Story by Katie Brigham of Heatmap:
Does anyone know more about this? Seems like if you turn it into bio-oil, there might be more useful things to do with it than injecting underground. Injecting underground might also create environmental concerns. My advice to technology developers: always keep in mind “what if I had to write an EIS for this application?”
Deep in Inyo National Forest in the Eastern Sierra Nevada are a couple of bright white domed tents protecting an assemblage of technical equipment and machinery that, admittedly, looks a bit out of place amidst the natural splendor. Surrounding shipping containers boast a large “Charm Industrial” logo, an indication that, yes, the U.S. Forest Service is now working with the well-funded carbon removal startup in a two-for-one endeavor to reduce wildfire risk and permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere.
The federal agency and its official nonprofit partner, the National Forest Foundation, have partnered with San Francisco-based Charm on a pilot program to turn leftover trees and other debris from forest-thinning operations into bio-oil, a liquid made from organic matter, to be injected underground. The project is a part of a larger Cal Fire grant, to implement forest health measures as well as seek out innovative biomass utilization solutions. If the pilot scales up, Charm can generate carbon removal credits by permanently locking away the CO2 from biomass, while the Forest Service will finally find a use for the piles of leftover trees that are too small for the sawmill’s taste.
“It’s actually pretty shocking how big the backlog of wildfire fuel reduction projects is in the United States,” Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO at Charm, told me. “The pattern of putting out fires as much as possible, as quickly as possible, has created just an enormous amount of fuel in our forests that has to be treated one way or another.” Controlled burns and forest thinning are the primary ways of dealing with this fuel buildup, but as Reinhardt explained to me, California has few pellet mills, and thus few offtakers for leftover wood. What’s left often ends up being burned in a big pile.
That’s common at Inyo, which is considered a “biomass utilization desert,” according to Katlyn Lonergan, a program coordinator with the National Forest Foundation. NFF is paying Charm a nominal fee to take the waste biomass off their hands, though not nearly enough to constitute a primary source of revenue for the company.
At this point, funding isn’t a problem at Charm. Last year, the company announced a $100 million Series B round and received a $53 million commitment from Frontier, the Big Tech-led carbon removal initiative, to permanently remove 112,000 tons of CO2 between 2024 and 2030, the coalition’s first offtake agreement. At the time, Charm had delivered over 6,000 tons of removal, “more than any other permanent CDR supplier to date,” the group wrote. Since then, the company has received an additional $50,000 from the Department of Energy and is currently in the running for a DOE carbon removal purchase prize of up to $3 million.
Charm’s process begins with woody biomass and an industrial chipper, after which the biomass is screened and dried. The chips are then rapidly heated in a low oxygen environment, a process called fast pyrolysis, which vaporizes the cellulose in the biomass. The remaining plant matter is then condensed into a liquid and injected thousands of feet underground.
Until now, the company has gotten more attention for its efforts to use agricultural biomass like corn stalks. But Reinhardt told me that lately, 100% of the company’s feedstock comes from “fuel load reduction projects,” — unhealthy trees that have been cut down — though in the future, it plans to source from both agricultural and forest waste. The change in feedstock prioritization, Reinhardt said, is due to wildfires becoming “a more and more urgent issue,” plus the advantages that come from working with denser materials. “Almost all the cost of biomass is in the logistics, and the cost of logistics is driven by density,” he said. Transporting puffy bales of corn stalks, leaves, and husks to Charm’s pyrolyzer is just not as energy efficient as trucking a log.
And because there are already plenty of piles of logs and residue sitting around in forests like Inyo, if Charm can bring its pyrolizers directly to the forest, it can increase efficiency still further. Bringing Charm’s operations onsite could eventually help the Forest Service save money, too. “The Eastern Sierra, it’s pretty isolated for this industry,” Lonergan told me. “And so we are actually hauling that [biomass] to Carson City, which is three and a half hours away.”
Fixing the agency’s transportation woes is a ways away though — Charm is starting small, processing just 60 tons of biomass over six weeks of operation in Inyo. The pilot is already more than halfway over.
Charm won’t be claiming carbon removal credits for this project, as Reinhardt told me it’s more a “demonstration of the production” to make sure the logistics work out. Scaling up will mean deploying larger pyrolyzers that can process significantly more biomass. “Our next iteration of pyrolyzers will be probably 10x the throughput,” Reinhardt told me. “So instead of 1 or one-and-a-half tons a day, about 10 to 15 tons a day.” Those numbers start to sound pretty darn small, though, when you consider the amount of forestry biomass and agricultural residue generated per year, which Reinhardt said is around 50 million tons and 300 million tons, respectively.
And while this particular project comprises 538 acres of forest, California alone has set a goal of thinning 1 million acres per year to reduce wildfire risk. Basically, Charm’s not going to run out of feedstock anytime soon, and the Forest Service isn’t going to find a quick fix for its piles and piles of unwanted wood. “I don’t envision it being the one solution that fits all,” Lonergan said of Charm’s technology. But, she told me, “it can absolutely contribute to these biomass materials that we don’t have an answer for yet.”
Instead of burying it, the energy-rich bio-oil might be used as a subsitute for bunker fuel in commercial shipping, instead of fossil bunker fuels. It would still be a relatively dirty fuel, but it wouldn’t emit fossil carbon. PLus, instead of paying big bucks to inject the bio-oil into the ground, shippers would pay for the bio-oil.
