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upstart writes:

Alphabet and Meta are just a couple of the big names paying a startup to produce bio-oil as a way to trap CO2:

Some of the biggest names in tech have inked a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into a barbecue sauce ingredient and then pump the stuff underground to try to fight climate change.

That sounds wild, so let's break it down from the start. Alphabet, Meta, Stripe, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability launched a new climate initiative called Frontier about a year ago. The goal is to boost new technologies capable of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by convincing other companies to buy into them.

Today, a San Francisco-based climate tech startup called Charm Industrial announced that Frontier's founding members and a smattering of other companies have agreed to pay Charm a total of $53 million to capture and store 112,000 tons of carbon dioxide between 2024 and 2030.

Some of the biggest names in tech have inked a deal to turn corn stalks and tree trimmings into a barbecue sauce ingredient

Charm has an unconventional way of getting that done. First, it collects agricultural and forestry waste — i.e., discarded corn stalks or branches leftover from logging. Wherever it finds that stuff, it sends its fleet of flatbed semi trucks hauling reactors that heat up the waste to 500 degrees Celsius without burning it. That turns the waste into bio-oil, a tarry-looking carbon-rich liquid.

The watery part of the bio-oil is essentially the same thing as liquid smoke, an ingredient used to give barbecue sauce and other foods a smokey flavor, according to Charm CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt.

Bio-oil also holds the carbon dioxide that the plants or trees its made from absorbed for photosynthesis. Had those corn stalks or tree branches been disposed of by burning or simply left to rot, that CO2 would have escaped again — heating the planet along with all the other emissions that come from burning fossil fuels.

Trapped in the bio-oil, Charm Industrial thinks it can store the CO2 underground for thousands to millions of years to keep it from making climate change worse. That's how the startup can now sell carbon removal credits, representing tons of captured CO2, to companies that want to use its service to try to cancel out some of its own carbon dioxide pollution.

So far, Charm has successfully stored more than 6,100 metric tons of CO2 in the form of bio-oil. (A previous purchase from Microsoft, at 2,000 metric tons of CO2, is a big chunk of that.) So the deal announced today is a major escalation and a vote of confidence from Big Tech companies that have been early backers of the nascent carbon removal industry.

The advantage Charm says it has is that its plan is decentralized. Other companies are building big plants to suck carbon dioxide out of the air or sea. They need land (or offshore real estate) for their facilities, to start. And then they face lengthy permitting processes for pipelines transporting CO2 to specialized storage wells.

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