These are welcome news. Seems like a small company in short amount of time was able to develop and validate carbon removal. Stripe's commitment helped them do this, which is great. I wish them further successes in making the process cheaper and faster.
I would love to see this model made feasible with a carbon tax, so that companies that couldn't meet a carbon goal could just buy their way down artificially or pay the government the taxes.
The best way to ruin a well run industry is introducing taxes. Just let it be. We've endured 25 years of BS to get this far and all the taxes in the world didn't help.
there should be no “but” in this sentence - the libertarian approach would be to allow anyone to pollute as much as they want as long as they clean up the pollution afterwards (or pay for cleanup :) )
Not sure it’s about cynicism as much as about understanding what's going on.
The amount of CO2 sequestered is about 80 cars/year worth, and I’m not sure if that accounts for the thermal decomposition reactions, transport, or other steps involved with bio oil production. (Worth noting the “bio oil” is not a usable product, as Charmful says on their website it’s a waste product they’re burying in the ground.)
Say they had 1MM Stripes, operating at 10^6 scale, e.g. 80,000,000 cars worth, it would still actually make no difference, reducing yearly global CO2 output on the rough magnitude of .000001%.
Carbon removal is early in the development cycle and needs rapid acceleration to be able to become more efficient and scalable.
However often the cost overshadows this need and companies choose the greenwashing "carbon credits" approach to save $$s which blocks the progress.
Nobody can live a life without being responsible for some carbon emissions at the moment. Even if we could, there is still an excess of CO₂ already present that we need to remove.
As someone working in carbon removal, this milestone is a big deal. Congrats to the Charm team on hitting this milestone!
I hosted an interview at AirMiners with Shaun, Charm's Chief Scientist, last June right after they received the purchase order from Stripe here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0k0ioXqkM
The conversation included 3 of the other Stripe finalists (Vesta, Climeworks, and CarbonCure, who just won the Carbon XPRIZE), plus Ryan from Stripe.
One thing I've been curious about -- I've got a few hundred acres of forest land, and I'm maintaining it in a natural state, but that still involves regular thinning/removal of biomass. I've wondered if there's a way to connect with someone like Charm (or any other company) to figure out how to supply biomass for their processes.
Maybe it's too small scale -- a few hundred acres doesn't produce that much timber. Or too distant. Or something. But I have no idea how to even start reaching out about it.
I'm looking at doing something similar (in Scotland) and am investigating the possibility of a small, on-site bio-char reactor.
Without a huge amount of research so far my high level plan is to convert waste bio-mass into biochar to sequester the carbon and then use the biochar as a fertiliser; for drainage etc. As long as it doesn't get burned then it should also work as a carbon sink.
I've considered this too, and honestly considered exiting the software industry to dive into this space. But I haven't really sat down and done the legwork yet.
Here's a few answers from folks so far:
- Check out Takachar, might be along these lines: https://www.takachar.com/
- Distance to transport the biomass matters a lot as well, so need to find something that makes sense closer to you than shipping biomass around the world
Interesting. Looks a long ways away (I'm in the Seattle/Pacific Northwest neck of the woods.) I wonder if the universities around here have any ideas though.
I'm excited for technologies like this to become available for regular individuals. I'm not sure what the current figure is, but in 2008 the average American was responsible for 20 tons of co2 every year[1]. At $600/ton[2], that's roughly a $12,000/yr unpaid externality on the American lifestyle.
It's likely that even with incredibly aggressive elimination of co2 waste, several economic sectors will continue to produce significant amounts of co2, and we'll need sequestration to make up the difference.
$600 per ton is how much they are paying to remove it, not how much the externality is. Economists like Nordhaus (who won a Nobel for his work) who have done empirical work to quantify the level of externality have estimated $50-70 a ton as more reasonable numbers.
The German government (the Umweltbundesamt) recommends between 195€/ton and 680€/ton in 2020, depending on the discounting function, with costs increasing to 250-765€/ton in 2050 [1]. The error bars on these estimates are terribly large because we don't know the CO2 sensitivity very precisely and we also disagree on which discounting function we should use to value damage in the future. Imo, tying the price of carbon to the price of atmospheric carbon removal is the most reasonable thing to do.
