Climate Now

Farm to stable CO2 storage

January 16, 2023 Peter Reinhardt Season 1 Episode 82
Climate Now
Farm to stable CO2 storage
Show Notes Transcript

The agricultural sector produces about a tenth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and while most of that comes from livestock (about 2/3), emissions from crop production still total about 2.2 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent. Interestingly, we only actually use about half of what we grow: this is not because of food waste (its own issue), but because more than half of any crop is residue: the stems, shells, husks and anything else left behind at the end of a crop harvest.

Charm Industrial is a new company with a plan to convert those crop residues (~ half a billion tons in the US alone) from a source of greenhouse gas emissions to a sink. Crop residues are usually left on harvested fields to decompose (or are burned), partially restoring the soils, and partially returning all the CO2 they absorbed during the growing season to the atmosphere. Charm plans to harvest those residues and convert them into bio-oil and biochar. The biochar returns to the soils for restoration; the bio-oil can be buried for CO2 sequestration or replace fossil-derived fuels. Climate Now sat down with Charm CEO and Co-founder Peter Reinhardt, to discuss how their technology works, and why interest is growing in this approach to carbon removal.



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James Lawler: [00:00:00] Welcome to Climate Now, a podcast that explores and explains the ideas, technologies, and the practical on the ground solutions that we'll need to address the global climate crisis and achieve a net-zero future. I'm James Lawler, and if you like this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcast.

Please share this episode with your friends. Tell us what you think at contact@climatenow.com. We'd love to hear.

So for this week's interview segment, we're going to take a look at the way one company is using biowaste to remove carbon from the atmosphere. We'll be speaking with Peter Reinhardt, who is CEO of Charm Industrial.

Charm Industrial's process involves taking leftover organic matter from forestry and farming operations… So think corn stover, which contains, of course, carbon from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the corn absorbed to grow, and converting that into bio oil, and then injecting the bio oil underground, which then permanently removes that carbon.

But [00:01:00] first, let's begin with our news segment “This Week in Climate News.”

Julio Friedmann: Well, I'm happy to kick it off this week, and I thought I'd start with two stories that rhyme. One of them is from the Associated Press, talking about the fact that the cost of living increases in inflation may overshadow progress at Davos this year at the World Economic Forum, as if to underscore that point, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about how Governor Newsom is proposing cuts to the climate change program in the context of a cloudy economic outlook. I like this story and this pair of stories because it reminds us that there is more going on in the world than just climate. Although I live and breathe every day on the climate front, it's a complex world. We still are dealing with Russia, Ukraine. We're still dealing with a whole bunch of other things, and so even though I expect we will make progress in Davos, it's a [00:02:00] reminder of the fact that it's contingent on many things.

Dina Cappiello: Yeah, totally. Julio, when I saw both of these stories, it brought back memories of polling that we used to do at the Associated Press, right? Where everybody's an environmentalist until you start talking about money and how much it costs. And economy always trumps environment, but then you look at some of the other, you know, recent news clippings and you think about just the cost of these climate-fueled disasters that we’re seeing, and I think it's super hard to take that complexity into account. In other news this week, lots in the press this week about gas stoves, which was triggered actually by my organization, RMI. We issued a peer reviewed scientific study showing a link between the use of a gas stove and asthma - that gas stoves can contribute to roughly a little under 13% of of asthma cases.

That news broke earlier this [00:03:00] week, and then in short order there was a recycling of something that the CPSC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission said late last year that they're considering a ban on gas stoves. And once that ban language got out, you know, all heck broke loose. We obviously, at RMI, are a research-based independent, nonpartisan think-tank.

So our, we, our research stands for itself and, and the, the consequences of methane emissions, um, and inhaling them are, are pretty well known. And we also know at RMI that the electrification of buildings is a much needed step to maintaining the Earth's temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Darren Hau: I just wanted to jump in here and mention Jigar Shah had this really interesting LinkedIn post about this where he posted a Statista infographic showing that actually the majority [00:04:00] of US households already use electric stoves. And ironically, the only states that have more than 50% gas stoves are California, Nevada, New York, and Indiana, I believe. So, funnily enough, it's the quote unquote liberal states.

