Learnings from the Field: Carbon, Capacity, and Consistency

In the Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) sector, the question is no longer "Can we remove carbon?" but "How quickly can we make it affordable?" We’ve already highlighted how the high cost of MRV compliance can be reduced through operational consistency (found here!). Here we’ll show how equipment improvements similarly decrease the cost of delivery for carbon dioxide removals.

At Charm Industrial, we view cost reduction not as a single goal, but as the result of three distinct operational levers: Carbon Yield, Capacity, and Consistency. By pulling all three of these levers in tandem, we’ve demonstrated a path to reduce unit costs by over 95% from our initial pilot baseline. Much of these improvements are already being achieved with Charm’s new pyrolyzer technology, the Autothermal Fluidized Bed Reactor (ATFBR), in collaboration with Frontline Bioenergy, which you can learn more about here!At Charm Industrial, we view cost reduction not as a single goal, but as the result of three distinct operational levers: Carbon Yield, Capacity, and Consistency. By pulling all three of these levers in tandem, we’ve demonstrated a path to reduce unit costs by over 95% from our initial pilot baseline. Much of these improvements are already being achieved with Charm’s new pyrolyzer technology, the Autothermal Fluidized Bed Reactor (ATFBR), in collaboration with Frontline Bioenergy, which you can learn more about here!

The Efficiency Multiplier: How We Scale

To organize our roadmap, we study our "Base Case" (our first functional pilot) and forecast how specific improvements move the needle on a relative basis.

1. Carbon: Maximizing Every Ton

The Lever: Improving Carbon Yield (tCO2e per bone-dry ton of feedstock). The Impact: By increasing our yield from 0.6 to 0.96, we achieved a 61% incremental reduction in cost.

In the early stages of CDR, carbon "leakage" or process inefficiency was the silent killer of economics. By tightening the loop and ensuring more captured carbon stays captured, we de-risk the entire supply chain. Higher carbon conversion has been the most significant technical leap in our journey, proving that our core chemistry is ready for the big leagues. The incredible impact of carbon conversion on cost is stark when presented numerically:

• Our baseline operations & equipment, particularly at a small scale, carry significant embodied emissions: diesel from transportation, cement and steel from concrete pad construction, and the very steel that makes up our pyrolyzers. For every tonne of CO₂ removed as product, 30% might be lost to penalties, yielding only 70% as saleable net CDR.

• An increase in yields by +50% takes production to 1.5 units of tCO₂e with (largely) the same set of emissions penalties. Instead of producing 0.7 CDR, we produce 1.2 CDR instead!

An extra 50% yield from every tonne of biomass is actually a 70% increase in end-product. It stacks up to more CDR that can make it into the hands of buyers, and more throughput over which we can spread our costs.

Inputs and outputs on Charm’s 4th Generation Pyrolyzer

The other massive upside of more efficient pyrolysis technology is that it opens up biomass sources that would have otherwise been unprofitable by $ or CO₂. Agricultural residues, for example, don’t have the same base carbon content as woody biomass (they have more ash), so inefficiencies on conversion make some agricultural biomass almost unusable from a CDR perspective. Better pyrolysis technology unlocks these biomass feedstocks and lets us operate in a wider range of locales. Yields on stover are not as high as woody biomass, but with the right technology, it works just fine.

The right technology to accomplish this carbon efficiency leap is not a mystery to us: we’ve now reliably and repeatedly demonstrated these improvements with our latest Gen 4 autothermal fluidized bed pyrolyzer.

2. Capacity: The 10x Leap

The Lever: Increasing Daily Throughput. The Impact: Moving from 1.5 to 15 tons per day results in an 84% incremental reduction in costs.

Scale-up is the universal hammer on cost down. As we moved from pilot-scale to small-commercial throughput fixed costs like land and labor began to distribute across a much larger volume of "product." Pyrolyzer costs are not linear, and we see substantial increases in throughput without a comparable increase in pyrolyzer capital cost. Our forecasted 900% increase in capacity is where CDR transitions from a science project to an industrial reality. We’ve already tripled our per unit throughput moving from our Gen 3 to Gen 4 pyrolyzers, and are working on the remaining throughput-tripling in our 15tpd iteration for deployment in 2027.

Dr. Joe Polin standing alongside multiple pyrolysis reactors with increasing throughput. 

3. Consistency: The "Quiet" Optimizer

The Lever: Increasing Plant Uptime (from 60% to 80%). The Impact: Improving reliability contributes a further 12% incremental reduction in cost.

Consistency is often the "unsung hero" of industrial scaling. While a 12% drop might look small compared to the 84% jump from scale, uptime is what determines the bankability of a project. A plant that runs 80% of the year vs. 60% is more efficient and more predictable, which is exactly what debt markets want to see. Achieving a low CDR price point requires many similar changes like this, each on the order of $10s of dollars per tCDR. Uptime is one of the largest changes in that bucket. We’re starting to see the fruits of labor here (much more work to do): our pyrolysis fleet has now exceeded 30,000 hours of aggregate operations and uptime has risen dramatically from 15% at first to over 70% today (things have gotten boring!).

Aggregate Operating Hours of Charm’s Pyrolysis Fleet

Honorable Mention: Convergence 

• The Lever: The relentless pursuit of optimizing "everything else."

• The Goal: Capturing the final incremental gains that separate a "functional" plant from a "best-in-class" facility.

When the big levers have been pulled, the cost curve looks flat, but it is still descending. Convergence is about looking at the remaining 4% of the cost index and finding ways to shave off a dollar here and a dollar there. It’s optimizing the heat recovery loops, renegotiating feedstock logistics, and automating the back-office reporting. This work won’t be as glamorous as a new reactor scale up, but it remains important to achieve industry leading low-cost CDR for our customers in the years ahead.

The Path Forward

As we look toward our next phase of deployment, our focus remains on Carbon, Capacity, and Consistency, the big three "Cs." We aren't waiting for a miracle discovery; we are engineering our way down the curve, one tonne at a time.