For instance, crops that are plowed under and trees that are turned into timber can also store carbon for certain periods. How much net carbon the process stores depends on what would otherwise have happened to the plant material. Then there’s the issue of tallying the climate benefits and costs.
“We will of course continue to invest in field measurements, lab measurements, and computational work to always be continuing to improve our understanding of what’s going on in the subsurface,” Reinhardt added. To help the company “develop the appropriate pathways for safe and permanent injection,” he said in an email, it has hired consultants who’ve permitted, built, and operated injection wells in the past. He adds that much of Charm’s technical work to date has been on the carbon sequestration side, including analyses to determine the subsurface chemistry and geology best suited to solidifying and locking away the bio-oil.īut he stresses that bio-oil is a dense fluid that already fits within the regulatory process for the types of wells and caverns Charm has in mind, and that the company is following best practices and EPA requirements to prevent leakage. Separately, the company has begun to explore whether it can use the resulting bio-oil to clean up steel and iron production, the dirtiest industrial sector (see related story). It’s also looking at carrying out the same process with trees and plants removed from forests-say, for fire prevention or in the aftermath of droughts. Now Charm, which has about 30 employees, pays farmers to allow it to pick up unwanted plant materials left after harvesting. Then the company could pull right up to farms and carry out the process at the edge of the fields. In 2020, Charm’s chief scientist, cofounder Shaun Meehan, had a bright idea: if the company was willing to do what Reinhardt describes as “half-assed gasification,” yielding bio-oil instead of hydrogen, the equipment could fit into the back of a semi-trailer. He started looking into carbon removal as a way of offsetting Segment’s emissions, initially exploring possibilities like funding rainforest protection.īut the company found that picking up the biomass and transporting it to a centralized gasification facility was far too expensive, because biomass is “too fluffy.” It’s bulky, heavy, and unwieldy, increasing the cost of handling and moving it-a painful lesson that biofuels companies learned more than a decade ago.
#RUST GAMBLING SITES SUCK SOFTWARE#
Corn stalks to carbon creditsĬharm’s CEO, Peter Reinhardt, 32, previously led Segment, a customer data software company that Twilio acquired in 2020 for $3.2 billion. In addition, the company will face the same risk as other young companies in carbon removal and storage: they’re gambling that large corporations will be willing to continue footing the high bill for cleaning up the atmosphere, and that governments will enact the necessary policies to build up the costly sector. The company will also face some obvious challenges as it scales, including the rising costs of shipping waste between fields and wells, competing demands for the agricultural byproducts it relies on, and questions around how much net carbon its approach ultimately removes.
Notably, the next generation of direct-air-capture plants coming online are meant to remove a million tons a year, 180 times more than Charm has achieved so far. And Charm doesn’t have to construct big projects, sidestepping some of the development, permitting, and capital challenges that startups like Climeworks or Carbon Engineering have encountered as they try to build carbon-sucking factories.īut an early lead in a field that scarcely exists doesn’t necessarily say much about how the company will fare as the market develops. It leans on agricultural crops to capture the carbon and uses existing formations for storage. The company has edged ahead of others mainly because it’s taking a simple approach. And there are plenty of questions and concerns about how reliable, scalable, and economical this approach will prove to be. But it’s a tiny sliver of the billions of tons per year that climate scientists warn the world may need to suck up in the coming decades to pull the warming planet back into a safer zone. Late last year, the company announced that the process has safely locked up nearly the equivalent of 5,500 tons of CO2 so far, claiming that’s the largest amount of long-term carbon removal delivered to date. The San Francisco startup has been sequestering carbon this way for the past two years.
0 kommentar(er)