Yes, it includes things like sea level rise. Having said that, the giant knob hiding in the math is the discount rate. If you have $1 of damage in 2121, how much are you willing to pay today to avoid it? $1? $0.01?
Discount rates are usually in the 4.5-6% range. On the lower end, that means damage 100 years out is discounted 80x+. Most of the hefty damage from climate change happens from 2060 onward in most models, so the NPV to society not actually that high (yet). You also have to decide if society will allow geoengineering (e.g. stratospheric calcite, or something that fairly harmless by contrast but politically charged today) when things get really bad.
(Realistically, that will likely happen because the alternative is much worse, so do you price that in? Something like stratospheric aerosols can turn back the clock for a significant fraction of damage (minus OA and some other nastiness))
Anyway, the $50/ton number is intentionally framed as a purely economic one, and it's acknowledged that not all externalities are captured, so you may want to pick a different number.
Also, as an aside, $600/ton isn't where the market is going, and not something to anchor on. I hope pyrolysis+sequestration, which has a lot of benefits, will get to a low cost point. They'll be competing with things in the $50-150/ton range, with various levels of scalability.
It did include sea levels and it doesn’t use any arbitrary cutoff, it uses discounting. Incidentally, standard macro discounting rates mean that things a century from now are worth very little compared to the same things today, so if you were to cut off at 2100 it wouldn’t change too much.
So that means that if the technology gets 10x cheaper then it'll be economically viable for the affected parties to pay for carbon sequestration. Charm says they think $45/ton is achievable. I guess the conclusion is that climate change will be solved in a few years?
Lol the whole concept of externalities is an economic one. It is the idea that a transaction you engage in has effects on people outside the transaction. And when this will occur in the future by definition forecasts (not of economics, of the effects) must be used to estimate it
Perhaps a naive question but what is the carbon overhead of the removal. And is that taken into consideration? edit: am I right in calculating that the average American citizen would need to purchase the 7 Eur plan 170+ times over to make themselves carbon neutral for a year
It’s certainly a good question. They may have done that analysis themselves, but I haven’t seen it.
And yes it’s about $20,000 USD per year to account for the average american’s emissions. I’m actually cheered that this is a good deal less than average GDP per capita. So as the tech scales the costs are at least possible to pay. It would be much worse if the costs exceeded GDP.
Meanwhile, buying a smaller subscription provides funds to help scale the technology which should lower costs. This is Stripe’s goal with Stripe Climate.
> According to them, the grey emissions for the construction, operation and deconstruction of a Climeworks machine are less than 10% of the captured carbon dioxide with the use of waste heat and renewable electricity. Our goal is to reduce this to 4%.
(Apparently this is most practical in Iceland because of the abundant geothermal energy there.)
The "grey carbon" (or emissions produced for the removal) are taken into account yes. Climeworks works with a geothermal power plant in Iceland for sustainable power to limit the CO₂ produced and only sells the "net negative emisssions" (so calculated after subtracting the emissions produced in the process)
CarbonPlan is doing a great job bringing transparency here by analyzing and publishing proposals to the major carbon removal programs to date (Stripe and Microsoft): https://carbonplan.org/research/cdr-database
That is a bit like suggesting everyone buy enough storage to digitize all of their photos at high resolution in 1990. It would have cost thousands per person. With scale this should get substantially cheaper and more realistic.
You can buy it (carbon removal via Charm) as part of a portfolio of carbon removal (including Climeworks - another Stripe partner - and Greensand, an already active equivalent of Project Vesta) at https://carbonremoved.com
Edit: More info on the portfolio of removal partners
In the 1980s it cost 100000 dollars to launch a kg low Earth orbit, today it's 1000. [1]
In the 1970s solar cells cost 100 USD/Watt, today 0.2 USD/Watt. [2]
These napkin calculations are fairly meaningless on those time scales with emerging technologies, 30 years is a long time. In fact they don't even hold for this year. They finished delivering 150 tons in January of this year and the rest in march so that'd be 300 tons in 3 months.
>These napkin calculations are fairly meaningless on those time scales with emerging technologies
Not all technologies are subject to the same scaling laws and it is foolish to act as if they are. Carbon removal won't get 1000 times cheaper, because thermodynamics.
