About Us

“If you could continually turn a lot of organic material into biochar, you could, over time, reverse the history of the last two hundred years…We can, literally, start sucking some of the carbon that our predecessors have poured into the atmosphere down through our weeds and stalks and stick it back in the ground. We can run the movie backward. We can unmine some of the coal, undrill some of the oil.”

Bill McKibben

LATEST GENERATION POWER PALLET

PP30 Power Pallet: 25kW Biomass-Powered Genset

All Power Labs is the global leader in small-scale gasification. We make biomass gasifier generators that are ready for everyday work, to serve real-world distributed-energy needs.

Our Power Pallet and Chartainer are a new category of energy device. They combine the best usability features of diesel generators, with the clean running of typical renewables, with the potential for a carbon-negative impact. Our newest product is the Chartainer, our Combined Heat and Biochar (CHAB) pyrolyzer system which can produce 40 kg per hour of the highest quality, high temperature, electrically active biochar.

Our project started in 2008 with the open-source Gasifier Experimenter’s Kit (GEK), supporting research, education and DIY hacking in biomass thermal conversion. Over a decade later, the GEK has evolved into the Power Pallet, a full solution for commercial power generation via biomass. Today you can find our systems at work in dozens of countries around the world, and supporting research in over 50 universities.

With APL products, you can generate on-demand power for 1/4 the operating cost of diesel, at 1/2 the capital cost of solar. And while saving money, you can shrink your carbon footprint and contribute positively to global efforts against climate change.

The stakes in getting energy and climate right are daunting. The sheer volume of carbon we’ve dug up from ancient reservoirs since industrialization and returned to contemporary circulation is difficult to get the mind around — we’ve collected some of the details in our Carbon and Climate section. So far we’ve mostly been able to ignore the consequences of this tomb-robbing, as the temperature rise from CO2 accumulation lags by decades, if not centuries.

Using biochar as a soil amendment, especially when co-composted with other biomass waste, is emerging as low hanging fruit in the efforts to mitigate climate change. Adding biochar to soil can result in a significant and long-term sink of atmospheric CO2, especially when co-composted with other green waste which creates a large multiplier effect whose positive impact is being increasingly validated. Recent studies done by both the APL team at the University of Modena and at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have shown that adding biochar to compost can reduce its GHG emissions by 6% for CO₂, 66% for CH₄ (methane) and 32% for NH₃ (ammonia).

Getting Energy and Climate Right

Agricultural-sector emissions were a key topic in the COP27 meeting held in Egypt, and again at COP 28 in Dubai, biochar was identified as a uniquely comprehensive solution. Nitrogen losses to the atmosphere, phosphorus losses to water tables, and the bioavailability of soil contaminants are all particularly well addressed by biochar soil amendment. These are in addition to the already well documented soil-health benefits of biochar in water and nutrient retention, these reductions of emissions, and support of the soil microbiome.

Biochar will have important and widespread impacts in numerous aspects of global agronomy. Our research and development of our SkyCarbon biochar and co-composting technologies is another way we are satisfying our mission of helping to solve this urgent crisis. To this end SkyCarbon biochar is now certified by the International Biochar Initiative’s (IBI) testing and certification program and is currently available from our Local Carbon Network.

APL Carbon-Negative Machinery: Today and Future

The process of gasification is an incomplete one, and the leftover “waste” our equipment produces from making energy is a stable form of carbon known as biochar. Sequestering this carbon is what makes biomass gasification net carbon-negative energy production.

While today’s APL Power Pallets produce a relatively small amount of biochar byproduct (around 5% of input mass), it is still enough for carbon negativity in the fuel cycle. The round rule of thumb numbers are as follows:

1 tonne of dry biomass in produces about 1MW/hr of electricity and 50kg of carbon byproduct.
50kg of raw carbon once recombined with O2 is the equivalent of 185kg of CO2 in the atmosphere. (mass C x 3.67 = mass CO2)
1 tonne of biomass input to the gasifier can soil-sequester the equivalent of 0.185 CO2 tonnes in the atmosphere.
Avoided CO2 emissions from not burning fossil fuel in the process are added to the wins above.

New APL machines, including our soon to be released CharPallet will introduce features that enable increased biochar yield of up to 15-20% of input mass with improved feedstock compatibility. Our pilot CharPallet is processing up to 25 kg/hr of biomass, outputting up to 5 kg/hr of particularly high-quality, high-temperature, geo-conducting biochar.

We are distributing the PP30’s 5%-of-input post-hearth char in our work with our drawdown project: the Local Carbon Network. We are discovering that the impact of this biochar, especially when co-composted and used in organic agriculture, is much more significant than we had expected. We are seeing values of up to 40kg CO2e per 1kg biochar! Check out Austin Liu’s excellent analysis on the LCN Site.

You can learn more about our carbon analysis here. You can also read fantastic coverage of the run up to COP27 in The Guardian. And for an extraordinary insider’s perspective, we’re really enjoying the blog Winning the Carbon War by Jeremy Leggett.

ON-DEMAND, AFFORDABLE, CARBON-NEGATIVE ENERGY

To see specifics of how our machines are helping to solve the global crises in both energy availability and climate change, visit our Projects Page. or click on one of the various use-case scenarios below