Julio Friedmann: The thing that I took away from this is how scientific findings become weaponized so quickly these days. Fundamentally, the technical information is known, the health information is known. The finding is not a surprise, and in the report, it actually talks about straightforward ways to mitigate this. If you want to have a gas stove in your house, this is what you can do to reduce your risk. Things like running your ventilator. None of this is controversial actually, but it immediately became an us versus them. It became a ban versus liberty topic, which is nuts. And we're gonna have to guard constantly against this weaponization of fact against the idea that technical findings are a grounds for a grievance [00:05:00] as opposed to a recipe for discussion.

Dina Cappiello: Could not agree more.

Darren Hau: Here, here.

So speaking of electrification, there was an interesting story today on Canary Media discussing the shortage of electricians and how that might retard the progress of transition. Typically, if you are upgrading to an electric appliance, which might cost in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars, people might end up getting very surprised having an ultimate bill of tens of thousands of dollars when they need to upgrade their breaker boxes, you know, maybe upstream grid connections, etcetera.

There's two reasons for that. The first one is usually permitting requirements that say, “Hey, you know, you actually have to do a bunch of other stuff if you're going to upgrade one piece of your house.” And then the other piece is just supply and demand. We just don't have us enough electricians, and they're typically booked out far in advance.

A few feelings that are driving this potential supply and demand mismatch… Number one might be kind of the education on professional paths that we in the US have taken. I think for a long time people have assumed that the path to, [00:06:00] you know, an upper middle class lifestyle is through a four year university education, and there isn't a lot of interest in the technical trades anymore.

At the same time, these folks who are into electrical trades are retiring and moving out, and I guess we just haven't figured out a good model to support the training of new talent coming in and provide incentives for that. Personally speaking, we've seen a lot of this in the charging infrastructure side too. A dearth of charging technicians out there. And if we're going to make electric vehicle charging reliable and consistent, we need to grow that supply.

Julio Friedmann: Two things quickly to add. One of them is we actually have perfectly good models for this. We just don't use them. The trades have apprenticeship programs.

Germany has the Ausbildung  that trains people for stuff like this. We used to do this and still do this to some extent in community colleges. Organized labor has been doing this for a very long time. Many of the companies, the utilities train their own employees. So in fact, there's a very [00:07:00] straightforward way to go about it.

We simply have not invested in it. We have not chosen in it. We have to rebalance that narrative in order to get the skillset we need. The second thing I'll say is that this is not just electricians. This is true across the board. To build the clean energy infrastructure we need, we not don't only need high power electricians, we need specialty welders.We need construction experts. We need safety and permitting and regulatory experts. We need all these people to get the job done. And whether that's ammonia, storage tanks, or under water port construction, like we need all kinds of stuff to get the job done.

Darren Hau: I think what we're seeing now with all of these, like white collar layoffs from tech is that like we have a skills mismatch, right?

Like we, we've neglected people who actually build things because we've put the stigma and said, oh, that's, that's not a, that's not a lucrative or a respectable path, and that needs to change.

Julio Friedmann: Speaking of jobs and labor and special skills, I was delighted to see an announcement this week about agreement to work on clean hydrogen [00:08:00] in North America, among the three amigos: among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The White House has in fact released a statement in which they talk about collaboration and a fact sheet in which they talk about how they can work together on cross-border hydrogen pipelines and research and safety codes, things like monitoring, leakage, all of these.

I'm pleased to see that it's gotten this level of attention. The thing that struck me the most from this announcement is that Mexico and Canada have pretty different announcements. It's not clear to me that they see this partnership the same way that the United States does. Still, I'm glad to see this topic on the menu, and I'm glad to see it receive the kind of a high level attention that these three state leaders have given it.

Dina Cappiello: Yeah. And adding on this, Julio, you know, obviously the hydrogen market globally is projected just to like expand greatly in coming years in the US through a grant from the Bezos Earth Fund. Our colleagues over at the Mission Possible Partnership, along with help from [00:09:00] us, we are working actually on erecting two clean energy hubs: one in Los Angeles and one in Houston, which has no shortage of, of, of industry and sources for potential hydrogen and hydrogen be a part of those clean energy hubs. So it's totally happening and I think that the fact that these three governments are hopping on board just shows its potential as a solution, especially for some of those harder to abate.

James Lawler: Now let's dive into our interview segment, looking at how biowaste from farms and forests can be used to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and put it into the ground. We've talked a lot about carbon removal on this podcast, how the ocean can help, how the trees can help, how rocks or direct air capture can help.

