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Turning Wood Waste into Profits: Miles Murray on LOCOAL's Carbon Capture Tech
7 Plays10 months ago
Join us for an insightful episode of the WoodWorld Podcast as we chat with Miles Murray, co-founder and CEO of LOCOAL. Miles, a West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran, is changing the game in waste management with LOCOAL's cutting-edge Rainmaker™ technology. Learn how this innovative system transforms sawdust into carbon and energy, offering solutions for carbon capture, environmental challenges, and new revenue opportunities. Discover the vision behind deploying this technology globally by 2028 and the drive to make waste streams profitable while reducing environmental impact. Don't miss this conversation on the future of sustainability!
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Transcript
Introduction of Miles and Rainmaker
00:00:00
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on the Wood World Podcast today. Today I've got a special guest for you. His name is Miles. I just feel like Miles has a really cool story personally and is working on great technology that's going to benefit the Wood World and the people in it as well as much beyond that too. So with that, Miles, could you please give a little introduction of who you are and what do you do?
00:00:26
Speaker
Yeah, my name's Miles Murray. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called Locole. And we specialize in next generation wood and other organic material recycling systems. And the name of our technology is The Rainmaker, which is an intelligent mobile biomass and bioenergy conversion product that yields biochar carbon capture through biochar and clean energy through synthe upt synthesized gas.
00:00:56
Speaker
Miles, that's a mouthful. Thank you. Thank you for so much for coming on to the podcast. I'd love to start with Miles. You and I talked a little bit ahead of time, but for our audience that doesn't know, I'd love to share have you share and tell us a little bit about your personal
Miles' Background and Inspiration
00:01:13
Speaker
story. How did you get to doing what you're doing now? You've got a wild story. Can you walk us through it, please?
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you could say that, well, the first and foremost is that I was born and raised in the world of wood. My grandfather passed on to us, um, eight generations of tree farming in new Northern Louisiana. And so all growing up in the summertime, I would, you know, get in my parents' suburban, the old boxy one, and we would drive all the way to Northern Louisiana for a month. now Every year.
00:01:48
Speaker
we would do a partial harvest of the ah the farm. And one of the things that I always noticed is, A, it took a very long time to grow these trees, and B, it was a violent and quick culling of them in the same process. And we would leave a lot of wood waste behind while we were creating timber. And that always stuck with me, the amount of waste that was that would be created in the production of lumber.
00:02:19
Speaker
Are you specifically talking about like in the forest when there's limbs? and Yeah. there's Well, there's the trimming, which you know you've got for those that you know know forestry, you you'll know that there's the hedging and the trimming and the culling of the trees that aren't going to produce the producer's you know size crop that we're looking for.
00:02:40
Speaker
But also in the process of making you know refined woods and actual lumber, there's just a lot of clippings and shavings. So not only do you leave a pile behind at the initial harvest, but once you've put it through milling, ah you leave a lot of sawdust and trimmings behind in that process. And we would just pile it all up and burn it. And I always thought to myself, I'd be i'd be curious if there was something else we could do with that. Sure.
00:03:09
Speaker
Touch a little bit more about your, so as you were growing up, you say, and then what happens? How do you get into the the working world, your career? Yeah, so
From Military to Sustainability
00:03:18
Speaker
I i didn't pursue tree farming ah professionally. That was a family business that I kept over in Louisiana.
00:03:25
Speaker
I grew up in Central Texas and I was in high school when 9-11 happened and I just felt the call to go serve my country. So I was fortunate enough to get a chance to go to West Point, which is the also known as the United States Military Academy, Army Navy Football, those that that school. Spent four years there. My main interest was environmental engineering because they don't have ag like they do at Texas A&M.
00:03:55
Speaker
So it was the closest I could get to it. But it was also of interest to mine and why, you know, why do people do what they do? And so when I left the Academy and I went to the military, I had a chance to serve in a remote outpost in i in southern Iraq, where there really wasn't a lot of combat, but there was a heck of a lot of engineering that was lacking. They did not have working electricity, working water.
00:04:25
Speaker
their hospitals were only partially filled because they just didn't have the infrastructure. And in all my time there, I just kept on seeing a similar thing where now I'm burning piles of trash ah that included rubbers and plastics and wood, all while trying to help build parts of this country up. And their solution too was just burn it all. And so in my time there, you know um as an and you know, an interesting part of our time there is that while we were trying to help the local politicians and leaders, community leaders build, there was a whole um force of people that didn't want to see that happen. And they had militias and they had, um you know, a lot of times at the time, we used to call them terrorists, but like what I was seeing locally in my region were were a lot of resistance to change and improvement.
