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What is Charm Industrial?
Harris Cohn - By injecting a carbon-rich liquid, bio-oil, into deep geological formations permitted under EPA UIC, Charm permanently removes carbon from the atmosphere. At scale, Charm’s bio-oil made from inedible and unmerchantable agriculture and forestry residues can then be used in an iron-making process, producing fossil-free iron, with an easy-to-sequester CO2 waste stream, turning iron’s 6% share of global emissions negative.
Origins
What was the inspiration that led to the creation of your carbon removal startup?
Harris Cohn - Charm Industrial was created with the objective of actually using plants to decarbonise steelmaking. Our co-founders wanted to transform biomass into hydrogen that could be used in steelmaking and other industrial processes.
'Aha' moments
Can you share that 'aha' breakthrough in your startup's journey?
Harris Cohn - The big breakthrough was when our, Chief Scientist and co-founder Shaun Meehan, discovered that if we put the bio-oil, which was a by-product of this steel-making process, back underground into caverns or oil reservoirs that are now empty, it is a permanent carbon removal. So this is actually what the oil looks like right here. You can see it's really sticky and viscous (Harris at this point shows us a jar of gooey oil.)
It was a big breakthrough when we realised, ‘Oh my gosh!’ there are tons of empty oil wells that could take liquid around the United States and around the world. And there's also gigatons of inedible excess biomass that, if we can convert into bio-oil, can act as a really big lever in the carbon removal space. So the oil stays underground for thousands of years and it safely removes the carbon from the natural cycles. And biomass can be converted into bio-oil really safely and it's incredibly abundant. There's gigatons of inedible excess biomass around the world already, so we're not competing with food, we're not competing with other land use issues, and we can use nature's ability to grab carbon and then we transform it and remove it from the atmosphere forever.
Garnering investor or buyer attention
What have you found the best way of garnering investor or buyer attention?
Harris Cohn - I would say the best way to garner investor and buyer intention has been transparency. So we visualise how our technology actually works. We have a fully transparent lifecycle analysis on our website. I think we were one of the first CDR companies to actually publish a prototype protocol for how to measure the life cycle analysis of bio-oil sequestration. I think transparency is by far the best way to garner attention. Plus, having a really credible path to a low-cost removal can capture buyer and investor attention.
Scalability
How are you approaching scalability, and what tools or strategies have proven most effective in levelling up your solution?
Harris Cohn - It's funny. I think the best tool and strategy to scale up our removable solution is actually just clarity of the most impactful way to drive scale. I'll give you an example. It turns out that it's really expensive to transport biomass, so think of tree branches and corn stalks and things like that. It's very expensive to take that, pick it up, and move it to a central location. National labs estimate that it costs $140 a ton to move it more than 50 miles. So this clarity of, okay, if we can solve that problem, we might be able to get to a much cheaper cost.
So we're building small modular fast pyrolysers that can transform that biomass as close as possible as to where it originates into bio-oil. And by doing this, we can actually take advantage of the growth curves. So basically, the cost comes down as your capacity to perform an action increases. We saw this with solar panels, for example, where they started out at a very high cost and now 20, 30 years later, they're at a minimal cost and it's now the cheapest form of electrical generation. And so we're hoping to follow a similar path and having a small modular machine that fits on the back of a 50-foot shipping container. This lets us have iterations on the technology platform within a matter of months instead of years.
Challenges
What's the biggest challenge your business is facing, and what do you think is required to solve it?
Harris Cohn - There are a lot of challenges that the CDR industry faces as a whole. I would say for Charm, it's twofold. First is just education. You know, there are still only a very small number of companies that have made the commitment to purchase carbon dioxide removals and we need more folks to understand why carbon permanent carbon removals are important to buy on the corporate level and to actually take action and make those purchases. On the flip side on the technical side you know we need to build out a logistical and supply chain that is brand new. No one has ever tried to move bio-oil in this quantity or do oil extraction in reverse. And so we have a challenge to educate regulators and to actually perform that work out in the field in a big scalable way.
