhances the ability of photosynthetic organisms to draw down and store carbon from the atmosphere through the responsible use of biotechnology.
Listen in to hear Maddie explain how these trees are designed to absorb more carbon dioxide by leveraging C4 photosynthesis, a more efficient form of photosynthesis.
Learn about typical concerns and misconceptions regarding the risks of photosynthetically enhanced trees, and discover why tree resilience is as exciting to Living Carbon as carbon removal.
Enjoy this foray into the promising potential of biotech trees!
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Full Transcript
Announcer: You’re listening to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a weekly show about current events in the world of carbon removal, from technology and innovation to policymaking and job growth. Brought to you by Nori, the carbon removal marketplace.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom, a show that not only covers the latest news on carbon removal, but also profiles exciting CDR startups building the solutions to reverse climate change and get us back to safe levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. I’m Radhika Moolgavkar, VP of Supply and Methodology at NORI, and today I’ll be talking with Maddie Hall, CEO and co-founder of Living Carbon, to learn about her company, how her company enhances the ability of photosynthetic organisms to draw down and store carbon from the atmosphere. So welcome, Maddie. Thanks so much for joining us.
Maddie Hall: Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Hall right, so before we jump into too many details, I want to point out what a unique and evocative manifesto you have at Living Carbon. Can you summarize the manifesto for our listeners and tell me a little bit about why you chose to frame your work within this broader historical picture of the Earth’s ecological history in relationship to the atmosphere?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so our approach is informed by times in the Earth’s history when plants evolved to rebalance the atmosphere and adapt to rapidly changing landscapes. So it’s a reminder to us that large-scale carbon drawdown is possible. Looking back at times in which the Earth did have large-scale warming and there was large-scale change in PPM in the atmosphere, and that actually happened in So it’s really important to us and for living carbon. Our goal is to accelerate the natural adaptive capability of plants through the responsible use of biotechnology. So using human biotechnology in conjunction with natural systems that can scalably remove carbon.
Allows us to do something that would have otherwise occurred over millennia, right? The evolution of trees in a shorter window of time.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Okay. So let’s just jump into it then. So we all know trees are one of the best known carbon solutions, but you’re introducing a whole different layer, a scientific and engineered layer. So what are genetically engineered trees and how are they designed to absorb more carbon dioxide?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so trees have evolved over millennia to have different characteristics that make them more resilient to climate change. And there’s actually about 15% of all plant species have what’s called C4 photosynthesis. And C4 photosynthesis is a more efficient form of photosynthesis. And what’s interesting is even though the biomass of those plants account for 5% of overall plant biomass, they account for 23% of carbon removal. So our approach at Living Carbon is to be able to take some of the learnings that have occurred over generations and decades in crop plant biotech and apply it with the lens of climate resilience.
So we’ve used traditional breeding and proprietary genetics for decades upon decades at this point. And climate change is such a massive solution that technology should not be reserved for increasing our crop yields. And making insulin or making vaccines for human diseases, we should also use that advanced biotech like CRISPR and gene editing to make our ecosystems more resilient to climate change and capture and store more carbon.
Radhika Moolgavkar: To be clear, when you say mitigate carbon, I just want to make sure I’m clear of what the tech does.
Maddie Hall: So we have two different focuses at Living Carbon. We focus on increasing the rate of carbon sequestration. So that is improving the efficiency of photosynthesis and also on slowing the rate of decomposition. So that’s through our work on metals. Increasing the amount of copper that trees can hyperaccumulate, you can actually slow the rate of fungal decomposition of plant biomass pretty significantly. So that allows you to store that carbon in the lignin of the wood for a longer period of time. And that’s basically what we do for pressure treating wood products.
So we have an R&D platform that can enable trees to do a lot of things. And those have been the two focuses early on.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Thank you. That’s really helpful. So Maddie, tell me what are the potential benefits in addition to carbon removal that these photosynthetic enhanced trees bring?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so we’ve shown in field trials that our trees have a stronger performance when it comes to resilience under drought conditions and performance in high temperatures too. So in addition to an increased growth rate and improved photosynthetic capacity, if you’re going through a biochemical process more efficiently, you’re able to get some other benefits more broadly to the plant as well. It’s kind of like the way we explain to some of our investors, it’s kind of like putting a plant into ketosis, right? It’s a metabolic biochemical improvement. And that’s just one of the many traits that we’re potentially exploring, but that’s the one that’s furthest along.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So, you know, what are the concerns that people bring up about potential risks of photosynthetic enhanced trees? Or how does, what does it get confused with? What do you want to clarify for our listeners? Yeah.
