What Is Bio-Oil And Why Does Big Tech Think It Can Fight Climate Change?

Some of the biggest names in tech have struck a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into barbecue sauce ingredients and then bury the stuff underground to try to fight climate change.

This sounds wild, so let’s break it down from the start. Alphabet, Meta, Stripe, Shopify and McKinsey Sustainability launched a new climate initiative called Frontiers about a year ago. The goal is to promote new technologies capable of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by persuading other companies to buy them.

Today, a San Francisco-based climate tech startup called Charm Industrial announced that Frontier’s founding members and other companies agreed to pay a total of $53 million to capture and store 112,000 tons of carbon dioxide between 2024 and 2030. is of.

Charm has an unconventional way of doing this. First, it collects agricultural and forestry waste—that is, discarded corn stalks or branches left over from logging. Wherever it finds that material, it sends its fleet of flatbed semi trucks to reactors that heat the waste to 500 degrees Celsius without burning it. It turns waste into bio-oil, a carbon-rich liquid.

The water portion of Bio-Oil is essentially the same liquid smokeAn ingredient used to give barbecue sauce and other foods a smoky flavor, according to Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of Charme.

Bio-oil also holds the carbon dioxide that the plant or tree absorbs for photosynthesis. If those corn stalks or tree branches were to be burned or left to decompose, CO2 would have escaped again – warming the planet along with all the other emissions that come from burning fossil fuels.

Trapped in bio-oil, Charm Industrial thinks it can keep CO2 underground for thousands to millions of years to prevent climate change from getting worse. This way the startup can now sell carbon removal credits, representing tons of CO2 captured, to people who want to try to cancel their own carbon dioxide pollution using their service.

So far, CHARM has successfully stored over 6,100 metric tonnes of CO2 in the form of bio-oil. (The previous purchase of 2,000 metric tons of CO2 from Microsoft is a big chunk of that.) So the deal announced today is a big boost and a vote of confidence from Big Tech companies that have been early supporters of nascent carbon removal. Industry.

Charm says its advantage is that its scheme is decentralized. Other companies are building large plants to suck carbon dioxide from the air or sea. They need land (or offshore real estate) for their facilities to get started. And then they face lengthy permitting processes for pipelines carrying the CO2 to special storage wells.

CHARM has a fleet of equipment and bio-oil tankers. It plans to inject the bio-oil into industrial waste left behind from oil and gas exploration or into more common wells used for old salt caves.

Still, the startup will face its own set of challenges at scale. The reactors that are used to heat waste products in the absence of oxygen, called pyrolyzers, certainly aren’t easy to come by — the company plans to build several of them itself. It must also ensure that none of its wells leak bio-oil before the material eventually hardens into rock, although Reinhardt says bio-oil is not as buoyant as oil, gas or pure CO2. And it’s less likely to go back up. surface.

Crucially, Charm will have to check its math to ensure that its process is actually leading to negative emissions. That means cutting your own emissions from running reactors and driving trucks. And its process is really only effective as a climate strategy if the wood and plant material the company collects was going to burn or rot without Charm to do something with it. For example, if farmers were going to use crop waste as additional feed for cattle, they may now have to buy feed which could become a more carbon-intensive option.

All of this certainly makes business sense – and carbon removal is still prohibitively expensive across industry. The $53 million deal breaks down to about $473 per ton of CO2 today. This already includes huge discounts; Potential customers can find quotations on Charm’s website for close to $600 per ton (compared to what it costs to suck CO2 directly from the air).

At these prices, companies are unlikely to make a big dent in their climate pollution. For perspective, one of the attraction’s potential customers could pay $6,000 a month to capture 10 metric tons of CO2—the equivalent of offsetting just three flights from New York to London. And even though Charm is scaling up with this deal to capture 112,000 metric tons of CO2 for a group of companies — it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the carbon footprint of Meta, one of those new customers. . Meta’s carbon footprint 5.7 million metric tons in 2021.

With this kind of carbon accounting, some environmental advocates are wary of companies turning to carbon removal instead of clean energy. There is no substitute for trapping a little CO2 in order to reduce how much pollution they create by burning fossil fuels in the first place. And Reinhardt agrees.

“Okay, I think it’s a wrong choice, but if that’s what you’re going to focus on first, you should absolutely focus on cutting,” he says.