The 2022 IPCC report on climate change mitigation highlighted carbon dioxide removal as a quote necessary element of a net-zero future and estimated that we may need to remove over 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by [00:10:00] 2100 to limit warming to two degrees Celsius. But despite the imminent need, carbon removal technology remains in its infancy.

Direct air capture is very expensive. Trees, as we've discussed, can only do so much, and when they decompose, that carbon is re-released into the air. But what if we took those trees when they died and buried the carbon deep underground? That's roughly what one company is trying to do. We're speaking today with Peter Reinhardt, who is co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, a company that is injecting carbon from trees and agricultural waste into the ground as what is known as bio oil, and we'll get into exactly what bio oil is in a moment.

Peter was previously the founder of Segment, which is a customer data platform that he started with his roommates at MIT, which they eventually sold to Twilio for over $3 billion. When he was trying to offset the company's emissions, Peter realized that the carbon offset market lacked sufficient [00:11:00] accountability.

Going down that rabbit hole turned his focus to carbon removal technology and trying to create a more secure carbon removal process. That's how Charm Industrial was formed. In this episode, we'll go into some key questions about using biowaste for carbon sequestration including:

- What is bio oil?

- How does Charm’s method of carbon removal work? And how would it scale?

- Is there a market for this kind of technology? And how much carbon has charm already sequestered?

Peter, welcome to Climate Now. It's great to have you on.

Peter Reinhardt: Thanks for having me.

James Lawler: So what is Charm and where does that name come from?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, so at Charm, we take waste biomass - so agricultural residues, forestry waste - take those residues and we cook it into something called bio oil, and we then that carbon rich bio oil we inject underground as a carbon removal pathway, or we gasify and use an iron making as a replacement for coking coal and natural gas. So we are basically [00:12:00] working on carbon removal by putting oil back underground and decarbonizing iron making, steel making.

James Lawler: Mm-hmm. 

Peter Reinhardt: The name comes from char plus farm getting smushed together.

James Lawler: I see. 

Peter Reinhardt: And when we cook the plant material into bio oil, we also get out some char that stays on the farm. So that's where, that's our charm. And the industrial part obviously cuz we're having a, trying to have an impact on industrial, industrial emissions.

One other thing to note is, you should think of this bio oil stuff that's so key to what we do… Think of it as like the active ingredient in barbecue sauce. So when you make barbecue sauce, you are basically diluting down bio oil by like a factor of 50 or so, but it's the smoke flavor that makes barbecue sauce taste like it does.

James Lawler: Interesting. So I'd love to just get into a little more detail on the process. So you have various biomass types as your feed stock for your process. Is it any kind of biomass? Is it purely agricultural residue? What are those inputs?

Peter Reinhardt: So our process needs [00:13:00] fairly dry materials. and ideally very cheap materials that are sort of cellulosic.

So the combination of dry, cheap cellulose takes you to specifically forestry waste. So timber slash forest fuel thinning and agricultural residues that are excess from harvesting. So the two things that we look at most closely are corn stover.

James Lawler: Mm-hmm. . 

Peter Reinhardt: There's hundreds of millions of tons of corn stover produced every year in the US that just rots. So all these, you know, we grow a hundred million acres of corn every year. It sucks  600 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. And then, we just let it rot and those 600 million tons of CO2 go back into the atmosphere just in the United States every year. So if that capture has already happened, how can we turn it into storage?

We are also interested in forestry residues, cause they're very similar in that they're dry, cheap cellulose, that no one really knows what to do with vast quantities of biomass produced in the California forest every year, they're just like, [00:14:00] we don't have a good way of getting rid of it. So we just torch it.

James Lawler: Mm-hmm. 

Peter Reinhardt: We're not interested in things like municipal solid or like manure things that are very rich in nutrients or rich in heavy metals, that our process would kind of concentrate in unproductive and expensive ways.

James Lawler: And so the reaction that's taking place is a pyrolysis reaction, is that right?

Peter Reinhardt: That's right. It's a fast pyrolysis

James Lawler: Okay. 

Peter Reinhardt: reaction. So, you know, if you have like slow torrefaction or, or slow pyrolysis would be a lower temperature with a very slow heating rate. We're going from room temperature to 500 degrees centigrade in two seconds. So very, very fast heating rate that, think of it as like you kind of flash on the pan of like you tossed down a little crumb of biomass and it goes phew into smoke and we effectively condense the smoke.

