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OUR BLOG
12 Jun 2025 | Dillon Card
9 MINUTES READ
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At Charm, we’re often asked what stands between us and gigaton-scale carbon removal. There are many academic answers to this: policy frameworks; economic market incentives; technological learning curves. All of these are right, in their own way.
But as one of the leading carbon removal companies that is removing carbon today, there’s an often overlooked challenge. What does it mean to scale operations for a new hardware and manufacturing technology? What breaks when you go from running one carbon sucking machine some of the time, to a fleet of machines all the time?
In this post, we’re going to take you through the key moments and highlights over the last 12 month journey in scaling durable carbon removals. It’s the gritty, zoomed-in view of technological progress, full of engineering surprises, clog-busting ingenuity, and G.O.A.T. hotflows.
Unboxing components. Breaking down shipping crates. Logging fresh inventory.
We were kicking off commissioning, testing, and operation of our 3rd-generation pyrolysis platform at Charm Colorado. These machines (dubbed the “Bighorns” after the rugged Bighorn National Forest in northern Wyoming) would expand operations by nearly 5x beyond our previous machine count by adding 9 new pyrolyzers!
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Image Caption: Bighorn 001 arriving at Charm Colorado
We knew the production ramp was ambitious, if not a bit daunting: build a first-of-kind production system, with 24/7 operations, rock-solid data collection, and complete emissions traceability. Most importantly, the Bighorns would be the foundation for our operation to deliver verified carbon removal to customers at scale.
What we didn’t realize at the time? Hidden within each new machine were gremlins - some big, some small - and for the next 12 months we would be hunting down those gremlins day and night.
Even in the early days of commissioning, it became clear that our beloved Bighorns would need major reliability upgrades before we could achieve 24/7 operations. The machines functioned out of the box, but initial test hotflows (a single continuous “run” of a pyrolyzer) rarely made it past the 4 hour mark. We faced everything from motor faults triggered by feedstock jams, to material compatibility issues with our bio-oil, to electro-mechanical control failures. It turns out, hardware is hard.
So we did what Charm does best: zeroed in on the highest-impact problems and got to work. One of the most significant, upfront challenges was ceramic refractory failures from repetitive heat cycling.
The reactor in our Bighorn machine operates at intense temperatures - typically between 500°C – 1000°C during steady state pyrolysis - and must cool to ambient levels between production runs. These thermal cycles naturally cause the steel reactor shell to expand and contract, but for the internal refractory, originally constructed from ceramic plates, the repeated stress led to rapid degradation.
The refractory had two important functions: insulating the reactor body from the high internal temperatures of the pyrolysis reaction, and forming the surface profile over which biomass travels through the system. Over time, and with repeated thermal cycling, the ceramic liners cracked and broke apart. It quickly became clear that this design wouldn’t be viable for long-term operation or fleet-scale deployment.
The reactor is central to the entire pyrolysis process — this is where we generate the conditions to extract vapors that are later condensed into bio-oil. Any failure in the reactor directly affects system performance and reliability. So we needed a new refractory solution that could handle prolonged exposure to high temperatures, operate in a corrosive environment, and maintain vacuum pressures without structural failure.
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Image Caption: Ceramic refractory cracking & dislodging after initial hotflows
To develop a more robust solution, our engineers explored an alternative design inspired by double-walled insulated containers: a metal inner shell with insulating media between the walls. This approach aimed to combine thermal resilience with mechanical durability.
Early prototypes revealed areas prone to warping, which guided subsequent design improvements. We increased material thickness, added gussets for structural integrity, and continued testing under operational conditions.
The result was a significant improvement. The new assembly delivered greater temperature stability, 90% faster cooldown times, and, most critically, eliminated cracking. After validation, this “reactor armor” was integrated into the Bighorn system.
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Image Caption: Reactor armor shell after initial test hotflows
This challenge is just an example from the full landscape of issues we faced. With all of these reliability blockers, the only way through was forward. “Fail fast and iterate” wasn’t just a motto, it was our survival strategy. Radical resilience and inventive engineering became daily practices. System redesigns focused on reliability, operability, and maintainability, and our team pushed hard to keep learning from every challenge.
Nearly two months after unboxing Bighorn 001, we fired up our first formal production run. Bio-oil flowed. Carbon was being staged to go underground. The Bighorns were officially in the game.
From 0 —> 1 to 1 —> N. One machine was good, but a fleet was necessary. To prove we could scale, we needed more. Bighorns 002, 003, 004, 005: one new machine per week processed through Engineering site acceptance testing and delivered to our skilled Operators.
More machines = more hotflows = more shutdowns = more turnarounds. Each turnaround was a painstaking cycle of inspection, cleaning, and reassembly to give us the best shot at success in the next hotflow. Our operating strategy, originally designed for a single system, buckled under the weight of fleet management. Uptime plateaued at a frustrating 20%.