00:05:20
Speaker
And then there was what came on the heels of that were a few, you know, state sponsored, Iranian state sponsored attacks on us. And I, and it it just, you know, in the moment you're kind of focused on the combat, but over time and reflection, that I really started to kind of look at it through the lens of, you know, change is difficult and progress is a threat to somebody. And so.
00:05:44
Speaker
In light of all that, I just really started working professionally after I left the military towards technical solutions that created more or autonomy and clean energy, waste diversion systems, and circular economies because I just felt holy that you know if you can build a prosperous foundation of your supply chain and your you know your management of natural resources and the waste tailings,
00:06:12
Speaker
then you just have a lot more opportunity to to succeed. And coming from Texas, you know we have that whole don't mess with Texas aspect of our culture, but really it was like, don't mess with our natural ecosystems, don't match with mess with our rivers and our whitetail deer and our dove. you know we We like the natural conservation aspect, but we're also very energy forward. So sort of took the best of that aspect and reflected on kind of where we see the world moving towards a desire for circularity. I love
Formation of Locole and Rainmaker Technology
00:06:50
Speaker
it. So at what point do you get the idea, or how do you start this company that you now run, you're calling it, low call Lo Lo Cole. So Lo Cole is not my name. That's my co-founder's name. So like behind you, you can see this axe right here.
00:07:08
Speaker
And what that axe represents is the very first tool that the local at the time charcoal company used to create carbon out of wood waste. And my co-founder, a gentleman named Matthew Peterson, who goes by Petey, I met him at grad school. I had wanted to go find a co-founder and build a technology company and I found a co-founder that was hair down to his middle of his back. His fingernails were black with this dark charcoal looking stain and he had a cut off shirt and and and and you know outside work pants on on the first night of grad school where everybody else is wearing a suit and I just said, who is this character of a human being? But
00:07:57
Speaker
The reason why he was dressed that way is that he faces what a lot of entrepreneurs face, especially when they're alone. And he had to make a delivery right before the meeting. Otherwise he doesn't have money to fund the next week of business. And so instead of spending the time to get dressed in his clothes, he went and made his delivery and then ran, sprint, literally drove all the way up to the, you know, right to the campus.
00:08:26
Speaker
and ran up to the top of the building to meet everybody. And what he inspired in me was this idea that there's a lot of you know waste in the pecan space and that led to pallets and other sort of manufacturing processes of the food system or the supply chain, where then I really started seeing how much waste was being aggregated. And and I've told him I could build him a better tool than ah and an axe.
00:08:56
Speaker
And so we built a big automated bioenergy system. Okay. So that big bioenergy system you're talking about, that's the focus of your business today. Is that right? Yeah. So we wanted to be able, so our mission was to, to use the readily available wasted wood materials, rubbers and plastics for the purpose of providing a decentralized sort of, um,
00:09:27
Speaker
alternative to landfills. So intercepting landfilling with materials that we knew we could convert into carbon, and like capture the carbon and produce clean energy. And so that was sort of like, that's true north was, you know, end landfilling and create a circular economy out of it, which is not new entirely. People have been trying to figure out a way to do waste reclamation for some time, but what we didn't see was that there was a scalable, durable carbon capture method that could really um achieve some of the grander goals that are being set out by governments and large corporations about how many tons of CO2 they want to sequester. and and And there's a lot of different things that people use, forests, direct air capture, ah so you know accelerated weathering. um But none of that really had a lot of great utility.
00:10:25
Speaker
We wanted to capture carbon in a way that it has utility. Rainmaker, that we call it, is the it's a modular skidded system on a 53-foot skid. It's eight eight feet wide and 13 feet tall. and I built it that way because going back to my time in the military, you know we were decentralized in all of our operations. and What we had been no short of was containers and radios.
00:10:53
Speaker
and so I'm used to running a ah large scale operation where there's many small teams peppered all over a large geographic area. And I knew that moving logistically machinery through containerization or skidded intermodal containers was a good move. So we made a compact, highly, highly automated and very advanced from a pyrolysis technology standpoint system that really precisely captures the most pure carbon out of these systems by heating it up to a certain level and then sort of the carbon is all that's remained and everything else turns into this thick kind of combustible gas. And then we scrub that gas inside the system to where it's clean enough to operate a generator and then power itself. So it becomes a self-powering, relocatable, fully automated,
00:11:52
Speaker
biochar production system that also nets about one megawatt of ex excess energy. Well,
Rainmaker Process Explanation
00:12:01
Speaker
okay, so you just give us a little glimpse of the black box that your system is. Can you give me a little bit of a higher level understanding before we continue down the path of understanding how it works? What is the input? What is the output? You kind of just touched on it just now briefly, but if you were to say it simply, what's the inputs? What's the outputs?
00:12:24
Speaker
between two and four tons of sawdust per hour turns into a half to one ton of carbon and one megawatt or so of energy excess. And so what goes in is sawdust and what comes out is carbon and gas. And then there's also some bio liquids and bio oils that are extracted in the process too.