James Lawler: I see. And how do you achieve that temperature?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah. Ultimately the energy to drive that thermal process comes from the biomass itself. So there's sort of closed loops within the system, which is important from a life cycle perspective. There are people who do fast paralysis with outside electrical [00:15:00] power or external heating of one sort another, but we sort of have feedback loops built into the system.

James Lawler: And so do you start it, I mean, do you start it with a match? Do you start it… How, how does it start up?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, yeah. You do, you do, you have to reach operating temperatures with fossil fuels, but it's, it's very, uh, de minimus in the scheme of things.

James Lawler: Okay. So your outputs then are this, is it, it's bio oil and did you say there's anything, there's some kind of biochar that's left as fertilizer on the field? Is that, are those the two outputs?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah. So if you have one ton coming in of biomass, dry biomass coming in, you can kind of think about it as half ton roughly ends up in the bio oil.

James Lawler: Okay. 

Peter Reinhardt: And a quarter ton ends up in char and ash that goes back on the field and then the other quarter ton ends up going back into the atmosphere.

James Lawler: Got it. So from that process, what do you count as carbon sequestration? Is it just the injected bio oil or do the char and ash count as well?

Peter Reinhardt: So the bio oil, when it gets injected deep into old oil and gas reservoirs, like that stuff is permanent.

James Lawler: Right. 

Peter Reinhardt: [00:16:00] Really going nowhere. The char on the surface instead of rotting in the same year, it's certainly gonna be spread out over more years. I would say there's not a great scientific understanding yet of what the drivers of biochar degradation are. So we, we actually don't claim any credit for the char in terms of carbon removal. And as the science gets clearer as to where and when it's actually sequestered, we may change that, but for now it's not clear enough.

James Lawler: Got it. So in terms of the business model that you have, can you describe the different pathways? It sounds like you create the bio oil from waste and you inject it under. or you use it to create steel?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, well, so I'll outline three different delivery pathways actually because we're, we're very scrappy about getting carbon underground soon and learning very early in the process and that sort of drives three different pathways. So the first pathway is we actually buy waste bio oil produced by others and inject that. And that's really important cuz it lets us experiment with this never before done thing of putting bio oil back underground.

James Lawler: Mm-hmm. 

Peter Reinhardt: Um, so that's how we, that's how we've gotten started.

Um, so we're purchasing waste bio [00:17:00] oil or production that would otherwise be offline.

James Lawler: Okay. 

Peter Reinhardt: Uh, from both large industrial facilities, like plants that operate in kind of like the hundreds of tons per day kind of range, which are like large physical refinery almost like operations. Um, and as well as small, smaller biochar production systems that produce waste bio oil.

And these might be like the size of a house or the size of a camper van. And so that's our first pathway

James Lawler: In that first pathway, where are you doing your storage?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, we're doing injection in Kansas. In Kansas.

James Lawler:  Okay. And that's like a Class six permitted…

Peter Reinhardt: Well, the two well types that are sort of applicable to bio oil injection would be either Class one or waste Disposal well or class.

We've done a mix in different states over the years. Yeah. So the reason that we are in Kansas at all is that permitting in California here at HQ is incredibly stunting. The timeline for permitting a new well in California would be on the [00:18:00] order of like three to 10 years based on prior art, and that's just like not feasible for the climate, nor is it feasible for, for a startup. Kansas, on the other hand, has, uh, I would say like a really good regulatory regime and we are able to, over the course of months, basically get a permitting process done there. We're primarily working with partners on, on permitting wells. We primarily inject into a class five well in, uh, in Kansas.

And what's cool about bio oil is for end of assets.. salt caverns and so on, where there's voids in the ground. You really want to refill it in a way that is gonna structurally support the, the cavern and bio oil actually solidifies down hole. And so it provides sort of value as a beneficial reuse material in that context as well.

James Lawler: Cool. Okay. So that's pathway one. And then you are selling, are you selling credits against that injection? So you're on the voluntary carbon offset market?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, exactly.

James Lawler: Okay. 

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, so we [00:19:00] sell voluntary carbon removals against that pathway.

James Lawler: Mm-hmm. , 

Peter Reinhardt: which has a life cycle analysis and additionality constraints and, and so on.

We also are moving into a world where we'll be operating off the shelf pyrolyzers, um, to produce bio oil. And this is basically vertical integration, expand capacity practice 24-7 operation practice biomass inventory practice, MRV operations, like all these things that are gonna be necessary to really move towards operating at scale.