I don't find much value in these kind of out of hand dismissals.
Do you have industry knowledge or do you at least care to expand? The experts certainly seem to think they'll be able to get to scale, I think they'll be devastated to have to scrap it all and fire their teams of experts "because thermodynamics".
Carbon dioxide has a low concentration in the atmosphere, the atmosphere is really big, and diffusion is not a particularly fast process.
Adding to that, industrial processes tend to be big and heavy, and also take fossils fuels to make. Even the outputs of these processes are measured in tonnes of carbon
No less, whatever format you're storing the carbon in will be very energy dense, either via compression, or by chemically removing the oxygens.
So, there's limits to how quickly your apparatus can interact with new carbon molecules, on moving it to new carbon molecules, and on making sure the products of you apparatus stay sequestered.
If they're thinking they can scale, it's by setting up on top of carbon emitters, but doing that is net carbon positive(some will leak, and carbon emitters will continue to scale up), rather than negative
It won't get 1000x cheaper in terms of energy inputs, no. There are many different things you could do to make it economically 1000x cheaper, though. Redefine the US dollar in units of sequestered carbon, for instance. Self-replicating carbon sequestration units, if you like science fiction. Etc etc
Technically you need someone to cut the tree down, turn it into a stable form of carbon (say biochar), and bury it. Otherwise most (all?) of the carbon captured will be released fairly quickly after the tree dies.
Does anyone know the rough cost per /tonne? I doubt Stripe is investing much.
a 100% increase in volume doesn't sound ridiculous to me. zoom alone grew revenue over 100% in like a month - dumb example but there are lots of others. The triple, triple, double, double, double unicorn formula is widely marketed as another example.
There would surely be scale efficiencies in all these techniques too?
I think we are past catastrophe at this point and even with your math that sounds like more of a win than I would have guessed!
We have spent Trillions in the last year on stimi. that could have been targeted for dual purpose... and especially the proposed infrastructure bill should be changed but that would be another longgg thread.
Just trying to argue a point that even 'small' and maybe even not feasible at the moment ideas need to be actively pursued and scaled when they work, even if not as efficient as a HN engineer's dream we need to have basically an immediate all out war to fight climate catastrophe at this point.
Do this on 1000 different ideas and spend much bigger much faster we might stand a chance..
Stripe bought 416 tons at $600/ton [0] and Shopify has committed $5million annually[1] to carbon removal (including Charm at what I presume is a similar price point)
I am heavily bullish at the growth of carbon removal. Not as an excuse to continue emitting but as a growing awareness of necessity to restore more natural CO₂ levels.
It's truly the only way we'll be able to curve carbon emissions and CO2 ppms. We need a carbon tax now, to create a framework for companies to become accountable for their emissions.
Thanks very interesting. I agree. And if we end up killing our civilation maybe we'll be burying new oil for some future peoples to get similar explosive growth from basically free energy - and hope they learn from our mistakes ;)
Though seems like a tree can easily be more than a tonne and way cheaper than that. Even if worried about keeping the carbon in the forest could bury it too!
Depending on investment, greater than 100% growth is not necessarily absurd. The article is about the carbon capturing capability of a single, essentially PoC plant. Carbon Engineering is building a plant that will -- according to their own press release, anyway -- capture up to a megaton of carbon annually (https://carbonengineering.com/our-story/)
Either way, it remains to be seen how effective carbon capture plants will be. A lot depends on investment and proving a business model. Renewables have the upper hand on fossil fuels now, because they solve a proven business problem, cheaper. Carbon capture companies have to prove that there's even a market for their services. Although, some would advocate for a Keynesian approach to building out mass DaC infrastructure funded directly from federal spending.
Changing agricultural practices probably has a better outlook for carbon sequestration at the moment.
> ‘ Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not “additional”’
I was imagining that this would be the case. I was reading about pine farms being paid to halt harvesting. My very first thought was “I wonder if it makes sense to buy forested land to make a profit.” Clearly other people have already thought the same thing.
This seems so silly - is this really how credits work?
A fully grown forest won’t be removing any more CO2 (I assume the plant mass doesn’t keep growing without bound). Cutting the pine, replanting it, and using it to build homes and furniture would. Why can’t we make credits based on net CO2 change?
