What Is Biooil, And Why Does Big Tech Think It Can Fight Climate Change?

© Image: Industrial waste from Charm Industrial, converted into bio-oil Charm Industrial

Some of the biggest names in tech have struck a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into barbecue sauce ingredients, then pump them underground to fight climate change.

It sounds crazy, so let's start from the beginning. About a year ago, Alphabet, Meta, Stripe, Shopify and McKinsey launched a new climate initiative called the Sustainability Frontier. The goal is to promote new technologies that can extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to convince other companies to buy them.

Frontier's founding members and several other companies have agreed to pay Charm $53 million to capture and store 112,000 tons of carbon dioxide between 2024 and 2030, San Francisco-based Charm Industrial announced today.

Some of the biggest names in tech have struck a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into barbecue sauce ingredients.

He has an unconventional way of making charms. First is the collection of agricultural and forest residues, that is, discarded corn stalks or stalks left after harvest. Wherever it finds that material, it sends its fleet of flatbed semi-trailers carrying furnaces that burn the waste at temperatures of up to 500 degrees Celsius. It turns the waste into bio-oil, a carbon-rich liquid.

According to Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Charm, the water portion of organic oil is the same as liquid smoke, an ingredient used to add a smoky flavor to barbecue sauces and other foods.

Bio-oil also contains carbon dioxide, produced by plants or trees, which is absorbed for photosynthesis. If those corn or plant stalks are burned or simply left to rot, that CO2 will escape again, warming the planet along with other emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Charm Industrial, which is working on biofuels, suggests it could store CO2 underground for thousands or millions of years to prevent climate breakdown. Here's how a startup can sell carbon credits, which are large amounts of captured CO2, to companies that want to use its services to offset their carbon footprint.

To date, Charm has stored 6,100 metric tons of CO2 as biofuel. (The most is Microsoft's previous purchase of 2,000 tons of CO2.) The deal announced today is therefore a big boost and a vote of confidence from big tech companies that already support new carbon emissions. the industry

Charm's advantage is its decentralized planning. Other companies build large factories to absorb carbon dioxide from the air or sea. First, they need land (or sea real estate) for their property. And then they face long approval processes for pipes that transport CO2 to special storage pits.

Charm only has vehicles that carry gear and bio-oil. It plans to inject bio-oil into conventional wells used to drain industrial waste left over from oil and gas exploration or ancient salt caves.

Either way, the startup will face its own scaling challenges. The furnaces it uses to heat waste in the absence of oxygen, called pyrolyzers, aren't easy to find, and the company plans to build many in-house. It must ensure that no wells release bio-oil before the material has fully solidified in the rock, although Reinhardt says bio-oil is not as buoyant as oil, gas or pure CO2 and is more likely to try to surface. .

It is important to note that Charm must check its calculations to ensure that its process produces foreign negatives. That means reducing our emissions from fuel-powered reactors and trucks. And its process is only really effective as a climate strategy if the wood and plant material the company collects simply burns or rots and Charma doesn't intervene to fix it. For example, if farmers were to use crop residues as supplementary feed for livestock, they may need to purchase feed, which may be a carbohydrate-rich alternative.

All of this, of course, must also make business sense, and carbon removal is always expensive for the industry as a whole. The current $53 million deal provides about $473 per ton of CO2. It already includes a wholesale discount; Potential customers can find the price on Charm's website at $600 per ton (comparable to what it costs to suck CO2 directly from the air).

At that price, corporations are unlikely to cause serious harm by polluting the climate. In the future, a potential Charm customer could pay $6,000 a month to capture 10 metric tons of CO2, the equivalent of three flights from New York to London. And if Charm expands to capture 112,000 tonnes of CO2 for the team under this deal, that's still a drop compared to the carbon footprint of any of these new customers, Mater. Meta's carbon footprint in 2021 was 5.7 million metric tons.

With that carbon footprint in mind, some environmentalists warn that companies are using carbon sinks instead of clean energy. Capturing small amounts of CO2 cannot replace the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels. And Reinhardt agrees.

"Well, I think that's a bad choice, but if you're choosing what to focus on first, you absolutely have to focus on editing," he says.

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