Page 4 - BusinessWest September 30, 2024

Down to a Science
Inventor Mike Garjian Perfects System for Carbon Removal
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
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ike Garjian likes the symmetry.
Indeed, standing in front of a massive manufacturing space in downtown Holy-
oke, 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 pro- duce equipment he has invented that will reduce the amount of carbon diox- ide going into the atmosphere.
“A century later, a different kind
of green energy,” he said as he talked about the CarbonStar Catalytic Pyroly- sis 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 Gar- jian, a serial inventor and entrepreneur, and his wife, Irene, created. And cata- lytic 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 mir- acle 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.