We rolled out new playbooks: Kanban inventory replenishment for spare parts, scheduled shutdowns, block maintenance, improved automation and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) platforms, and digital issue ticketing. Our first goal? Run at least half the fleet for a full 8 hour shift. At first, even that felt ambitious. But structure worked; we built rhythm and achieved our 8 hour goal. Then we started climbing the runtime ladder.
September 17: 12 hours? Achieved.
September 23: 15 hours? Done.
November 25: 18 hours? Crushed it.
We’d also doubled uptime performance from August lows, now reaching a 48% rolling average.
As we started running longer, we identified a new key bottleneck in our reactor and downstream condensing train which was the source of ~60% of hotflow failures: pyrolysis aerosols were consistently clogging process piping, choking off the reactor, and triggering repeated shutdowns.
As woodchips vaporize and flow out of the pyrolysis zone, there is a natural hot-cold interface that develops in the upper reactor. This interface was ground zero for material buildup, occurring at a location deep inside the machine that is not accessible during nominal operation. Once this buildup reached critical mass, pyrolysis vapors would have nowhere to travel and our blower package would pull excessively negative pressures on the system; the Bighorns would effectively snuff themselves out.
The Engineering team, now affectionately known as “Clogworks,” had spent months mastering the sticky chaos of pyrolysis aerosol condensation. To overcome these hard-to-reach clogs, we designed targeted mechanical actuation systems to clear problem areas, and rolled out complimentary automation and controls to limit Operator burden.
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Image Caption: Charm engineers installing novel clog removal equipment
The linear motion of these clog-busting assemblies pushed through the sticky buildup and unlocked a new operating paradigm of extended hotflow durations. While most people wound down for the holidays, Charm put our foot on the gas now that our primary clog points were solved. Just in time to ring in 2025, our engineering changes were paying off and we demonstrated our first consistent, fleet-wide 24-hour hotflows.
Colorado is an amazing place to live and work. Winter is no exception, unless you’re trying to operate pyrolyzers in an outdoor tent…
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Image Caption: An icy day…
Water supply hoses froze, biomass wouldn’t dry efficiently, reactor clogging accelerated, and brutal cold prevented safe outdoor operations. Despite design tweaks, uptime dropped to 34%. Our hot December streak felt like a distant memory and our 2025 ambitions were off to a rough start.
After the winter thaw, and multiple weeks of sub-50% uptime, the warmth of early spring brought new life to the Bighorns. Our process upgrades kicked into gear once temperatures stayed above 40°F. Uptime soared above 70% reliably and peaked at 88% across our fleet, which now encompassed 9 pyrolyzers. Preventative maintenance was working. Hotflows were measured in days, not hours.
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Image Caption: Hotflow record G.O.A.T. trophy
We crowned Bighorn 001 as the G.O.A.T. with our first 5-day continuous run.
Three months later, our production system was… dare I say it… predictable. Some even called it “boring,” and in this case, boring was brilliant. We achieved over 15,000 hours of cumulative system runtime and generated over 140,000 gallons of bio-oil since the beginning of formal production in August 2024.
By this point, we had a new top performer in the fleet: the G.O.A.T. trophy was placed atop Bighorn 005 after achieving a 7-day continuous hotflow, our longest run ever. We consistently broke weekly records in bio-oil production and ramped inventory deliveries between Charm pyrolysis and injection workcenters.
Looking back at June 2024, those hidden machine gremlins taught us everything we needed to know: engineering fixes mattered. Deleting unnecessary parts and processes mattered. And just as vital was a structured, repeatable production system: tight schedules, tailored maintenance, responsive issue tracking. People and machines thrive with structure.
As we continue to ramp bio-oil production and turn the page to our next generation pyrolyzer, the hard-earned lessons of Bighorn are our foundation. We’ve shown we can manufacture a fleet very quickly, reliably run that fleet, generate real carbon removals, verify the delivery via third party, and deliver value to customers and the climate.
Now it’s time to scale: better machines, more machines, more bio-oil, more tonnes removed. Gigatons or bust!
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Dillon Card
Director of Operations Engineering
Subscribe to follow our journey to inject bio-oil into deep-geological formations, Charm permanently puts CO2 back underground.
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Stripe purchased 416 tons CO₂e in carbon removal from Charm in May 2020, as our very first customer. That carbon is now permanently sequestered in geological storage.
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Peter Reinhardt
CEO
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Stripe purchased 416 tons CO₂e in carbon removal from Charm in May 2020, as our very first customer. That carbon is now permanently sequestered in geological storage.
Humanity has emitted hundreds of gigatonnes of CO₂. Now you can put it back underground.
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