00:12:52
Speaker
And so it's separating wood into three different phases. You've got all your sulfurs, your socks and knocks that get put into a filtration tank. And then you're your methane and your other hydrocarbons that can burn, get moved into a gas and your carbon remains in solid state. And so now instead of it being an unusable product that can decompose and rot,
00:13:22
Speaker
And now it can be used for you know a lot of different applications than just what the wood industry normally services. Miles, and I guess the other question is, it's where in the world can people deploy this system or where have you seen it already be deployed? So most of our customers are people that produce a lot of sawdust or a lot of wood shavings or a lot of rubber clippings from tire manufacturing.
00:13:52
Speaker
And so where we want to strategically position it is one of two places. The first place is right co-located at a manufacturer's facility. You know, they've got their trucking 18 wheelers a day away, $1,000 plus per load with all-in costs and that's in the inner cities. And then, you know, those trucks are spending time and traffic getting to the landfill, dumping it.
00:14:18
Speaker
and coming back and regulations don't allow them to burn it and real estate pricing doesn't allow them to store it. So they need a place to get it off. We can replace that 18 wheeler a day with our system, bag all the carbon that comes out of it and send it to retail shelves.
00:14:37
Speaker
Whereas the gas can be turned into electricity that can then power a generator that also powers part of their facility. So what is right now a cost and a waste becomes a profit and a resource that you can consume on site. The other side of it would be where there's aggregation points. You know, sometimes, you know, the forestry department doesn't want us to stick a rainmaker in the middle of the forest for obvious reasons.
00:15:06
Speaker
um But mainly because they're scraping a lot of the debris, the forestry private companies are doing their slash and they're harvesting, and they're going to be piling up all their slash in certain spots. And so wherever is being aggregated today as a sufficient enough volume would be a good place to co-locate. You have dumpster roll-off companies that want to do this. they'll They'll separate the wood from all the non feedstock items. And then that is a major lift for them. So it's it's it's it's where the the end of the manufacturing process or the beginning of it. And that's where you kind of like trees cut down, trees turn into small boards with a lot of sawdust.
00:16:00
Speaker
Well, and there's uses for that sawdust. So like when I go around sawmills, um you know, I hear different companies treat the, what you would call residuals into, you know, different parts of the residuals go to different places. And um so I guess this is another opportunity for them to make another value. Yeah, we know. um And there's some, there's some uses that I think are going to continue, but there's a lot of low yield.
00:16:28
Speaker
um seasonal type of uses, you know, there's only so much compost that can be made and sold, right? There's always so much um wood that can go into mulch. You know, I think when we looked at the latest statistic, only 5% of residuals can go into mulch before mulch is so saturated that they might as well give it away. And so where there is some alternative places to take them, and again,
00:16:55
Speaker
Some people listening to this have probably found some phenomenal uses of it. What we found is it's either a low cost, it's either a cost or at best a no cost, you know, um end of life cycle material for the manufacturer. What we want to do is we want to turn that into a profit center.
00:17:18
Speaker
Understood. So besides sawmills directly, you mentioned there's other types of input that the Rainmaker can can take in. um Could you name other ah inputs that you've seen? You've mentioned rubber trimmings. What else besides wood goes into the machine or can be taken? Yeah. So biomass at large larger scale here, it has to do with like anaerobic digest sludge, wood fiber sludge. um the the The base materials that are inside of there are the ones that were targeting fixed carbon, you know and um you know there's still a lot of hydrocarbon chains that are built into that structure. And so you've got rubber, um you got pelletized sawdust, you've got regular wood chips, you have
00:18:14
Speaker
ah certain plastics that can that are there that are good for pyrolysis that can you know you can yield a good energy stream out of that. You don't get much carbon out of it, but you can get some liquid carbon Black 6. And so you know we primarily focus on wood because it's it's what we've chosen to kind of spearhead the technology on. And for those that are on the product development side,
00:18:41
Speaker
It's designed to be extendable across any feedstock that is um responsive to thermal chemical decomposition, which is basically we heat it up to a certain point and it changes form and factor. um We can't put metal in there. we're not We're not smelting metal and we're not going to put inorganic such as dirt or rocks or anything that really doesn't respond to um a chemical combustion or pre-combustion.
00:19:11
Speaker
Totally.
Rainmaker's Development and Commercial Release
00:19:14
Speaker
What have you seen in terms of, you've already deployed some of these systems, I believe, right? You've told me some, some around during this? Yeah, we've, well, we've, we've been in a, so we've launched since 2019. And as a, as sort of a next generation technology company, and we've been ah mainly in research and development. The US Air Force has been a major benefactor to us in R and&D, effectively discussing how you know We've got a world where there's going to be a lot of infrastructure disruption that we're anticipating on the horizon. and This was in 2020, so like we're kind of realizing it now with the wars that are all over the the planet right now. And that the drive for sustainable, like rapidly deployable renewable energy systems that do not require an external fuel source to be able to provide power.