Purchasing this type of carbon removal potentially has a massive second order effects if it helps encourage big unit cost reductions like what happened for solar. The Collinsons have talked a lot about creating the conditions for progress so I wonder how intentional this is.
I dislike the idea of trading carbon credits because it implicitly assumes that all the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions is reversible. Sure, on a long enough time scale, it is a chemical process where the carbon dioxide emitted today is captured back into the ground. However, the loss of animal and plant life and the negative impacts on human beings are not reversible within the timespans of relevant entities. A family that loses their home because of rising sea levels submerging their home will likely never live in that home ever again in their lifetime.
I find it weird that one company can trade away a taxpayer-funded subsidy allocated to them another company and claim it as a profit. On what basis was the subsidy granted to the first company in the first place?
> I dislike the idea of trading carbon credits because it implicitly assumes that all the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions is reversible. Sure, on a long enough time scale, it is a chemical process where the carbon dioxide emitted today is captured back into the ground. However, the loss of animal and plant life and the negative impacts on human beings are not reversible within the timespans of relevant entities. A family that loses their home because of rising sea levels submerging their home will likely never live in that home ever again in their lifetime.
Paying that family for the economic value of their home is not a complete replacement for the lost home. But it's a hell of a lot better than giving them nothing, which seems to be the usual alternative. Tradeable carbon credits seem to be the least-bad option that's actually workable.
This seems like such an ass-backwards approach. They're making oil and injecting it into the ground using and old oil well. Wouldnt it be way better to just pay Saudi Arabia/Norway to NOT to pump this much oil out of the ground?
Having someone actively put oil “back in the ground”, actually really helps the narrative and ongoingly highlights the hypocrisy you speak of. It’s a next step.
Yeah so long as it is stable low energy per Carbon is a feature and not a bug. Not only is it less dangerous for energetic reasons but it means producing it is more energy efficient.
That is a weird sort of anti-symmetry. If we burn novel carbon fuel it is better to burn energy dense ones (natural gas vs coal) but if we want to sequester it the filthiest fuel for the energy is best in the situation.
How do you do that? Are you paying them to shut the pumps down for X hours? What if the rest of their demand remains constant? I don't see how this can possibly work.
Maybe they are already not pumping this much. Just discount it 20% from any number. It’s free carbon removal by your proposal. They’d fleece you if you offer that payment to them lol. You’d never be able to track it
> Conscious consumers and companies are moving towards engineered carbon removals after carbon registries, verification bodies and trusted brands have sold fraudulent carbon offsets with abandon. Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not “additional”, meaning nothing happens as a result of the carbon offset purchase. This has triggered a momentous shift towards permanent removals beginning in 2019 with Stripe’s landmark carbon removal RFP, followed by Shopify’s later in 2019 and then Microsoft’s in 2020.
This is in fact the central idiocy of oil burning: we will have to put it back into the ground, at great cost.
However there is no good way to buy the rights to permanent sequestration of a given oil resource. It would, however, be optimal to tax oil burning from stored reserves.
Or better yet, tax the daylights out of oil so oil producers don't have incentive to produce? But as others mentioned, we can also pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
If you (probably in this case "you" means some government) actually tax the daylights out of oil, then your population will riot, remove you from power and reverse the tax before it has had any meaningful impact.
"Gilets jaunes" riots two years ago were caused in part by a relatively minor fuel tax increase. Actually taxing oil so much as to significantly reduce its consumption would be a huge impact on population and cause much larger resistance, probably violent.
Cars will increasingly become electric and power stations will increasingly become clean. The inconvenience will minimize. Anyway, i’m the united states it matters relatively little what ordinary people want, it matters what businesses want, which is presumably the biggest reason we don’t have a carbon tax or any other sensible environmental policy.
I don't really know the subject, think it's called "Carbon sequestration"? Your "making oil and injecting it into the ground" made me curious, and it does seem like a grand simplification of what's happening.
No, because the oil isn't fungible. We're getting high quality, grade-A organic, family-owned oil out of the ground and putting the bottom of the barrel sludge back in.
I feel like the covid pandemic has definitively answered the question "What's better, government policy and collective action, or a small well-capitalized group implementing a technological solution?"
