He digs coal out of the ground in reverse - taking dead trees, baking them into carbon, and burying the result where the atmosphere can't reach it for a thousand years.
Andrew Jones runs Carba, a Minneapolis company with a deceptively simple pitch. Find the biomass nobody wants - storm-felled trees, ash borer kills, the brush a utility crew trims off a power line - heat it in the absence of oxygen until it becomes a stable, charcoal-like carbon, then put that carbon back underground. The atmosphere loses a little CO2. The ground gains a little coal. Repeat at scale until it matters.
He has a name for this. "If we harvest all the biomass waste out there and convert it to something more stable, like a char, then bury it underground, we're reversing the coal mining process." Coal companies spent a century pulling concentrated carbon out of the earth and lighting it on fire. Jones wants to run the tape backward.
The chemistry is not new - charcoal has been around since people figured out fire. The hard part is doing it cheaply, at planetary scale, without burning a mountain of energy to capture a molehill of carbon. That is the nut Jones claims to have cracked: "There's a huge negative emissions problem, and nobody has the technology to scale without using a ton of energy or capital. We believe we have cracked that nut."
As of December 2025, the claim has a physical address. Carba's first-of-its-kind molten salt reactor sits at a Waste Management landfill in Burnsville, Minnesota, chewing through roughly 10,000 tons of biomass a year - with three more reactors planned on the same patch of ground.
We believe we have cracked that nut.
Waste wood from emerald ash borer kills and utility trimming arrives free, or paid-to-accept. Feedstock that used to be a problem.
Molten salt at 400-500°C cooks the biomass in an oxygen-free reactor. "Molten salt is basically a thermal battery," says Jones - even heat, no vapor pressure.
Out comes biocarbon - a charcoal-like solid that also happens to be a fine filter for odors, gases, and pollutants.
Anoxic burial as alternate daily cover in landfills locks the carbon away for 1,000+ years, certified by Isometric.
Jones likes to point out how little CO2 it takes to change everything. In the pre-industrial age it was about 0.03% of the air. In roughly fifty years, it climbed to 0.04%. The whole business is built to walk that number back, one buried ton at a time.
An undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Jones meets professor Paul Dauenhauer in a research lab. The partnership outlasts most marriages.
Graduates summa cum laude from Minnesota, then heads west for a PhD in Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley.
Founds Activated Research Company, builds instruments for analyzing greenhouse gases and sustainable fuels, and exits via an IP sale to Japan's Shimadzu Corporation.
Alarmed by rising CO2, Jones reunites with Dauenhauer to launch Carba - a bet that the planet needs carbon subtracted, not just slowed.
Carba sweeps the MN Cup Grand Prize and the MPCA Green & Sustainable Chemistry Prize. Jones collects the Neil Armstrong Award of Excellence.
Signs a 5-year deal with Microsoft for 44,000 tons of carbon removal - validation from the biggest buyer in the voluntary market.
The molten salt reactor goes live at the Burnsville landfill. A $6M round closes. The theory becomes a machine.