Inventor Mike Garjian Perfects System for Carbon Removal
Down to a Science
Mike Garjian likes the symmetry. Indeed, standing in front of a massive manufacturing space in downtown Holyoke, complete with overhead cranes, where waterwheels, used to generate hydropower, were assembled more than a century ago, he envisions that same space soon being used to produce equipment he has invented that will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere.
“A century later, a different kind of green energy,” he said as he talked about the CarbonStar Catalytic Pyrolysis System and what it might mean for a planet that is heating up, he and many climate experts say, due to rising amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
CarbonStar is a company that Garjian, a serial inventor and entrepreneur, and his wife, Irene, created. And catalytic pyrolysis is the process by which biomass (wood chips, seaweed, and canola meal) is converted — through thermal decomposition under oxygen-limited conditions — into what’s known as biochar and other byproducts, such as wood vinegar, a liquid fertilizer.
Gargian calls biochar “almost a miracle substance,” one that can be used for everything for reviving depleted soil to acting as an additive in concrete to reduce the massive CO2 emissions from the production of that product.
In simple terms, Garjian’s system takes a tree that is dead or dying — as well as the biomass lying on forest floors — and essentially interrupts that part of the carbon cycle whereby the tree or biomass decomposes into CO2 or methane. And it creates a use for the biomass that has sat on forest floors, fueling fires from California to Canada to Australia.
All this is, as Garjian said, a different kind of green energy being produced at this same location on Main Street. “The process of biomass decomposing and returning to CO2 in the atmosphere.