Efforts like this are the only way we make a dent in climate change.
Self plug but I have seen people saying they wish they could also support Charm and other carbon removal methods.
Please check out Carbon Removed[0] which offers negative emissions subscriptions and one-time purchases. We are partnered with Charm Industrial and Climeworks (as well as others) and aim to offer a removal portfolio.
We do this for two reasons:
1) To support the progression of as many different removal methods as possible. There is no "silver bullet" when it comes to fighting the climate crisis and we will need tech based carbon removal - we're past the point that nature can do this on her own.
2) To make carbon removal more affordable - as somebody rightfully calculated, removing the average US footprint (16 tons) would cost around $16,000 purely with Climeworks and $9,600 purely with Charm. We spread the removal across expensive tech and cheaper natural methods to help lower the cost.
Happy to discuss carbon removal and offer custom plans if you want to contact me directly: Email me @ "ewan at (@) carbon removed dot (.) com"
I had actually been looking at things like Climeworks recently, and your service looks like an interesting portfolio. Although it is heavily weighted towards planting trees, and I think that turned me off to it initially.
Do you plan to offer any larger subscription plans as self service? Your Gold subscription is only 6 tons of the average 16 ton footprint. And then a family being multiples of that. While you could make one time purchases over time, it would be nice to have more options. Even a 'make you own' plan of sorts. Specify what you want to offset annually and pay in monthly installments.
Are you getting a lot of subscribers? I think one other thing that had me hesitant was only having removed 121 tons so far. Seemed pretty new and unused, and was not sure how sustainable the model was. If that makes sense. Although now I realize the numbers in my head are probably off because you are calculating the trees over time, and its only been about a year since you started, so they have a lot of time left in them.
FYI the first two links in your Transparency sheet are bad, one asks for a login and one seems dead.
I'm actually both happy and sad that the weighting of trees puts you off a little. Happy because it shows you know and value the active carbon removal, sad that you're a little deterred from using the product.
We did initially start with a much higher weighting towards Climeworks & Charm however the high costs were not gratefully received hence why we do add a stronger weighting to cheaper forestation. To give you an idea, without forestation (and an equal split between Climeworks, Charm and Greensand) the 500kg/month plan would be $500-600/month...
Our subscriber base is growing 1-5 subscribers each month and we're seeing a growing interest as people look for alternatives to carbon credits. At the moment neither founder takes a salary as all money is reinvested into developing the product, educating on carbon removal and spreading the word.
Thank you for the heads up on the transparency sheet. We recently shuffled things about and I had not noticed them, I shall fix them today.
If you are interested in purchasing a custom plan please feel free to email me your requirements and I shall get back to you with a price.
Sorry if I'm missing something obvious here. You say that, without forestation, cost would be ~$1k per tonne. From the article, Stripe paid $600 per tonne. Where is this difference coming from? Did they get a 40% discount from Charm?
I believe that is averaged across the other three methods? If you get the subscription from Climeworks its $1200 for 1100kg. And I do assume Stripe got a first mover / bulk discount. Although greensand looks like its only $50 per ton, so maybe that is not included in the the average.
Great work! Thank you. I see that you are structured as a GmbH in Switzerland. Does Switzerland have a similar concept to the gGmbH (German Wikipedia: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeinnützige_GmbH) which might help saving on Tax while still running a for-profit business?
It's interesting to compare this (creating bio oil and injecting into the ground) to using ethanol in gas, which many people seemed to have concluded was/is a wasteful endeavor.
It'd be funny if at some point they concluded, 'storing this is much less efficient than burning it as fuel. Let's just burn it instead of petroleum based oils!'
I don't fully understand you so I'm going to assume you meant a sequestration process that captures CO2 as bio oil. If we capture existing CO2 and then burn it again to produce CO2, that's just re-circulation (from an ecological pov; pollution is a different story). Growing new crops to then burn it very likely adds new CO2 - not per se, but because these crops would/could only replace existing crops - which simply moves elsewhere or trees/forestland and not result in afforestation.
Also, if our goal is reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, not just keep the balance, we need permanent sequestration.
Unfortunately carbon is only one of the overconsumption caused problems we have. When that's fixed (I have no doubt that us with bourgeois lifestyles will add pressure to tech) we're still facing a crapton of other greed and selfishness created issues. Self reflection is not one of the best qualities in our species.
