One Stove at a Time: A Wyoming Startup’s Unlikely Path to Climate Action

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Rowdy Yeatts’ office is filled with skulls. Deer skulls, bison skulls, the odd antelope; most anything you could hunt in the lower 48.  Yeatts’ first business, Skull Bracket, manufactures and sells hardware for mounting skulls; these are for demonstration.  

I am actually more interested in his second business, High Plains Biochar. Yeatts is friendly with a firm grip and easy laugh. We head out to his garage, which doubles as his manufacturing facility, and he shares how he got into the biorchar business. Apparently, it all started with a dog named Ginger (more on that later).  

We are in rural Wyoming, in winter, and it is bitterly cold and windy. Despite the weather, there are two young men outside working next to something that looks like a cross between a futuristic water heater and an old-fashioned stove. Heat comes off of it in wobbly visible waves. This is what I have come here to see.  

What is biochar?

According to Yeatts, “If you have ever burnt toast or found some charcoal at the bottom of a fire pit, you have made biochar.” Biochar is created by heating biomass, such as wood or animal bones, at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. Turning biomass into biochar interrupts the carbon cycle, preventing carbon from going back into the atmosphere. The end product is a very stable form of carbon that can be used as a soil amendment, a feed additive for animals, filter material, and—because it is basically carbon — in building materials like concrete, paving, and asphalt projects.  

High Plains Biochar

Yeatts founded High Plains Biochar after getting the inspiration from is his dog, Ginger, who brought him a piece of burnt wood during a game of fetch. He recognized the potential of biochar as a means trapping carbon long term. Biomass is abundant in agricultural and forestry practices, and biochar was a positive alternative over other approaches such as controlled burns and landfill.  

High Plains Biochar started out manufacturing and selling biochar but switched to producing biochar ovens in 2019. “I realized this market was going to get dominated by large commercial producers and the biochar was going to commoditize,” Yeatts told me, “there wasn't going to be a place for small-scale producers like myself.”

Instead, Yeatts turned toward technology and fabrication. He built his first biochar stove in 2019. The stove was simple and clean, really clean. “We did emissions testing on this particular stove, it turns it is one of the cleanest burning stoves in the entire world, and it doesn’t require any electricity for moving air,” he tells me. High Plains Biochar currently builds several kinds of stoves, from a basic, entry-level one for home use all the way to industrial-style equipment with PLCs for controllers sourced from Colorado State University.

What the future holds

With Yeatts’ stoves, community-scale and local biochar cooperatives were possible. “People want to make a difference,” Yeatts tells me. “They will drive an electric car, they’ll re-use grocery bags, they’ll ride their bike to work. They just don’t know how to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere.”  

We pause our conversation long enough for Rowdy and his staff to load a barrel-shaped biochar stove onto the back of a battered pickup truck. This stove is on its way to Taste of the Wind Farm, an organic sheep farm. The stove’s new owner and head of the farm is BJ Edwards, a petit and formidable woman in Carhart's. Her farm’s ethos is to ethically and organically raise Icelandic sheep for food and fiber. The stove is destined to make bone char and heat one of her outbuildings. She listens attentively as Yeatts takes a few moments to explain how this stove works before sharing a friendly handshake and heading back to her farm.

The goal is to make these stoves accessible for anyone interested so that they can reduce their waste, generate free heat, and participate in voluntary carbon markets. Access to such markets can serve as an important source of income for small producers at the same time reducing carbon emissions. With the support of the CO-WY Engine and the Boulder Biochar Coalition, efforts are underway to expand local biochar projects across Colorado and Wyoming.

High Plains Biochar currently has a staff of eight, working across Colorado, Wyoming and Texas, and they just recently opened a new – much larger – facility in Laporte, Colorado. “We are really excited about having some actual space. We have been very limited with what we have been doing so far and this feels like the next step in the evolution of the company growing,” he said. The company plans to hire five to ten people over the next year to cope with the growing demand.

“At the end of the day,” Rowdy tells me, “the vast majority of people in the world know that there is a problem with our climate and that carbon needs to be removed, and we want to assist with that in any way possible.”

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