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so I think people have what I call this anti-GMO hangover that really comes from predatory business practices that past companies have used and is completely separate from the biotechnology in and of itself, right? So biotech is what allows us to have enough insulin to provide synthetic insulin to folks with type two diabetes. Biotech is what has enabled us to develop the mRNA vaccines. There’s so many applications for biotech. And so I think when people talk about I think it’s really important to be very thorough in your development and deployment of the work that you’re doing.
So for example, for us, we do whole genome sequencing of all of the trees that we plant. So we’re able to see exactly what we’ve changed. And we study over multi-site, multi-year field trials that enable us to have a very holistic view of the trees. Genetic engineering as a technology is a good thing. It has allowed our world to feed the population that we have today. It’s allowed us to solve many different diseases. I think people have an emotional reaction to genetic engineering without actually understanding what it is. And that is part of the problem.
And I think given how quickly we’ve warmed the world as a human species, right? We geoengineer the world every day with how we destroy habitats and pave over parking lots, et cetera. So, you know, I think we’ve really focused also on deploying on degraded land, right? We’re not trying to plant our trees in the Amazon. We specifically focus on areas where you don’t have a high rate of natural regeneration. And that’s because that’s where the biotechnology makes the biggest difference from an additionality perspective and from a carbon product development perspective.
So if you’re able to capture carbon on non-arable land, all of a sudden you don’t have as much leakage as you would with traditional afforestation projects where you might still have to use arable land. So I think it’s actually really, really important to look at the application and the technology and for people to be open-minded there because the fundamental technology is safe and has been demonstrated to be so over decades.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So I’m hearing a whole host of benefits that your company brings to land, you know, obviously increased carbon removal, use of arable lands and restoring them, a development of an important technology in a different application. But how do you work within local communities who sometimes don’t, you know, you said we have a GMO hangover, so maybe just don’t trust technology. I think this is a broader question we ask within CDR all the time, and I’m wondering how Your company approaches that.
Maddie Hall: Yeah. So I think like our perspective with local communities is to really first like have boots on the ground, be hiring local, be using local council and be making sure that you’re engaging in a way that is like Not just focused on educating them about what living carbon does, because that’s very paternalistic in a weird way, but actually learning about what the needs are of that community. And if there’s not interest, if we can’t solve a problem for them, then we should go somewhere else, right? And a lot of the mining communities and areas where there has been a lot of surface mining or resource extraction, those are sites where you have a lot of negative impact on water quality.
You have a lot of negative impact on soil health. And there’s not Many resources or many opportunities for communities to actually generate revenue and also improve the watershed and also do some way that isn’t a huge lift, right? With multiple replantings across many different sites and site prep. So I think it comes from listening, right? And then finding the people that actually want what you’ve made and not trying to push it on groups that are not interested.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Is there anything you’ve learned today? That was unexpected when you’ve listened to people?
Maddie Hall: That’s a good question. Yes, actually. I think we had initially kind of had this idea that, oh, like maybe planting on active timber sites would be a good idea and a potential path to market for us when we were much earlier on. And what we’ve learned is that, like, the species that we work on right now, which are mostly hardwoods, they’re not that interesting to people from a crop, from a, like, timber perspective. I think eventually, once we bring to market our loblolly pine species, that will change. So just given the difference between the quality perceived around an IFM credit versus an ARR credit, the carbon markets have definitely gone in the direction towards ARR credits.
And so we’ve had to match our path to commercialization with not only the demand from the landowners, but the demand from the carbon markets. And I think that’s what every company has to do when you’re trying to grow in an emerging market like carbon is Where it’s tough out there when it comes to actually having the growth that we need to have to make a meaningful difference from a carbon removal perspective.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, it’s the beauty and the difficulty of an emerging market. Like you never know where it’s going to go and flexibility is so important, but you never know where it’s going to go. And so it’s exciting. Yeah.
