Back in 2011, he and two friends, Ilya Volodarksy and Calvin French-Owen, dropped out of their junior year at MIT to start a software company. Reinhardt, 34, has a classic Silicon Valley story. In the three years since Charm began this process in 2020, the company says it has sequestered about 6,400 tons of carbon, selling the service as carbon offsets. The bio-oil contains a high carbon concentration, which the plants originally pulled out of the atmosphere as they grew, and which would have been released back into the atmosphere had they been left to decompose. Then it heats up the waste until it turns into a slurry in a process called pyrolysis, and pumps the “bio-oil” down into abandoned oil wells, where the company says it will remain for more than 10,000 years. The largest, though, judging by the amount of carbon they’ve managed to sequester, is a San Francisco-based company called Charm Industrial.įounded in 2018, Charm specializes in gathering up leftover corn stalks and other unwanted biomass. Currently, those projects are only able to remove negligible amounts of carbon from the atmosphere-they would have to scale up to an almost unimaginable size to make a difference in the world’s emissions trajectory. Technologists seized on that imperative, with venture capitalists pouring money into startups attempting everything from sucking carbon out of the air with enormous fans to sinking carbon-rich biomass into the deep ocean. More and more scientists were saying that wrenching the world back onto a livable emissions trajectory would no longer just require halting carbon pollution, but also involve somehow finding a way to remove billions of tons of emissions from the atmosphere in the decades ahead. Decades of delay in cutting emissions had painted humanity into a corner. It happened though, that there was a new area of climate action well-suited to Silicon Valley’s interests.
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