Charm Industrial – the company using agricultural residues to produce bio-oil and sequester it, announced a major milestone that will help accelerate the deliveries of its carbon credits. Charm has raised $100 million in its latest Series B funding round led by General Catalyst.
It also announced that as of June 7th, 2023, it has managed to deliver 6,209 tons of carbon removal. Charm Industrial is rapidly expanding operations boosted by new record-breaking deals with Frontier and JPMorgan Chase for the delivery of additional 140,000 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide removed via bio-oil sequestration.
Relevant: Frontier Signs $53M In Carbon Offtake Agreements With Charm Industrial
The funding will go towards accelerating operations in the US and carbon removal deliveries. Other investors that took part in the round were also Lowercarbon, Exor Ventures, Kinnevik, Thrive Capital and Elad Gil.
“After deploying increasingly advanced pilot processes in 2021 and 2022, we began ramping up in 2023. Our primary focus is expanding bio-oil production and transport capacity, and since the beginning of the year we’ve increased tons of carbon removal delivered per week 5x,” explains the company in its investment announcement.
Charm opened a second site in Fort Lupton, Colorado in 2022, responsible for biomass processing R&D, bio-oil gasification, forward-deployed pyrolysis testing and operations. It plans to ramp up operations in Colorado and expand its lone pyrolyzer into a continent-wide fleet of tens of thousands of pyrolyzers.
Relevant: Charm Marks A Carbon Removal Milestone – 5,000 Tons Of CO2 Equivalent Delivered
“Each Charm pyrolyzer will produce bio-oil for sequestration and improve the soil with biochar. By 2050, we need roughly 10 billion tons per year of carbon removal, which will require 70% year over year growth for the next 27 years (twice as fast as software),” also states the company.
Charm’s technology involves converting agricultural residues into bio-oil through a process known as fast pyrolysis. The biomass is put in a pyrolysis unit and heated at very high temperatures (> 500° C) in the absence of oxygen for a matter of seconds to produce bio-oil. The bio-oil then gets injected into EPA-regulated wells or salt caverns where it remains permanently sequestered.
Charm uses small, mobile pyrolysis units that can be deployed near farms or in forestry settings, close to where agriculture or forestry residues are collected to reduce transportation and capital costs. The use of distributed pyrolysis units rather than centralized biomass processing plants can drive down the costs of this process in the long run.