00:20:05
Speaker
So that was the thesis. They've been funding us. They funded us three rounds over a little over $3 million dollars in R and&D and we've taken some investors in. And so we have built our third generation of the technology in a laboratory. And our final commercial version is in final manufacturing and assembly and will be deployed in January as our major product release. I love it. I love it.
00:20:34
Speaker
What do you anticipate, the just you mean you meant you touched you touched on it just now in terms of infrastructure disruption. Can you share any more about what you anticipate and how does the technology help with that disruption? So, you know, one of the things about technology is that it moves alarmingly fast every year. But for parts of the world and economies that have not had the same adoption rate of technology, we have to do some skipping and bounding.
00:21:03
Speaker
ah for them to be modernized. And so you look down all throughout the Caribbean and there's a ton of shells, you know, coconut shells, as well as um other types of wood that is kind of an abundance, but they have a lot of energy resiliency problems. So in not even talking about just war conflict, we're just talking about keeping societies up with the speed at which more advanced societies are advancing at an alarmingly fast pace.
00:21:32
Speaker
And so internationally, we've got an interest from Australia, from Europe, from the Caribbean, South America, and Asia as of recently. So I think Africa and the Middle East are kind of our next areas of, you know, is there an interest here? But what we've really learned from a lot of the leaders of those countries, and we do have a, we've had a chance to talk to a number of their delegate, delegations that are looking for the advanced renewables um engineering teams.
00:22:02
Speaker
is that they want to get an economy where they can produce clean energy in areas that are too difficult to invest in the infrastructure. And then when you look at areas where infrastructure is being disrupted, to allude to your question, you look at like, you don't build yesterday's solution because when yesterday's solution got destroyed, you have to build the next one. So we start looking at, you know, how are we going to employ a data-driven,
00:22:28
Speaker
um, type of grid infrastructure that has prediction, predictive analytics. We can harden areas. We know where there's going to be weather conflict and we can build and harden, you know, these, these infrastructure pieces to be more resilient and resiliency is sort of the, that's the other buzzword around sustainability. It's a sustainable and resilient future and resilient means environmental conflict, human conflict. Um, and.
00:22:57
Speaker
dilapidated legacy systems that must be, you know, converted into modern systems.
Rainmaker's Role in Localized Energy
00:23:04
Speaker
All these need to be built with a degree of resiliency and hardening and not just a rapid build.
00:23:13
Speaker
Here's something that's happened recently, right? We've seen hurricanes and storms come through from understanding all the biomass that gets generated in this, in this practical instance, a hurricane comes through and there's a whole lot of trees and just biomass, where does it go? And what could be a solution that, you know, you could say, well, here's another way to do it. Yeah. So our lead client, um, that's taken our first deliveries, you know, basically said, I'm having to turn down what I can see as potentially 10 years of feedstock that happened in a single storm, simply because we don't have the capacity to hold it this long.
00:23:54
Speaker
We don't have enough of your systems on the ground in the next year to convert it all. But if we could get 10 more systems on the ground in the next year, then we would be prepared to intercept a large quantity of hurricane generated biomass waste. And that could then return back to the, and you know, the community and energy source. Because at that scale, you're looking at 10 megawatts plus of power. You're a small power producer in Georgia at this point, you know.
00:24:24
Speaker
And so, and that comes with its own challenges, to be honest with you, like our solutions run into roadblocks that are kind of unintended consequences of legacy systems. Like how much energy can we pump into the grid? Well, depends on how overloaded the grid is and how, you know, in the inability to relieve grid intensity on production side, whenever there's demand side could wane, you know, so.
00:24:51
Speaker
you can't overproduce while people aren't using the lights. So it's it's one of those things where not only could we be a diversion of this waste, we could be a small power plant producer. And with battery technology and with localized micro gridding, as opposed to long transmission grid, we'd be able to to get power up faster. It'd be more resilient because we could close up our machines and make them hurricane proof during the storm and then fire them back up within 24 hours.
00:25:21
Speaker
and immediately start cranking a clean energy, even if long thermal transmission is down over long lines. So localized, resilient, renewable energy utilizing relatively readily available waste. And it wouldn't just be for that period of time. Like we're talking, these piles could burn all year until the next hurricane, you know.
00:25:47
Speaker
Where does, where did all that ways go today? Just the landfills, all the biomass? Well, it depends on where you're at. I mean, when I was working and and recovery response for Katrina, we were literally setting it on the median of the highways and they were being sent off to aggregators that would just be paid under a service to grind them down and to, to and to sawdust effectively and then just kind of spread them wherever they could. But there was really no.