Maddie Hall: I think that’s one way that we’re differentiated from other project developers because we do have those, our physical trees, right, on our R&D platform. And so we are able to, you know, design things that are not just for carbon projects, but design and develop trees that are going to grow better in hypersaline areas or under higher drought conditions. So climate resilience as a potential market path to us is, I think, equally exciting to carbon removal, in my opinion, right now.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, that’s a great point. So actually, I wanted to just kind of take a step back and have you describe to our listeners, how did the idea of Living Carbon come to be and how did your company develop?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I used to work at OpenAI and really was fascinated with this idea of doing both really frontier research with some of the top scientists in the world in an area that was going to have a really high impact in the future, but not as many people might realize it right now. And also commercializing that research and sharing that research more broadly with the world. A version of this for carbon removal. And it ended up being that synthetic biology actually felt like an area where there was a lot of potential for product development, for deployment, for solutions to climate change that hadn’t really been thought about yet.
And you had a lot of researchers that were really passionate about about the same bio and plant biotechnology, but didn’t have as many career opportunities to do what they get to do a living carbon, right? So you can either go into an academic lab where you get to do interesting research, but you don’t very often actually get to take it to the field or take it beyond the field. And then also you could go work at like a chemical company. And in that case, you’re probably going to be like a cog in a machine.
So could you provide this path that would be an opportunity to do both of those things, frontier research, but also the field trials and more of the carbon deployment. So I think at Living Carbon, our core competencies are our research and development platform and carbon project expertise. And so marrying the two of those two is also something you don’t really see. So that was about four years ago. And I came up with this idea of could you take some of this research that had been done in the crop sciences and figure out a way to make it work in trees and to make it work for a new market, which was at the time the carbon market, which barely existed in 2018 in the way that it exists right now.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, tell me about it. So I think one of the questions I also am always curious about is the regulatory hurdles that carbon removal companies face. I mean, I think In some ways, they’re often very similar, but in some ways, they’re often so divergent because of the different tech. So can you describe some of the hurdles that maybe Living Carbon has overcome? And are there other challenges that you think about or are addressing on the regulatory front?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so I think that there are a couple of challenges. Frames in which I think about our regulatory work. The first is around more of the local and state regulations as it relates to some of these mine land sites and the Office of Surface Mining. So I think for us, understanding where a site is in the process of reclamation is super important just to ensure that you can have Like 100% additionality when it comes to the development of your projects and also like a clean title. So getting clearance for bonds being released by local offices of surface mining is something that we’ve, you know, not necessarily what I anticipated, but that’s been an important regulatory area that we’ve worked on.
The other one is with USDA, right? So USDA is our main regulator. And when it comes to the biotechnology industry, And so we’ve been fortunate enough to have our MI regulated letters confirmed by the USDA that we were not regulated in the same way that you would regulate sort of pesticide resistant corn, which is great because we’re Not the same thing. And we’re also going through the process right now of getting broader level regulatory approval for the mechanism of actions that we use. And that would actually make it much easier for us to incorporate some of our work into new traits.
Of course, on the international stage, you have places like the EU that have a complete ban on CRISPR right now. And so until those regulations change, which are in the process of changing, actually, they’ve taken the first steps because I think they recognize the fact that to ensure food supply and also just the continued ability for our crop species to be resilient to climate change, you have to allow for these gene editing tools to be deployed. And also they’re just, they’re no different than what would naturally arise from mutations, just doing so in a more directed way.
So yeah, I mean, it’s just the beginning for us, but I think we’ve been fortunate from a U. S. perspective that everything, knock on wood, has been all right so far.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Just out of curiosity, is the ban on CRISPR in Europe just a remnant of old, like you said, the GMO hangover or why did they do that? Do you know?
Maddie Hall: Yes, it is that. The EU has historically been very anti-biotech. And I think why that is, that’s a question for a different podcast that we could go very deep into some of those dynamics. But I think a lot of the countries that are facing a lot of changes in their landscapes as a result of climate change, Thanks for the clarification.
Radhika Moolgavkar: I had no idea that you had banned CRISPR. Yeah. Another topic I always like to hit on when I’m talking to CDR startups is the MRV part of it. You talked a lot about everything being additional because you’re going to degraded sites, but how do you measure and report on these trees?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so it’s no different than you would for any other tree, right? We’re still calculating our baseline and then calculating the increase in biomass relative to that baseline, right? We’re not just saying that the delta in growth rate is the only thing in which we derive additional carbon removal, right? First of all, that wouldn’t be accurate. It would be under-representing the amount of carbon that’s actually being removed. So, you know, I think we used a state-of-the-art combination of like allometric plus dynamic baseline Work in conjunction with some of the registries, both traditional and emerging.
