Hello and welcome to the Strawman, the daily climate newsletter that’s like the smart friend whose homework you used to copy. We got you covered.

In today’s news we’re covering Charm Industrial which just announced a huge funding round for is innovative decarbonisation startup. More below.

Bio-Oil for Breakfast

This week, Charm Industrial announced a $100M Series B round led by General Catalyst. Aside from the big numbers, they assure us that they’re doing things differently, one corn cob at a time.

The founder of Charm, Peter Reinhardt, previously led Segment, a data startup that was acquired for $3.2B by Twilio. While at Segment, he was looking for options to offset the companies’ emissions. After seeing what was out there, he was so fed up with the quality of the offsets that he vowed to do something about it. We previously covered the low quality carbon offset industry here.

So what does Charm even do?

1. Convert waste biomass like corn stalks in to a liquid.

2. Pump said liquid deep underground.

3. …

4. Save the environment.

They then take these projects and sell them on to companies looking to offset their existing carbon emissions. Hopefully making big $$ in the process.

Typically this waste material is burned, thereby emitting high levels of CO2 back in to the air but with Charm’s intervention its stored safely in deep underground wells. On top of this, they’re looking in to repurposing this bio-oil as an input to green steel production, another space which contributes to a shocking ~7% of global climate emissions.

Charmed but still not convinced

With a history of crappy projects, carbon capture industry still has many critics and they’re hard to convince. Charm is looking to tackle these criticisms head on.

• Many carbon capture solutions lack transparency so Charm runs a public registry of all of their projects, it’s pretty cool and you can check it out here.

• Carbon capture solutions focused on planting trees struggle with their long-term viability, Charm claims their solutions are sequestered for 10,000 years. We probably won’t be around to verify that but it sounds like long enough…

• It’s tough to hit scale with these solutions but Charm has already onboarded a number of blue chip tech and finance companies including Stripe, Shopify, JP Morgan, and McKinsey.

To date, Charm’s delivered 6,200 tonnes of CO2 removal and they have already have agreements in place for 25 times this amount! It’s clear they’re here for a long (and a hopefully a good time too). We’ll need it.

Until next time,

The Strawman

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