00:26:14
Speaker
There's really no like advanced economy or process around this. i mean there's Every year there's enough service companies that their job is to pick it up and then however they dispose of it can vary by company. Yeah. Well, very interesting. There's a lot of I don't know if I want to call them theories, but you're talking about what's interesting is the long transmission, what caught my attention versus the localized production of energy. It seems like an interesting concept. Um, how do you think that your technology scales? So, you know, we, we, we work in a modular world. We are all connect. So even kids are connected on video games from different systems all over the planet, all kind of coordinated in the same gaming world. Right.
00:27:04
Speaker
When you look at that in the physical world, we see, well, I would want to be able to have 10,000 Rainmakers systems globally all being commanded you know monitored from a central command center to make sure that they're optimized. The maintenance plans are right. they're um Their productivity rates are what they're supposed to be. And it's not just on like machine performance, but even like our customers, like, hey, you're not you know you're not using this enough. What's going on? Are you all right?
00:27:33
Speaker
Can we help you get more feedstock? Are you having a problem with biochar sales? So as a company, we scale in three ways. First is we have an intelligent IoT connected system that can be placed anywhere in the grid, anywhere in the world in a gridless world. okay And so physically we can kind of spread everywhere locally We're doing anywhere from two to four tons, depending on the density of the ah ah the material per hour. And so if ah a location is producing 10 tons, well, we're going to do three systems, three to four systems. you know And so you can kind of modulate on site. So one site may have four systems, another site two, another site may have 20. And so you've got kind of scalability in your step up manufacturing model
00:28:29
Speaker
on site, then you have scalability through digital command and control. And then finally, like not only are we scaling just this technology, but what what helps create that circle? So um we have another system called the afterburn that will take all that synthesis gas and blend it with natural gas in order to power a much larger thermal um generator system for even a greater you know energy load.
00:28:57
Speaker
Um, we're going to be working on, you know, um, battery, working with battery partners for battery, long-term storage and grid balancing. So it's, it's a product high, high tech product driven kind of company right now. But as we step into this new sort of circular and dust industry mindset, there's just a whole lot of linear.
00:29:25
Speaker
concepts that are being challenged. And so it's not just me challenging them. The idea of a microgrid, one that's storm resilient and the ability to spill off and store long-term energy instead of dumping it is real practical solutions to an ever-growing population. Miles, you've brought up a couple of interesting things. So there were domestic uses like the hurricane storm here, but I say here because I'm in Florida,
00:29:53
Speaker
There's multiple storms that rip through this season. um But internationally, I'm sure you're hearing and seeing people come into you with interesting concepts where like you mentioned in the those island type countries or or states where they have a lot of people that are energy energy dependent, they need the energy, but there isn't necessarily a clear way of how you get it over there or how you transmitted it. Anyway, so maybe can mean be can you can you share a couple of other like, what are the unlocks that technology that like yours will bring to nationally or internationally? Can you share some cool stories of practically how will people benefit from this technology that you've seen or heard so far? Yeah, so you got you've got a number of economies that are still what we would consider a wood and coal based economy, right? If you look at like energy economies, and so you take for instance down in the, let's see,
00:30:52
Speaker
Now that you've kind of asked me that question, let me think of a cool one. Sure. We'll take Mexico for instance. Mexico and right across the border is shares a geographical similar terrain, but we're divided by the Rio Grande, right? And then that's our international dividing line between the two nations. But you've got a lot of farmers that are farming on both sides of that river doing pecan shells. And I use pecan shells because we we The world consumes a ton of pecans. People don't realize it, but we do. 50% of the weight of the pecan is waste because it's the shell. And so it limits the economics of that particular industry causing them to have to do roll-ups and constantly kind of merging different things together. as there's There's subsidy producers grants. A lot of things that have to make the the farming industry
00:31:49
Speaker
you know you know, profitable and it's seasonal again based on subject to weather. What we figured out was if you take pecan shells and convert them into carbon and you infuse that into the orchard itself, not only do you reduce the watering requirement required in the first couple of years, but you also reduce a lot of the chemicals that are required to grow pecans because in the region in West Texas, both sides of the Rio, you've got a lot of depleted soils from generations of farming. And so a couple of years ago, we were all we were out in West Texas and you know we did a soil sample. I went 18 inches deep. I found no microbial life. It wasn't soil, it was dead dirt. And so pumping and humate
00:32:46
Speaker
and nitrogen and other types of fertilizers was just required just to get the plants up and going. And then the amount of water that's required for you know to grow this stuff is pretty substantial. Now, there's strong water tables under the ground, but that takes pumps and that takes energy. And these are in far remote locations. So the demand charge and the cost of pumping that water is 10 times sometimes the rate of energy for a normal house that's located near transmission lines. And so just
Applications and Economic Impact of Rainmaker
00:33:21
Speaker
the economics that we could pull were kind of threefold. It was one, we can produce energy that you could use to pump your wells. Two, we could extract the carbon from the shell by diverting it from getting landfilled or burned.
