A New Negative Emissions Method and Our First Customer

Over the past century humans have extracted and burned hundreds of gigatons of fossil fuels, increasing atmospheric CO₂ from 280 to 415 ppm. Today we’re excited to announce that Charm has developed a new, patent-pending method to help reverse that: bio-oil sequestration.

Bio-oil is produced through fast pyrolysis of waste biomass, then transported to an injection well, prepared for injection, and pumped underground. In the US these injection wells are typically EPA Class I or Class V salt caverns. The process effectively takes atmospheric CO₂, captures it in biomass, converts the biomass to a liquid similar to crude oil but with half the energy content, and injects it into rock formations that have stored crude oil for hundreds of millions of years. In the coming months we plan to publish a white paper documenting this new method in detail.

We’re also excited to announce our first customer for this method: Stripe. Stripe has committed to spending a total of $1m this year across a portfolio of negative emissions projects, and today Stripe has announced that Charm will receive a portion of that to sequester 416 tons CO₂e at $600/ton, using our new bio-oil sequestration method.

While $600/ton CO₂e may seem like a high price for negative carbon emissions, it’s already cheaper than equivalent-scale direct air capture. In the long-run at scale, we believe costs as low as $45/ton CO₂e are achievable.

We plan to complete our first injection in the next few months. Subscribe here for updates. In the interim, you can find answers to frequently asked questions or contact us.