I’m suspicioning it’s transportation costs that would make it uneconomic (like many other uses). But maybe if the equipment to do it was movable to be onsite.. and then if they could sell carbon credits..
Thats real smart, remove what breaks down into topsoils feeding the biology of a forest.
The levels of insanity with experts is peaking.
For 30 years I have been hearing about on-site engineering fixes for the fuels mess we’ve created by removing frequent fire from ecosystems that depend on fire for health and persistence. Not long ago (2016 or so) there was a startup out of the Midwest with a different name, but an almost identical engineering scheme, that presented to our collaborative. They weren’t proposing to inject the oil into the the ground, they were proposing to truck the oil offsite and use it for power generation. They had a demo in Las Vegas and were shopping their idea around to collaboratives to see if they could find money for a pilot. A couple members went to see the demo and they did not come back impressed. Not that I am opposed to the concept, but I am skeptical there is an engineering fix to the problem that will pencil out.
I doubt it would be ‘beneficial’ to allow knobcone pines to dominate some of our western forests. They are ‘naturally’ extremely flammable and will aggressively seed back in after a wildfire. I’ve worked on projects which removed such trees, protecting the remaining high quality fire-resistant trees. We all know that some forests are at extreme risk of total loss. Are we supposed to pretend that overstocked forests which burn intensely turn out ‘great’?
This seems really familiar to the plans about a decade ago by Pioneer Forestry to make small diameter trees into jet fuel. This scheme was convincing enough to fool the Forest Service to issue one of the largest FS contracts ever under the Four Forest Restoration Initiative. Ultimately, it was too good to be true and it wasn’t economically viable. This one seems like it would rely completely on the value of sequestering the bio-oil to be successful at a larger scale, which brings up questions about whether carbon sequestration credits would be economically beneficial enough and if this does scale-up, what those impacts might look like.
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2013/four-forests-restoration-initiative-08-12-2013.html
“It’s a pipe dream to claim wood products from low-value pine forests can compete with Asian and South American companies with access to cheap materials and even cheaper labor,” said Todd Schulke with the Center for Biological Diversity.
I thought that that was pretty free-tradish for CBD. I suppose the same argument could be made for almost anything natural-resources oriented produced in the US. Not to forget, less stringent environmental standards. Which CBD is for..? Oh well. I agree that the tech didn’t pencil out but don’t think much of that argument.
I think the argument CBD was making is that FS should bite the bullet and fund ecological restoration rather than maintain the same model of depending on private industry.
Well, when it comes to extra woody material, it seems to me that removing it and using it would be better than burning it (air, carbon into atmosphere).
Using it, say to replace something that uses more carbon, or is more expensive, would be good.
The point is getting rid of it as economically and environmentally sensitively as possible.
When it comes to developing products, marketing them, and selling them to make money, some of which goes back to counties, states and feds, and some to workers, this seems like a good project for the private sector.
The FS doesn’t control funding, nor can it advocate for its own budgets. It is up to the whims of the US Congress.
Here’s an excerpt from an essay I wrote earlier this year:
A few years ago a forester friend said that the best way to capture carbon dioxide, or CO2, from the atmosphere and store it permanently would be to harvest lots of fast-growing trees, such as cottonwood, Douglas-fir, loblolly pine, or eucalyptus, and sink them in the deepest parts of the oceans. Wood is about half carbon (C) by weight. The cold salt water, he said, would prevent the logs from decomposing, thus sealing away the carbon in the wood forever. Plant more trees and repeat.
That would help slow down climate change, he opined, and might even create some new fish habitat.
Another forester chimed in with a different take: Although Forester No. 1’s plan would indeed store carbon away beneath the waves, the scheme addresses only part of the problem. It would be far better, said Forester No. 2, to use those fast-growing trees to make products that are substitutes for materials that result in carbon dioxide emissions during their manufacture (such as concrete and steel) or combustion (coal, oil, natural gas, propane, jet fuel, etc.).
I agree with Forester No. 2. According to a February 2023 article in Scientific American, cement and concrete production generates as much as nine percent of all anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 emissions (the article “Solving Cement’s Massive Carbon Problem,” describes efforts to address the issue). The production of steel results in another 8 percent to 11 percent of global CO2 emissions, according to multiple sources. The burning of fossil fuels for generating heat and power produces about one-quarter of CO2 emissions, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
In my view, the problem with the old “fast growing woody crops” problem has always been that where they grow best other things also grow, and annual plants don’t have the time at risk that even short term woody crops do. Farmers can switch every year between higher value annual crops.
Then there are the markets for different short rotation crops as in this 2012 paper by Don Rockwood:
“Short Rotation Woody Crop systems are promising for increasing productivity and extending uses beyond conventional pulpwood to applications such as windbreaks, dendroremediation, and energy wood.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258385749_History_and_Status_of_Eucalyptus_Improvement_in_Florida
History note: I reviewed research proposals maybe 25 or so years ago from the Forest Products Lab about the how markets for bioenergy could impact pulpwood markets and vice versa.
I’m curious as to what the true amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere would be as compared to the amount put into the ground when implementing this system.