Photos: The technology turning agricultural waste into 'sticky' bio-oil for permanent carbon storage

The process typically removes 0.85 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of biomass -- but will it go to scale?
Sade Agard
Charm transforms plant waste into a sticky mix of biochar and bio-oil.
Charm transforms plant waste into a sticky mix of biochar and bio-oil.

Charm Industrial  

  • The company, Charm, captures thousands of tons of carbon by transforming CO2-rich plant waste into bio-oil before storing it geologically through injection wells.
  • Businesses like Microsoft, Shopify, and Stripe are already paying the company 600 dollars for each tonne of carbon it buries underground.
  • IE discusses the questions and concerns regarding how reliable, scalable, and economical this approach will prove.

Somewhere at the edge of Kansas, there's a crew of employees from a San Francisco startup called Charm Industrial working in corn fields, transporting branches and bushes to a diesel-powered semi-trailer. Yet, this is no regular clean-up- the company intends to lock away the carbon stored in these crops for thousands to millions of years by turning them into a sticky tar-like mix of biochar and bio-oil.

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