00:33:40
Speaker
which you can't really burn anything in West Texas because of of a forest fire concern or brush fire concern. And then three, the cost avoidance on the whole growing process. And this has been an ongoing study for several years, but what we've really figured out is when you can put our technology up to a large enough pecan shelling operation, you can become more profitable on that than the than the toll milling that is the cost to the farmer. So in theory, if economics work out well, we don't have to raise prices every year on farmers in order to keep shelling plants and packaging plants moving in the upward direction. And so as we look at cooperatives and however they do business with each other, this is a new tool to unlock you know a better ah better economy around this particular product. that That's one case.
00:34:38
Speaker
um you know I don't have a crystal ball, but when you look at how Ukraine is going to be rebuilt, you know we're not going to be putting in 1980s Soviet systems that they currently are destroying right now or have been destroyed. What we're going to be building in is going to be largely renewable systems, but the cost of real estate and the upkeep of solar and the low density energy yield that per square foot sort of prohibits certain mechanisms. So we start looking at, well, can we make renewable energy more dense, your square footage? um So that in the rebuild, we're you know we're rebuilding these these dens the the power index the density index of power number of square feet required to produce this amount of energy becomes much better.
00:35:33
Speaker
Wow. Well, Miles, what other things have I maybe not asked you about, but you're working on or you're excited about, you know, I don't want to limit you, but if you have other... I think that from my position, I kind of sit in the peripheral of the wood industry as the wood ways. So, I mean, there's a sector that I'm a part of, but I'm a part of sort of the aftermath of it. But, you know,
00:36:01
Speaker
there's There's definitely been a rolling up a lot of of everything kind of in the space when it comes to atlanta and sawmills, to paper mills, to forest management. you know There's just a lot of consolidation that's going on. And what I think you know happens in a lot of that case is that you know large corporations are doing kind of big initiatives that sometimes can be looked at as ah Well, there's deforestation that's happening here, or there's you know this type of you know corporations owning large poor portions of our natural resources. But in all reality, these are also the companies that are sort of on the forefront of trying to find you know good solutions. And as you know as we look at it in the world of tomorrow, there's going to be a need for
00:36:51
Speaker
um A lot of these corporations to decide on if they're going to be a leader in sustainability. And that's what I'm getting signaled by almost every sustainability department of all the large wood industries. And so we're fortunate enough to be in the right time and early enough from the adoption of this concept of circular economies to be able to have a very meaningful conversation about sustainability, resiliency, landfill,
00:37:17
Speaker
mitigation, methane abatement, and all of these things both align commercially with the plans of the business, but also what the international and domestic communities um have set forth as their decarbonization and goals, both coming up in 2035 and longer goals in 2050. And so by partnering with the right companies, our technology can you know do 30 million tons of carbon sequestration annually once we get to volume. ah And doing so, we're also helping feed the the energy demand while avoiding the cost and the expense and the hassle of waste management operations. And so I think we've got this magical moment where, are you pro environment? Yes. Are you pro business? Yes.
00:38:09
Speaker
And that's that is what we have to work towards. And that's where I would want both you know all sides of the the equation to come together and say, humanity moves in one direction, that's forward. um But we're always looking back and asking, like where are we at compared to yesterday? And to me, where we're heading towards is you know sort of fast, consolidated, um streamlined waste management processes that look for a first tilt towards a circular solution before they go to a linear one. And
Understanding Circular Economies
00:38:42
Speaker
I'm really excited that the upcoming generation has a lot of passion around climate impact because what we can do with this technology is bridge a generation. That's incredible. Miles, can you back up a little bit? And for those who may be not familiar with the terminologies, define circular economies for us, if you would.
00:39:03
Speaker
so And he throws something into the trash can and the trash man picks it up and he takes it to a landfill and he buries it. That's what you would consider somewhat of a linear economy. um We do not return the materials from the source at which they were extracted. In a different image, what I would say is, say we go cut we go harvest 10 hectares of forest
00:39:34
Speaker
um a tree farm, if you will. Well, yeah those trees are full of carbon. Carbon that got extracted through a combination of pulling it from the air, but also pulling it from the soil. When we cut that tree down, and we go build houses with them primarily, and that's important. We all want housing, affordable housing, some more cutting is going to be required.