Which carbon registry and third party verifiers confirmed the removal? This marketing piece doesn't actually point to any project details / offset protocols / verifiers etc.
FWIW believe in carbon offsets but have deep skepticism about geologic storage (go see Aliso canyon as an example of geologic storage gone awry).
Still, you could burn that fuel in a power plant instead of e.g. natural gas, and that would offset much more CO2 than what you can shoot into space. It's just not an efficient use of energy, and any large quantities energy saved or not generated has a pretty direct impact on the CO2 that we could not produce.
I know they make a point in reasoning "why not landfill?" but I have to wonder if "injecting our magic bio-oil deep underground" just sounded better to the VCs vs "we we just friggin' buried the corn husks."
On a serious note...that's not a bad idea. I will need to find out why that's the case (although I imagine it's something to do with the pyrolysis leaving a more stable and predictable carbon-rich mass rather than leaving the degradation to nature)
"Others are working on this method. The landfills are expensive to dig, the geology is critically important, and we don’t believe the capacity to be as scalable or as permanent as injecting carbon-containing liquid into deep geological storage. The conversion of biomass into bio-oil via pyrolysis results in a liquid form with a higher carbon density, and is more easily handled, transported, and injected into existing wells."
Burying biomass produces methane as it anaerobically decomposes. I'd imagine that capturing that is fairly challenging compared to (essentially) burning the biomass and separating out the carbon.
Biomass can be pyrolized to produce flammable gas, charcoal/biochar, "wood vinegar", and a few other byproducts in a process that produces surplus energy. As long as you have biomass feedstock coming in, you can produce highly concentrated solid or liquid carbon on the far side and get energy out as power.
Biochar, the solid product of pyrolized biomass, is considered a beneficial soil amendment (it's basically elemental carbon -- like what you'd get in a charcoal filter). It's probably not a good idea to breathe it though.
I'm not sure about bio-oil specifically, as it contains much more of the tar-like compounds. It's likely it contains benzene and other compounds. I found this in a cursory google search: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/37779.pdf
Notably the dose makes the poison as well. If just "helps plants grow" was enough to be an environmental good then fertilizer run off would be a good thing.
To be fair the US is a bigger problem than India, and is only a smaller problem than China by virtue of having a far smaller population. The US is the second largest source of CO2 emissions in the world, and per capita is higher than both of those countries.
However, building these technologies may help everyone reduce net CO2 emissions.
USA has close to a double per capita emission of CO2 compared to China. If you're worried about total emissions by a country, then I have a great proposal in which we divide China in 10 countries to effectively make their CO2 emissions completely irrelevant!
The US is absolutely nowhere near India's carbon emissions, nor China's. And none of the famously popular proposals such as Paris even address it.
It's cool, they already serve as our garbage dumps and contain the toxic waste that fuels your iPhone. Just saying the USA isn't anywhere near the peak of the problem.
why would you say things that are so easily disproven with a 30sec google search?
in 2017, the US emitted 5Gt, the EU 3.5, and india 2.5. india's also got a billion more people than the US.
to make matters worse, these are attributional, not consumptive emissions. that is, if a US consumer orders a product made in india, the emissions from the creation of that product are attributed to india, and the emissions from shipping it are attributed to a global shipping counter. even though US demand and US consumption are responsible for those emissions, US emissions don't increase.
Well the numbers are all over, depending on what you look at. The number you quoted, which references EU report that I believe quotes CO2 emissions due to direct fossil fuel emission, and doesn't account for product use (which the US outsources to other countries, primarily China) and indirect emissions.
Have a play with the CO2 emissions data from OurWorldInData[0]. 416 tons is not to be sniffed at although it is small in the grand scheme of things.
The biggest benefit by Stripe purchasing carbon removal is the increase in awareness, funding and acceleration of research. It takes a lot for a company to buck the trend of $5/ton carbon credit greenwashing and invest $600/ton into active carbon removal.
These are welcome news. Seems like a small company in short amount of time was able to develop and validate carbon removal. Stripe's commitment helped them do this, which is great. I wish them further successes in making the process cheaper and faster.