Let me try to offset the cynicism here.<p>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.
As someone working in carbon removal, this milestone is a big deal. Congrats to the Charm team on hitting this milestone!<p>I hosted an interview at AirMiners with Shaun, Charm's Chief Scientist, last June right after they received the purchase order from Stripe here:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0k0ioXqkM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0k0ioXqkM</a><p>The conversation included 3 of the other Stripe finalists (Vesta, Climeworks, and CarbonCure, who just won the Carbon XPRIZE), plus Ryan from Stripe.<p>For those of you interested in more details, Charm has a blog post about their process here:
<a href="https://charmindustrial.com/blog/2019/3/17/making-grass-flow-like-water" rel="nofollow">https://charmindustrial.com/blog/2019/3/17/making-grass-flow...</a><p>Congrats again, and cheers to many more.
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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.h...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases" rel="nofollow">https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases</a>
Random unverified search: 1ppm is 7.8x10^9. Just say 300ppm is reasonable. Currently 417ppm.<p>7.8x10^11 tonnes of Carbon to remove from the atmosphere to return to “normal” (Handwavy approximations)<p>This was 4.16x10^2, in, let’s just say 12 months.<p>Assuming an absurd 100% increase in volume year over year... they’ll drop the carbon ppm by 1 after... 24 years.<p>Not meant to doom/gloom, just curious.
> ‘ Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not “additional”’<p>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.
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.<p>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?
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?
Self plug but I have seen people saying they wish they could also support Charm and other carbon removal methods.<p>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.<p>We do this for two reasons:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Happy to discuss carbon removal and offer custom plans if you want to contact me directly: Email me @ "ewan at (@) carbon removed dot (.) com"<p>* [0] <a href="https://carbonremoved.com" rel="nofollow">https://carbonremoved.com</a>
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.<p>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!'
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.<p>FWIW believe in carbon offsets but have deep skepticism about geologic storage (go see Aliso canyon as an example of geologic storage gone awry).
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."
416 tons of CO2e is what... The amount emitted by a single family in a few days?<p>I reckon I could turn my thermostat back a few degrees and save that.