00:39:57
Speaker
um but when we also sequester the carbon from that cut, and we sequester it from the sawmill where you know we're pulling 30 to 40% back of that total mass, and then we go and reinsert it back into the very soil that the trees were grown from, that now you've circulated back any of the waste materials that would traditionally just get burned up or put into a landfill.
00:40:29
Speaker
And so the idea that this system supports this system, supports that system, and then final system goes and supports the beginning of the cycle again, well, now you've kind of got that that natural carbon cycle. And for those that are kind of familiar with carbon um cycles, it's no different than many of the you know sort of like rain cycles, like water gets evaporated, turns into a cloud, and rains.
00:40:55
Speaker
what would be devastating is if the rain never returned from where they evaporated from, and then you would end up with deserts, and then you'd run out of the source at which the evaporation came from, so you end up with a dead planet. So you want to figure out that circular aspect of economics that matches the natural circular ecosystems at which those economics are dabbling in, if you will, or disrupting.
00:41:19
Speaker
And also thank you for that and also could you now you brought up carbon cycles Could you quickly summarize a carbon cycle give us a visual on sure? parallel to the carbon exists and everything that's organic and um Everything that's organic generally decomposes so the idea that we have Carbon into our soil is really just a bunch of stuff that was alive and is now died and it's decomposed and it's start you know, it breaks down over time into this and you know, different but molecular chains. And so carbon being one of them and you've got all your nutrients and everything. And that that then creates where you get like lots of worms and lots of bugs. And that's a really healthy soil, right? But when you grow farming and you till over and over again, what you're doing is that you're completely disrupting that ecosystem that lives in the six inches underneath the soil. And that is more vibrant and
00:42:17
Speaker
you know For geeks like me, more exciting than the 20 miles above the soil. right There's just more life. There's way more life six inches under the surface than there is on the top of the surface of the earth. so when But when we farm things aggressively, we're stripping carbon out of that you know out of that system.
00:42:36
Speaker
and then we're rapidly growing these plants and we're cutting them down and then we're relocating them to somewhere else. So you're effectively removing, your your you know you're taking withdrawals from the cart from the soil. You're not necessarily putting it back in, as opposed to like an old growth forest where trees fall, their limbs fall, it you know it hits the ground, rain falls on it, it decomposes, and that sort of circle happens naturally. On a larger scale, you've got forest fires.
00:43:07
Speaker
those emit that burn up a ton of carbon and put it into the atmosphere. You've got volcanic ash that puts them in the atmosphere. And so we rely on plants to pull it down and to absorb it into their leaves. The more that we develop the planet, the fewer there are areas that are able to mass capture carbon. So we end up with larger and larger you know, measurements of carbon. I think we've kind of increased by 25% over the last 50 years ago in the amount of saturated CO2 in the atmosphere. And is that a problem? Well, it's a problem in certain circumstances. It's not a problem in others, but more importantly, it's it's recognizing how we are finding a harmonious approach to the natural life cycle, which really depends on returning carbon from the source at which it was extracted.
00:44:07
Speaker
Thank you for all the the depth there. Any other terminologies that you and I may be familiar with that you've mentioned that you want to elaborate on that you've brought up during our conversation today? Just to be clear on definitions. Yeah, I think think what people have to understand is that when you're building hardware today, there's there's kind of DOM hardware and there's smart hardware. What I mean by that is that DOM hardware is where you have to kind of have a human operator that's moving the dials, right?
00:44:38
Speaker
Smart hardware has got degrees of intelligence, depending on how much investment you want to put into a product. But what we look for is something that is constantly improving itself. So in the world of tomorrow that we're building today, machines don't break down without telling you why. And they don't break down, hopefully, um in order to tell you why, they'll tell you ahead of time, hey, we're starting to you know, that the outer system starting to wane a little bit, you know, there's a possible, you know, binding in the system. Can you check it out? Build these type of systems, controlling the effects of pyrolysis, controlling the flow of natural, like synthesized natural gas, the ability to use instrumentation to measure in real time, the amount of methane and carbon that you've abated,
00:45:28
Speaker
is becoming commonplace. and and And one thing I know about a lot of the wood industry is that you know that there's it's difficult to change, it's difficult to mature into the next generation of technology. It's expensive, a long time, it's cumbersome, but that is what I've set out to be, is to make change management as easy as possible. Literally, let me back in to two skidded containerized systems, give me a little bit of square footage,
00:45:58
Speaker
And I can solve this problem. My technology will largely solve this problem itself. And it has very few human hands on the solution. And that's good for and kind of accelerating the adoption of the technology. I love it.
00:46:15
Speaker
Miles, well, we're my personal mission is to improve the lives of the people in the wood industry globally. And that's really why I wanted you to come on the podcast and share with us maybe from more of an educational perspective. And thank you for doing exactly that. Yeah. know How the technology you're building and what it does and what it can do. Can you answer specifically and simply how does your technology improve people's lives in the wood industry globally?