I think quantifying overall forest carbon biomass from the above ground side is relatively simple when it comes to some of the other MRV challenges that folks are facing. We have done like large scale biomass experiments ourselves and in partnerships with national labs, where we’ll grow the trees for a couple of years, harvest them and dig up all of the root biomass and actually make sure that like what we’re what we’re doing is reflective of.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I guess you’re right. I didn’t really think about it, but the MRV should just follow pretty traditional afforestation in some ways. So that is a great advantage that you guys have that you don’t have to start from scratch.
Maddie Hall: For forestry, I think MRV is sort of heading in the direction of becoming a commodity in the sense of there are very clear best practices that are state of the art, but we’re innovating on the product level, we’re not innovating on the MRV level, and that’s kind of by design.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, no, that makes so much sense. So then, yeah, let’s talk kind of about the future of living carbon, about these types of trees, So you’d mentioned you have some new species maybe being developed, but kind of what do you see as the next five to 10 years for photosynthetically enhanced trees and like the roadmap, quote unquote?
Maddie Hall: Yeah, so I really see us moving beyond just the photosynthesis enhanced tree species that we have right now, but incorporating our photosynthesis enhancement trait into new species, right? So that could be species in the US, that could be species in other countries, and also working more to get our decomposition resistant traits to the field, right? And to commercial markets. So some of our work with metal hyperaccumulation is super exciting and promising, more results to be published there in peer reviewed study soon. And, you know, I think Living Carbon really wants to be that biotech platform that can enable the development of advanced species using biotech for carbon removal, right?
So it could be carbon removal, it could also be climate resilience. So moving beyond just one specific application of our trees into many applications of our R&D and of our trees as well. With the lens of carbon project development and that expertise that’s really needed and sometimes missing from a lot of the other like biotech research that’s done, you can develop a really great product. But if it doesn’t actually translate to more carbon from a methodology perspective and from like your area of expertise, then you don’t really get paid for it.
So then what’s the point of doing all of the R&D? So mirroring the two is really where I see our sweet spot thinking.
Radhika Moolgavkar: So as a gardener do you ever anticipate these trees being available for more mass like audiences or is it always going to be sort of in a project developer world?
Maddie Hall: Yeah so we are actually doing like a very small sort of friends and family VIP ornamental launch so if you’re interested in getting one by all means shoot me a note but you know I think Being a consumer business was never something that we really thought would have the highest impact from a climate resilience and a carbon removal perspective, and I think that remains true today. But it is really cool to see trees be a symbolic representation of the other projects that we’ve planted and have that be represented for the folks that have transacted credits from us, etc.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Yeah, I might shoot you a note. That’s so cool that you’re going to do ornamentals. So I think, you know, for my final question, I just kind of want to leave it open to you, Maddie. Like you have covered, you probably more than anyone I’ve talked to have covered such a broad range of technology in terms of CRISPR, to forestry, to like timber products, to, you know, your company spans a ton of stuff and it obviously does CDR and climate resiliency. So You know, what is the thing you want to leave our listeners with and to really understand your company, understand your vision and, you know, the future of living carbon?
Maddie Hall: Oh, that’s such a good question. I mean, there’s so much where to start. I would say that, like, there is a role for nature plus engineered solutions in the space. And actually, they’re the solutions that allow us to get to the highest quality carbon project with the lowest cost in the shortest period of time. So it’s probably as simple as that. And I think we represent an interesting bridge. And very curious and grateful for all of the good questions. And yeah, always interested to chat with more people. And if you’ll have questions or concerns, like I’m all about having an open dialogue.
Radhika Moolgavkar: Well, thank you, Maddie, for everything you taught me today and all the hard work you’re doing with Living Carbon. I am really looking forward to seeing what the next few years bring. And I’m Actually, the most impressed with the fact that you’ve got your regulatory stuff all in line and the USDA’s behind you. So those are huge hurdles that you guys have sort of overcome and you’ve been flying a little under the radar with all that. So I’m glad that we got to hear about it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Maddie Hall: Of course. Well, thanks for having me.
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