Then in the third pathway for us is designing our own pyrolyzers that, that are really optimized for. The operating model that we want to scale, which is highly mobile systems, like you should think about the ideal pyrolyzer that we're working on in designing and that we have pictures of on the website and so on.

You know, we have a commercial scale. One that we, uh, are, is sort of an r&d prototype that we're, that we're testing. You should think of it as farm equipment and it will move across the field, pick up the biomass that's laying on the field, converted into char and put the char right back into the soil.

And then just like a harvester, combine offloads [00:20:00] grain at the edge of the field, we'll offload bio oil at the edge of the field.

James Lawler: And then you have some kind of service vehicle that goes and picks that up and takes it to your sequestration well?

Peter Reinhardt: Tank trucks. Yeah, and then that much like custom harvester units due today where they sort of move, combine harvesters to follow the harvest from Texas to North Dakota.And then back again, twice per season. Once for wheat, once for corn, we'll do the same thing. And then in the late winter spring, kind of over winter, probably doing forestry waste.

James Lawler: So I'd be really curious to just hear you talk about what your conversations with investors have been like. Basically, you know, you're presenting a group of investors with all of these unanswered questions, right? And you're saying, we don't, we don't know what the answers are gonna be. We, we have some reason to think that there's gonna be a market for this stuff because we have the climate crisis and we have to remove co2 so people will pay for it, and this technically should work, but we don't really know. I mean, how does that go typically?

Peter Reinhardt: Well, I think there's two very fundamentally different flavors of risk that you [00:21:00] could talk about. One is like existential science risk of like, will this work? And another is economic, operational risk of like how well does it work to.. like how few operators can you get down to? How well can they be trained?

Like what uptime can you achieve, et cetera, et cetera. These are like matters of degree as opposed to like, matters of existential questions. So I think for the existential risks at this point, we've mostly retired the existential risks. And like, you know, seed money and series A money, like that's what it's for.

It's super high risk, but people are willing to make a bet on sort of what we'd already demonstrated. And honestly, we're very capital efficient with that. Like we got quite far with very little money. We're now transitioning, I would say, into more like operational risk where it's more a question of like, can we execute at doing this thing? Can we smoothly and quickly and cheaply acquire contracts for wells? Can we smoothly and cheaply operate these things? And that's a matter of degree. And I think frankly then an investor is looking more at caliber of [00:22:00] team and like, are, is this a team that has experience doing this?

And I, I think things that for example, are helpful there… like both of my co-founders have background in modular hardware design and manufacturing scale up at places like Planet Labs and, as you know, I've run a much larger company at this point. I, I think at peak, my team at Twilio was about a thousand people.

So I think those sorts of things are things that investors would look at and say like, “okay, they, you know, sure, figuring out operations is challenging, but that doesn't mean that it actually has that much risk on it, per se.”

James Lawler: And so are you injecting any bio oil that Charm has created or just third party oil at this point?

Peter Reinhardt: At the moment, everything that we inject is off the shelf. Bio oil, we do produce our own bio oil, but we actually use it more for internal, uh, internal purposes. Our operations team is in the room next door. They've had some recent wins, so I think they're, they're celebrating a little bit .

James Lawler: Very nice. So how much are your credits going for?

Peter Reinhardt: We currently sell removals at $600 per ton. With a most favored nation clause. So all customers get the benefit of [00:23:00] future price reductions for undelivered tonnage. So basically we're saying our prices will come down, but you know, we'd be lying if we said we knew how and when. And to such a degree that we could commit contractually to it.

And so you will get the benefit of it. But you know, we'll march down that curve as it's responsible both to ensure that we can actually really deliver for you and, and not go bankrupt in the process, which is what happened with a lot of PV solar manufacturers in the first boom. And, and the other thing to point out is that that $600 a ton is not for delivery in 2024.

2025, like we are delivering at $600 per ton today. With very slight margin on that. And if you look at the prices that direct air capture or or other technologies are kind of selling it today, they may be being sold at 2026 prices that are down at like $800 a ton or whatever, but they're being delivered at well north of a thousand dollars a ton today.

So the timing of these prices really matters when comparing apples to apples.

James Lawler: How many tons have you guys removed so far since you became operational?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, we've removed a little over 5,500 tons of co2-equivalent [00:24:00] on a net basis. So we've put a lot more carbon than that underground, but on a net basis, netting out all of the dimensions and so forth along the way. Uh, that's where we end up. Um, we're starting to go through a process of third party kind of auditing that we generally have found that our assumptions were conservative and we're not gonna revise up our, our tonnage delivered. I feel pretty good about how about the, um, both customers auditing it as we've delivered it and, and others starting to look over it as well.

