Spirit of the Wood: OroCarbo, Haffner, Maverick and Amspec aim for forest economy revival in Oroville, CA

Call me Brown.

I come from a town west of Nebraska and north of the North Platte so unimportant, nobody remembers what it was called. Not even the people still living there. Two streets, a Dollar Store boarded up, and a Methodist Church with nothing left to sing about. Nobody visits anymore—not even the wind. It just passes through right quick.

I left because everybody left. But I was still looking for something—some place where prosperity hadn’t limped off to die, where the lights were still on because somebody had business using them. A place where know-how still mattered. The real kind—not the podcast kind.

I tried coal country. I tried shale. Worked a call center until I couldn’t stand the phone. Drove a parcel truck on roads that got lonelier by the month. I tried Silicon Valley, helping robots replace humans. One morning, I got on a train going somewhere—anywhere—else. And I stepped off in Oroville, California. I didn’t plan to. I just got tired of watching towns roll by like old postcards. I thought Oroville might be another one of those places—gold rush bones, optimism packed away with the Christmas lights, history with no future.

But I was wrong. People here hadn’t quit. They had shifted.

They didn’t talk about gold anymore. They didn’t talk about reopening the mills, or waiting for railroads, or betting on the next boom. They talked about The Project. Not like a slogan. Not with hype. Just quiet, steady, familiar—as if it had already begun working before it had started.

I asked what it was. Nobody gave me an answer. But they all gave me a direction. “Down past the orchards.” “Past where the fire crews cut the breaks.” “If you want to understand it, start at the county office.”

So I did.

The County Planning Office didn’t look like where the future begins. The usual sleepy county office layout. Old wildfire maps. Was that a coffee urn that might have outlived several presidents? I asked to see the plans. Linda, the planner, didn’t hand me blueprints. She handed me numbers.

A carbon flow sheet. Columns. Conversions. Variations that seemed to me like 3 carbons in, 1 carbon out. “What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Recarbonization,” she said. “Not getting rid of carbon. Replacing fossil-based carbon with carbon that already belongs to the cycle. Waste carbon. Forest carbon. The kind that doesn’t add to the problem. Three carbons in, one carbon out,” she said—“that’s what helps us get to low or even negative carbon fuels from forest waste. It’s not decarbonization,” she said. “It’s carbon discipline.”

Then she told me why they have to prove it—down to the last molecule. Because there are groups—loud ones—who believe using forest residues is cheating. Or worse—greenwashing.

“They want to ban forest residues from federal incentives,” she said. “Even though they’re the most dangerous fuel in California.” She slid another sheet forward—the letter OroCarbo and others had sent to Washington.

Friends of the Earth, and other groups, were actively fighting to exclude woody biomass from six IRA incentives— 48C, 40B, 45V, 45Q, 45Z, and 45X.

“If they win,” she said, “projects like this die on paper before they ever begin.”

“That’s why the first milestone isn’t construction. It’s Carbon Intensity validation,” she said. It’s AmSpec—doing the CI study. It’s the Argonne GREET model—the gold standard. Prove it’s real. Or don’t build.

Then she leaned in. Quiet, but fierce.

“The forests are on fire. We need to manage our forests like the Scandinavians do, not as Americans and Canadians do. The smoke is going to sink us if it doesn’t kill us first.”

She didn’t say it for effect. She said it for scale. Because here in California: The eight largest fires ever recorded all burned in the last five years— over 3.5 million acres. And when fires burn like that? It’s not carbon dioxide that gets you first.

It’s particulate smoke. It finds the lungs of children, truckers, teachers, elders—but especially low-income, rural, and underserved communities—people who don’t have the option to leave.

“The question isn’t whether we should use woody biomass,” she said. “it’s not about dollars or climate change or energy. It’s about staying healthy.  It’s whether we should keep leaving it on the ground to burn.”

Now the part that surprised me the most.

“Look,” she said, tapping her calculator. “For this system to endure—not just work, but last—we need to get finished hydrocarbons down to 28 cents per pound or less. That is the number that matters. Because every time oil goes past $100 a barrel, the world economy starts sagging, cracking, and stumbling towards recession.”

“And they’re making?” I had to ask.

“Methanol,” she said. “When methanol is stable,” she said, “the world is stable. It’s a fuel, it’s a chemical, you can make so many things from it, you can hardly list ’em.” When she said that, it didn’t sound like policy. It sounded like memory, trust, ritual.

So what is the Project?

OroCarbo. Using Haffner Energy’s SYNOCA 20 MW modules, and Maverick Synfuels conversion. With AmSpec leading CI validation. Producing 100 tonnes of renewable methanol a day. For companies like Maersk or MSC. Or the chemical trade. Not someday. Planning now. Targeting 2028. Nothing experimental. Just ancient chemistry, modern discipline, new purpose.

Linda said the crazy thing wasn’t that Oroville got a project. It was that Oroville became the proving ground. Because if it works here—where the grid is strained, water is tight, land is fire-scarred, and politics are smoky—then it’ll work in Redding, Red Bluff, Yuba, Butte, Trinity, Siskiyou, or any town where biomass piles up faster than promises.

“This isn’t just one plant,” she said. “It’s a template.”

That’s why AmSpec’s Carbon Intensity study matters—because it’s not just validating feedstock and conversion, it’s validating the model: Residues in → syngas → methanol → certified products → recurring revenue → jobs → forest resilience → repeat.

No waiting on pilot miracles. No betting on future hydrogen. No hoping for fusion. This is shovel-ready and market-ready—once it’s calculator-ready.

“Get that CI score,” she said, “and suddenly the tax credits align, the financiers relax, Maersk nods yes, and the forest goes from hazard to asset.”

Later they showed me the Mother Orange Tree. Planted in 1856 by miners chasing gold and stumbling into something better.

It didn’t get rich. It just—lasted. Never boomed. Never busted. Just kept producing. And I finally understood: Persistence isn’t staying the same. It’s changing without disappearing. That’s methanol. That’s a forest that refuses to die.

That’s Oroville. I didn’t find gold in Oroville. I found something better. I found something that remembers how to last.

The Spirit of the Wood.

PROJECT SUMMARY

Developers: OroCarbo LLC with tech partners Haffner Energy, Maverick Synfuels

Output ~100 tonnes/day renewable methanol

Feedstocks Forest residues, orchard waste, fire fuel reduction

Conversion: SYNOCA 20MW → Syngas → Methanol

First Milestone CI Study — AmSpec using Argonne GREET

Policy Levers Sections 40B, 45V, 45Q, 45Z, 48C, LCFS, CORSIA

Why It Matters: Fire risk → feedstock → fuel → lasting value