The remainder was setting aside some forest in Indonesia, but it seemed pretty clear that there were no protections around the forest next door getting cut down or it burning up in fires that ravage Indonesia, etc.
The four of us set out on that journey in 2018: Shaun Meehan, Kelly Hering, Kevin Meissner and I.
One was that the biomass was much easier to transport if you first converted it into bio-oil at the source.
Yes, it started for me with offset purchases in 2016 and then 2017, a year of research, pre-founding, and then starting in 2018, we tried to build some machines, 2019 building more machines, and then at the end of 2019, Shaun had these two huge breakthroughs.
So, for example, the direct air capture summit hosted by Climeworks was just about a month ago in Zurich, and basically everyone in the carbon removal space was there.
And so I think there is this assumption that has taken hold, that fixing climate change is someone else’s problem to actually solve, that we should protest for someone else to fix the problem.
People overestimate how many people are working on the hardware, and overestimate how long it takes to get into it.
Up to 82% of them suffer from really significant leakage, so even if you do reduce emissions in one place, the emissions still happen somewhere else.
Even worse, the permanence of these traditional offsets is only 10 or 20 years.
We sell these super high quality carbon removal offsets at $600 a ton today, so it looks expensive, but it’s probably actually cheaper in reality.
But if you buy it at the edge of the field, after it’s been cut, raked, baled, wrapped, and moved to the edge of the field, it’s $65 a ton.
The key with our mobile bio-oil fleet approach is that you can eventually do the conversion to a pumpable, dense fluid as close as possible, starting at the field edge and maybe someday actually on the field, which means that you cut out all that transport cost, because the thing that you’re transporting now is five to ten times denser on an energy or carbon basis.
That much volume of bio-oil, if it was to be moved through a rail car fleet, would require the entire rail car fleet of the United States, 365 days a year, 24/7 to move enough bio-oil to get to a gigaton a year of impact.
We’re not anywhere close, you know, we just crossed 5,000 tons removed this past month, so it’s a long, long scaling curve to get there.
The latest IPCC report this year suggests that we need somewhere between 5 and 20 gigatons a year of carbon removal, depending on how quickly we start reducing our emissions.
But there are areas where it’s hard or expensive or where we just won’t get it done in time, and that is the role that carbon removals can play.
Other areas that I find really interesting are geothermal energy, fusion energy, I also am an aerospace nerd and really enthusiastic follower of SpaceX and Rocket Lab and so on.
So we’ve combined the most expensive capital with the most expensive manufacturing costs in the most expensive city, with the shortest possible lifetime.
Shift to proper manufacturing, in a lower cost location, with a reasonable lifetime 10x as long, funded by low-cost debt… all of those effects compound and bring the cost of the pyrolyzer in terms of per ton of CO2 down by an enormous factor.
And that identity doesn’t give you agency to build a fusion plant, doesn’t give you agency to go build a geothermal well, doesn’t give you agency to go figure out direct air capture or any of the other kinds of hardware.
There is only one other company, and I’m super proud of them, that has delivered, and that’s Climeworks, and that’s amazing.
How many articles have been written about direct air capture – many, many, many – we have to be super proud of Climeworks and I’m certainly super proud of Charm that actual tonnage has actually been delivered.
Unfortunately, through no-one’s fault, these rules only recognize pumping the molecule CO2 underground, and, quite reasonably, didn’t anticipate that there would be other compounds that embody CO₂ that could be pumped underground, like bio-oil.
That’s right, and all of these laws already have the concept of life cycle analysis because if you burn a bunch of energy to capture the CO₂ out of the atmosphere and then pump it underground, you still need to do a life cycle analysis to understand your net CO₂ impact.
That is an enormous, enormous employment opportunity and in most cases, it is a lot of the same people who know how to operate wells and know how to operate large plants and equipment and build all that stuff.
We went down for our first injection in Oklahoma in January, and when we were chatting with the guys in the railyard there, this is like a pretty conservative part of the country, we were a little uncomfortable at first since we’re all about climate change prevention, but we shared with them that they were helping put carbon back underground, and they were delighted.
The IPCC targets need us to get to hundreds of megatons by 2030 as an industry, and to gigatons by 2040, and 5 to 20 gigatons by 2050.
The way that manifests over the next couple of years is in building fleet capacity, pyrolyzer fleet capacity, and transitioning from operating first of kind pyrolyzers to operating building manufacturing and so on.
In 2019, that started to shift, climate tech became “in” again, and then in 2020, we had the distraction of COVID-19, but generally there was a lot of money flowing into climate.
It may have ups and downs, but over the next decade, it almost certainly needs to get hotter if this problem is going to get solved.
They are a solar deployment company that was founded on a financial structuring insight, where they found that they could, through some cleverness, sell tax equity and recycle corporate equity into debt financing and so on.
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