The Charm Underground - June 2024

The Charm Underground  is a monthly series sharing our progress & learnings as we scale carbon removal to gigatonne scale. If you’d like to get The Charm Underground  in your inbox, subscribe below. 

This week, as the United States celebrates Independence Day, we at Charm Industrial are reflecting on the entrepreneurial spirit at the heart of our nation. As an American company tackling the global climate crisis, we’re proud to operate across this great country, from D.C. to El Dorado to Fort Lupton to San Francisco.

Like our country, our team is a melting pot of talent and experience: from former petroleum engineers and farm operators, PhDs trained at top US universities to the self-taught. Our team is what will power us through the challenges that stand between us today and gigatonne scale. 

We believe that the same spirit of innovation and determination that made America a leader in technology and energy in the decades past will enable the USA to emerge a leader on carbon removal.

Below are some June highlights from the front lines. 

Delivery, Delivery, Delivery

We hear from many that carbon removal seems like a sci-fi futuristic solution that’s decades away. But here's a photo of us delivering removals NOW. And a video here.

In June, we delivered on 5 different days, injecting carbon-rich bio-oil deep underground where it will be permanently sequestered for thousands of years. Credits will be issued over the coming weeks via our partnership with Isometric. 

Follow along on Twitter/X to see realtime updates of delivery. 

Charm Named Department of Energy Semifinalist

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has selected Charm Industrial as one of the 24 semifinalists for the first phase of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize. As part of this program, Charm Industrial will receive $50,000 to support the scale up of permanent carbon removal via bio-oil sequestration, and has the opportunity to compete for up to an additional $3M in DOE carbon removal purchasing.

Learn more about our partnership with the DOE and what’s next in Phase II here.

A Charm Deep-Dive in The New Yorker

Charm was featured in a New Yorker article, surfacing the amazing progress and technical challenges we’ve navigated as we scale up our operation. The reporter, Michelle Nijhuis, visited Charm about a year ago when we were in the midst of initial field deployments, and it’s amazing to see how much progress we’ve made since then!

Check out the full history of our first 7,000 tons of deliveries here.

Peanut Wagon Powered Biomass Efficiency

Our engineering team revamped our biomass processing over the past year - 2x’ing our efficiency while cutting emissions in HALF. 

The journey to the “perfect chip” took us across the country to test wood chippers and loading systems. It required hundreds of engineering hours spent analyzing chipping yields and updating test plans for drying techniques, and it ushered in a new fleet of processing equipment.

Read up on all the our improvements we've made here.

More, Faster

Our Head of Research Edward Young shares his analysis on the climate trend line we’re on, and what it will take to get back on track. The punchline? We need more of everything – faster – across decarbonization and carbon removal to get our climate healthy again. 

The world needs renewable energy companies to develop and deploy faster. We need heavy industry to find low or no carbon pathways, even if it is difficult. We need sustainable food systems that minimize or even reverse the loss of carbon in our soils. Our transportation systems need to be converted from fossil fuel based to electricity based. We need governments to fund research into new technologies and to incentivize the deployment of the best ideas.

Read more here.

What an incredible June! Looking forward to sharing more scale and removals in the months to come. Make sure to subscribe to get The Charm Underground in your inbox.