00:46:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's a catalyst. You know, right now we've got still a lot of legacy systems that are being used. And they worked just fine. But the world is turning circular. And in order to provide an economic incentive for people to move towards a more circular way, I've built a technology that gives them every dollar that they were spending to get rid of something, they're now gaining a dollar mindset.
00:47:08
Speaker
And it takes a little bit of time and it takes some effort to to to get it all working in their favor. But this is a catalytic moment. And you want to i speak to all the people that are working every day in these fields or this industry and the different facets of the industry. And I have to ask yourselves this every time. Going forward, when you see a pile of waste, wood,
00:47:35
Speaker
that you're going to burn. Ask yourself, is do you realize that you're burning a pile of potential profits for your company? And you're also not returning a good to the public that they're willing to pay for. Because those two go hand in hand. There's the subsidy of carbon credits, and we do calculate those precisely for our clients. But there's also the real tangible product that comes out of this that has a growing demand.
00:48:04
Speaker
so Not only does it improve your economic, it also aligns with many people's sentiments. And that is, well, of course I won't throw something away if it doesn't need to be thrown away, but I have no other viable solution for this. So I'm forced to do it this way. You're no longer forced. It's now a choice.
00:48:23
Speaker
Miles that's pretty exciting so like over the last several weeks I visited several sawmills and one one gave me a really cool behind the scenes tour where I was able to go and see for example the way that lumber is dried in the kilns is on a steam, there's a boiler that generates steam. Steam goes into the kilns. Steam never leaves the the piping and and all of the technology there, but the heat from the steam is used to dry the lumber. Steam is and so inside of a basically a closed loop circle, and it's powered by burning. with you know In the boiler, what happens is there's
00:49:05
Speaker
like the sawdust and the bark in this case goes through a hog and then goes to the boiler. The boiler obviously burns those and so that exists. But what I understood is that there is so much more generated than is being consumed in that system because that one was maybe, ah well, it's it's it's more than, this one is better than typical. This one's a such a closed loop and well sealed system that the steam never leaves and so therefore they don't need that much energy to power it. Therefore, a lot of the residuals um are available and they sell them somewhere else. So practically speaking, um you know if people wanted to
00:49:48
Speaker
understand how this technology could be in their factory? or Is there practically a way that they can get a hold of you?
How to Connect with Locole
00:49:57
Speaker
Is there any pricing that you can you share now? right If it's early yet, how can they find you when and get connected with you to learn more about what could that What could people practically do in their operations? Yeah, so a lot of information on our website and how to get a hold of us, www.locol.com. And that's a play on words for low carbon. So www.locol.com. And if you want to tell us directly, hello, H-E-L-L-O at locol.com.
00:50:33
Speaker
um And by reaching out to hello at local dot.com, you can introduce yourself. We've got, um you know, there's there's ah it's a small but mighty team of 10 of us in which three of us are constantly doing business development. We're taking orders now, get you into the manufacturing pipeline. Pricing is proprietary on a platform like this, but it's extremely competitive. I will tell everyone that their return multiple is quite better.
00:51:04
Speaker
simply because we're unlocking the full potential of the value, not not just partial potential. It's a total solution for your biomass, and the the entire machine is geared towards maximizing the economic factors of that conversion. So you're looking at less than three years to get a full return on a system that we warrant warranty for 10 years on the welds, but we expect it to last quite longer than that. This is a 20-year system.
00:51:33
Speaker
Incredible. Miles, thanks again for you know talking to me and having this conversation across your technology, providing some education here. If you could leave the audience of the wood world with some closing thoughts and your encouragement, call to action, what would that be? Well, I would say that you know born and raised ah in the wood world. And I know that you know despite market reverberations that happen all the time, we continue to build or continue to build all over. My area in Texas is like the fastest growing in the country and they just can't build houses fast enough. So the demand for this industry is not going away, but there's also a second demand that's happening and that's somewhat driven by culture and somewhat driven by modern technology and economics. And that is become a zero waste um community.
00:52:30
Speaker
don't ever see any of the byproducts of your work and labor be considered as waste. There are all alternatives and there's people like me that are working to provide the tools so you can achieve that goal. So give us a call. And if there are also any other investor class, you can reach out to us too. We are a high growth technology company and so we're kind of always in that mode, if you will.
00:52:56
Speaker
I love it. Miles, well, thank you so much for coming on to the Wood World Podcast. I hope this was to the audience helpful, beneficial, educational. Leave for Miles and myself your comments in the comments section below this video. And we'd love to connect with you, ask questions. give us Give us your feedback on what you heard and what stood out to you. And with that, Miles, thank you so much. And we're going to say goodbye here. Thanks, everybody.