Putting (Bio)Oil Back Underground

Charm Industrial converts waste biomass into bio-oil by briefly heating it to high temperatures in an oxygen-free chamber through a process called pyrolysis. The resulting bio-oil can then be injected into orphan (decommissioned) oil wells, where it solidifies, stored securely for thousands of years. Charm only uses waste biomass—such as corn stover, leaves, & stalks— for its pyrolysis process, which would otherwise rot or burn and emit carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Therefore, Charm’s process uses abundant and low-cost waste products and leverages existing infrastructure; this means that the solution can rapidly scale.

Charm’s carbon removals will have significant local environmental benefits by helping to avoid agricultural waste incineration and wildfires in high-risk areas through efficient on-site biomass processing. Payments to farmers for waste biomass improve their profits and Charm’s partners in oil field services have been delighted to deploy their underground well operational knowledge and geological talents to try and reverse climate change. Additionally, Charm is exploring ways of contributing to wildfire fuel reduction by processing woody biomass into bio-oil with various forest management partners throughout the US.

In the future, at a large enough scale of bio-oil production, Charm will be able to use bio-oil as an input into steel making that avoids the use of new fossil fuels while still capturing emissions and removing them from the atmosphere. Charm is actively commercializing this technology in addition to scaling its bio-oil production operations.

The United States alone has over 39 million hectares of corn production, and stover makes up nearly half of the yield of a corn crop. In addition to the massive mitigation potential of corn stover, there’s significant potential for this technology to process other forms of biomass waste such as sawdust, wood-chips, and nutshells for bio-oil production. A byproduct of Charm’s bio-oil production is biochar, which Charm plans to return to the farmer’s fields and forest floor to support nutrient replenishment and eventually reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers.

The production of bio-oil is well-established as a highly additional and highly permanent form of carbon removal. Support for this project helps validate and scale up this new technology, stimulating a growing carbon removal industry, and increasing the probability of successfully decarbonizing steel production in the future. CO2 is especially excited about the potential to quantify the many co-benefits of the project, and the application of the technology to steelmaking.