He puts waste wood in one end and pulls clean hydrogen out the other. The carbon never comes back.
In Kern County, California, the feedstock for Joshuah Stolaroff's energy company is the same dry, woody biomass that feeds the state's wildfires. Mote, the company he co-founded and now runs as CEO, gasifies agricultural and forestry waste into renewable hydrogen, then captures the carbon dioxide and buries it underground. Waste goes in. Clean fuel comes out. The carbon stays locked away.
The shorthand for this is BiCRS - Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - and Stolaroff didn't just adopt the term. He helped invent the playbook. While running the carbon capture program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he co-authored a 2019 report called "Getting to Neutral," which laid out, with numbers, how California could reach negative emissions. Mote is, in effect, that report turned into steel and pipe.
Mote's first commercial-scale projects sit in Sacramento and Bakersfield. The Kern County facility was selected for funding under ARCHES, California's federally backed hydrogen hub, and the company has partnered with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) on a second plant. A single facility is designed to produce roughly 60 tons of low-carbon hydrogen a day, sold into heavy-duty transportation.
In March 2025, Mote closed the first tranche of its Series A - about $7 million - led by Nella Next and Preston-Werner Ventures. Yes, that Preston-Werner: GitHub's co-founder, Tom, sits on Mote's board. The pitch Stolaroff makes is unusually plain for climate tech. Remove durable, large-scale carbon. Make low-cost clean hydrogen. Do both at once, using garbage nobody wanted, and you save money, land, and resources along the way.
“Our use of wastes to fight climate change saves money, land, and resources compared to alternative options.” // Joshuah Stolaroff, on the economics of carbon-negative hydrogen
Agricultural and forestry waste wood - the stuff that fuels wildfires or rots in landfills - gets gathered as feedstock.
The biomass is heated in a gasifier, breaking it down and releasing the energy and carbon locked inside the wood.
The process yields clean hydrogen for transportation - and a separate, concentrated stream of CO2.
The CO2 is captured and permanently sequestered underground. Net result: carbon-negative fuel.
As a PhD student under David Keith and Greg Lowry, Stolaroff runs the first technical and economic assessment of pulling CO2 directly out of the air - and builds a working prototype air contactor. The research later helps inform the founding of Carbon Engineering.
His paper on capturing CO2 from atmospheric air using a sodium hydroxide spray lands in Environmental Science & Technology, an early landmark for the direct air capture field.
An AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship at the U.S. EPA, working on climate policy, plus a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon's Climate Decision Making Center.
Eleven years as a staff scientist and Carbon Capture Technology Manager. He works on microcapsules - tiny coated bubbles that trap CO2 - and 3D-printed reactors, and leads the lab's carbon capture program.
He co-authors the award-winning report that maps California's path to negative emissions and launches the BiCRS approach that becomes Mote's foundation.
Stolaroff co-founds Mote and the company announces the world's first carbon removal plant converting wood waste to hydrogen.
He steps into the CEO seat, closes $7M of the Series A, and advances the Kern County (ARCHES) and Sacramento (SMUD) projects.
“Mote's process saves resources and benefits the climate by making hydrogen from waste while storing carbon. It's an important complement to other renewable approaches in the energy transition.”
“There is a pressing need for durable, large-scale carbon removal and scalable solutions that provide low-cost, clean hydrogen. Mote's technology does both.”
“Carbon removal remains essential to our shared fate.”
“It is hard to get any project over the finish line - all market participants benefit from a completed project.”
His doctoral work on air capture feasibility helped inform the creation of Carbon Engineering - now part of one of the world's largest direct-air-capture efforts.
At Livermore he worked on microcapsules: tiny coated bubbles that let CO2 pass through and get absorbed by material sealed inside.
Mote's feedstock is the same woody waste that powers California wildfires. Burning it for hydrogen instead lowers fire risk.
GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner sits on Mote's board, and Preston-Werner Ventures co-led the Series A.
After two decades studying carbon in academia, fellowships, and a national lab, he decided the markets had finally arrived - and left to build.
His Livermore toolkit included 3D-printed reactors and heat exchangers built for CO2 absorption, conversion, and supercritical power cycles.