Meet Garrett Lutz - Charm’s MRV Associate

Today I’m very excited to introduce you all to Garrett Lutz, Carbon Accounting Associate at Charm. Garrett brings a wealth of experience in carbon accounting for complex operations. Before joining Charm, Garrett worked with companies like Meta helping manage Scope 3 emissions for large-scale construction builds. 

So, what does it take to manage carbon accounting for one of the fastest growing carbon removal operations on the planet? Let’s find out. 

Garrett - let’s start from the beginning. Tell us about yourself and where you grew up?

I grew up in the east county of San Diego. I’ve always been obsessed with nature and have a deep respect for all plants and animals and the symbiotic relationships that have formed over many thousands of years. I moved to the Bay Area for University, lived there for over 10 years, and recently moved to CO for my wonderful fiancé (eventually leading me here to Charm, yes!)

You have quite a bit of experience in carbon accounting – tell us more about your work here?

I’ll be helping the Monitoring, Reporting & Verification ("MRV") team scale up by bridging the gap between data collection, analytics, and operations. My goal is to get all the data required for MRV while removing burdens from the teams who provide the data whenever possible. It's a combination of automation & manual work to ensure accuracy required to deliver transparent and trusted carbon removal.

What's the biggest challenge in scaling up carbon removal carbon accounting at Charm?

Our biggest challenge will be to not lose ourselves in the inevitable evolution of more automation. Automation and leveraging technology is the only way for us to effectively and efficiently scale, but we can’t lose sight of the operators who make it all happen, and the constant need for manual quality assurance and audit.

What problem are you most excited about solving at Charm?

I’m excited to help bridge the gap between our operations and MRV. MRV is an extremely data intensive process, with countless stakeholders and an immense workload. Being onsite at Charm Colorado will allow us to systemize and shore up our MRV processes across production and injection operations.

Any good books you’ve been reading lately?

Two books:

Why We Sleep - I think everyone can appreciate this book since we spend such a large % of our lives doing this. Great science around sleep, and how it is in many ways, much more important than anything we do awake.

Alexander at the End of the World - A good book about Alexander the Great in the final years of his conquest. His cross collaboration and delegation of responsibilities across an immense geographical area with no communication technology is extremely impressive, and the battles and history is entertaining.

Welcome, Garrett!