The Shortest Slippiest Path

Picture this: it’s a scorching August day in Kansas. You’ve spent months trying to whip a thick, sticky bio-oil into an injectable state. It’s flowing terribly like thick taffy, even in the heat. Breaking pump after pump. If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a greased-up walrus up a ramp you’ve got an idea of what our lives were like at Charm last summer.

There’s so much we love about bio-oil. It’s carbon-dense, efficient to transport, and produced through a well-studied chemical process called pyrolysis. It also tends to stay where it’s put – for millennia – which is great if you can get it to where it needs to stay. These properties make bio-oil one of the best tools available to reverse climate change and permanently store carbon from the atmosphere. 

As we’ve scaled up operations, we’ve had to tackle the challenge of making bio-oil flow smoothly while meeting strict regulatory requirements that ensure the bio-oil goes–and stays–where it’s intended. We tested a range of solutions, from refining our manufacturing methods to experimenting with complex multi-pump setups at the wellhead.

But the best solution turned out to be the simplest…the shortest…and the slippiest.

A Viscous, Salty Nightmare

You can think of our injection operation in three steps:

1. Bio-oil Preparation – Before injection into EPA-regulated salt caverns, our bio-oil is blended with salt. This ensures regulatory and permit compliance and protects the salt cavern.

2. Transport to Site – The bio-oil is loaded onto trucks for a short haul to our injection site.

3. Injection – Finally, the bio-oil is pumped down a Class V salt cavern injection well.

Simple in theory, and fast when the bio-oil is flowing.

But for months, that final step—getting bio-oil out of the truck and into the ground—was a full-scale battle. The oil was thick. Sticky. Full of suspended salt particles. Every time we tried to pump it, the salt would grind down our pump rotors and lobes, wrecking the equipment. We had to rebuild the pumps after every single injection.

We tried everything: centrifugal pumps (which stalled under high viscosity), positive displacement pumps (which wore down too quickly), and even different pump materials. Nothing worked reliably. 

The combination of thick, gooey fluid and granulated solids was a pump-killing nightmare.

A Wildly Simple Idea

After months of fighting pumps, our engineering team took a step back. Instead of focusing on the pump itself, we started asking why we needed a pump in the first place.

So we did some quick math. The pressure drop across our system—the resistance the pump had to overcome—was about 30 psi just across the 30-foot-long, 3-inch-diameter hose we were using. That’s 1 psi per foot, which is absurdly high.

Then, a lightbulb moment: our tank trucks can already pressurize their headspace to 30 psi. That means our tank trucks are designed to pressurize the empty space above the bio-oil inside the tank (the "headspace") up to 30 psi. We already had a built-in force we could use to push the oil out.

However, our existing hose setup was creating too much resistance—losing 30 psi over just 30 feet. That meant the pump had to work hard to overcome that loss.

We adjusted our site set-up so we could try a new approach. By shortening the hose, increasing its diameter, and using a slippier material, we were able to reduce that resistance. Suddenly the friction loss was low enough that the truck’s internal pressure alone was enough to push the bio-oil through—eliminating the need for a pump entirely.

With these changes, the three-hour injection time dropped to twenty minutes. 

No more broken pumps. No more clogged lobes. No more power-hungry pump motors. Just bio-oil flowing effortlessly back underground.

A Big Win for Operations

This simple change has accelerated our injection process. Fewer components, less maintenance, and higher throughput. Rather than wrestling that greasy walrus up the ramp, it’s now sliding down the ramp. 

We’re now setting new records on injection tonnage every week, all thanks to our shorter,   slipperier hose. Our recent deliveries to JPMC, Stripe, and Shopify are the byproduct of all of this great work – and 2025 is shaping to be the biggest year yet for Charm. 

We’re excited to keep sharing our stories of optimizations from the frontline as we scale up carbon removal. And if this kind of problem-solving sounds like your jam, we’re hiring.