James Lawler: That's great. And over what timeframe is that?

Peter Reinhardt: Uh, the past 18 months.

James Lawler: So that compares favorably with like Orca, for example?

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah. As yet no one has announced a permanent carbon removal delivery aside from Charm. So we can estimate what work I might be deliver and hopefully they'll announce at some point how much they're delivering. It's it's nameplate capacity as 4,000 tons per year. I don't believe that's on a net basis, but as far as we know, it is probably something like 90% of global deliveries. But yeah, again, no one else has announced, [00:25:00] so we'll find out, I guess, if. It happens,

James Lawler: Right. Hopefully it does. Hopefully there are more announcements cuz we've got a long way to go from 5,000.

Peter Reinhardt: Yeah, we need to scale up about a factor.. the industry, if you take that 5,000 number as the number for the industry. Then we need to scale up by a factor of 2 million between now and 2050 to get to the 10 billion tons a year. So,

James Lawler: right.

Peter Reinhardt: If you just like do a straight exponential log on that or take the algorithm with that, it's 70% growth compounded every year for the next 27 years.

James Lawler: Yeah. 

Peter Reinhardt: But you know, let's go.

James Lawler: That's a lot to do… Actually on that point, have you like, as you sort of model out the questions that you're trying to answer, there's quite a few of them just operationally as you, you kind of rattled off a moment ago, the time it will likely take to answer those questions and the desire you have to capture and store more co2? Where do you think you guys will be in terms of tonnage per year in [00:26:00] five years and in 10 years?

Peter Reinhardt: um, in five years, we should be in tens of thousands of tons. Uh, and in 10 years, like in millions, subject to be revised. But like at a high level, that's, that's what 70% year over year kind of looks like.

James Lawler: So you mentioned earlier that you all are also working to decarbonize iron making. Could you talk a bit about that?

Peter Reinhardt: When you look at the breakdown of global emissions, about 30% of global emissions comes 25, 30% comes from industrial sources and one of the biggest ones of those is iron making. Steel making. It's a huge commodity. We make two or 3 billion tons of, of steel every year.

Some proportion of that is recycled, but it's not a hundred percent and it will never get to a hundred percent because of copper impurities and other things that you have to blend down, so

James Lawler: mm-hmm. 

Peter Reinhardt: the actual production of iron ore to iron is one of the world's largest emitters. And there's pretty limited options for how we can get that to zero emissions because carbon is actually used [00:27:00] chemically as the reducing agent in turning the iron oxide into, into iron, metallic iron. And one option is to use pure hydrogen. There's a few electrochemical approaches that are being explored and a Charm. We have a sort of a fourth option to add to the mix now, which is we can provide that carbon in a form of carbon monoxide and hydrogen to an iron making process and make fossil free metallic iron. So anyways, we've, we've started to demonstrate being able to produce that gas less in gas, carbon monoxide hydrogen at a spec that is useful in, in iron making. And so it has the potential we think, to decarbonize iron making and mitigate about 8% of global emissions. On top of that, that process will produce a, a pure CO2 stream that is easily sequester.

James Lawler: mm-hmm.

Peter Reinhardt: So even if we use the bio oil for iron making, we will actually still get the CO2 that could be sequestered for the same carbon removal benefit. Right. So it's also a way for us to, to lever up the impact of [00:28:00] biomass.

If we're currently one ton of biomass ends up underground as one ton of CO2 removal, we can potentially get two to three tons of combined reductions plus removal out of that same ton of biomass, the carbon removal component ends up subsidizing. We think we'll end up subsidizing the iron making portion such that the iron making economics are quite favorable.

James Lawler: Really exciting. Thanks so much, Peter.

Peter Reinhardt: Thanks so much for having me.

James Lawler: That was Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Charm Industrial on the carbon sequestration potential of bio oil derived from biomass waste. That's it for this episode of the Climate Now podcast. For more information or to sign up for our newsletter, visit us climatenow.com.

We hope you can join us for our next conversation.

Climate Now is made possible in part by our science partners, like the Livermore Lab Foundation. The Livermore Lab Foundation supports climate research and carbon cleanup initiatives at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is a Department of Energy applied science and research facility. More [00:29:00] information on the foundation's climate work can be found at livermorelabfoundation.org.