Carbon capture and storage series: Charm Industrial

A multitude of carbon offsetting projects and services are on the market, ready take compensation for offsetting CO2 output. However, with some types of offsetting, for example planting trees, it takes multiple years or even decades until the promised amount of CO2 is really removed from the air while the emissions have occurred in the present. We will have a closer look at some of the issues when it comes to carbon offsetting.

Luckily, there’s a more recent movement to develop and implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) methods, sometimes also called carbon capture and sequestration. The goal of CCS is to remove capture carbon dioxide by any means from the air or biomass and put it into a permanent storage location.

In our new series about CCS, we cover various solution providers offering CSS. Today we have a look at what the US company Charm Industrial is bringing to the market.

Charm Industrial uses a process called fast pyrolysis to convert biomass into bio-oil. Fast pyrolysys is an established method where certain biomasses such as wood, rice straw or almond shells are heated up to about 500°C without oxygen present, leaving ash and carbon dioxide captured within bio-oil after the process. Charm Industrial states that they currently use excess sawdust and wood which would have rotten otherwise.

A look into the pyrolyzer. Source: Charm Industrial

That bio-oil is then safely injected into existing underground wells for long-term storage.

Notable customers

The U.S. payment provider Stripe has purchased carbon removal for their Stripe Climate campaign, allowing Stripe’s customers to participate in carbon removal by giving a percentage of reveneues directly to companies such as Charm Industrial. Both Microsoft and Shopify are noteable customers too.

You can follow Charm Industrial on Twitter.


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