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Charm delivers Stripe's carbon removal purchase ahead of schedule
- boringg 5y agoWhich carbon registry and third party verifiers confirmed the removal? This marketing piece doesn't actually point to any project details / offset protocols / verifiers etc. FWIW believe in carbon offsets but have deep skepticism about geologic storage (go see Aliso canyon as an example of geologic storage gone awry).
- salmonfamine 5y agoI've always wondered if we could find a way to shoot it into space.
- PhilipVinc 5y agoShooting the rocket would probably generate more CO2 then you are sending to space...
- gruez 5y agodepends on the rocket fuel. hydrogen or hydrazine doesn't produce co2 on combustion.
- salmonfamine 5y agoIf we get to a world with hydrogen-fueled rockets, we'll probably have much bigger dreams than just carbon sequestration.
- philipkglass 5y agoThe Delta IV Heavy is already fueled purely with hydrogen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy
- salmonfamine 5y agoWell I’ll be a buttered biscuit
- PeterisP 5y agoStill, you could burn that fuel in a power plant instead of e.g. natural gas, and that would offset much more CO2 than what you can shoot into space. It's just not an efficient use of energy, and any large quantities energy saved or not generated has a pretty direct impact on the CO2 that we could not produce.
- mvzvm 5y agoPR fluff piece?
- Judgmentality 5y agoIt's the corporate website, so yes.
- PradeetPatel 5y agoIf a corporation is doing something good, shouldn't they have the right to show it off to the rest of the world? It has been observed that this is a valid tactic to consolidate their reputation, and encourage others to follow in their footsteps.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> If a corporation is doing something good, shouldn't they have the right to show it off to the rest of the world? Yes, and people have the right to call it out as the PR fluff piece that it is.
- DivisionSol 5y agoRandom unverified search: 1ppm is 7.8x10^9. Just say 300ppm is reasonable. Currently 417ppm. 7.8x10^11 tonnes of Carbon to remove from the atmosphere to return to “normal” (Handwavy approximations) This was 4.16x10^2, in, let’s just say 12 months. Assuming an absurd 100% increase in volume year over year... they’ll drop the carbon ppm by 1 after... 24 years. Not meant to doom/gloom, just curious.
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- dillondoyle 5y agoDoes anyone know the rough cost per /tonne? I doubt Stripe is investing much. a 100% increase in volume doesn't sound ridiculous to me. zoom alone grew revenue over 100% in like a month - dumb example but there are lots of others. The triple, triple, double, double, double unicorn formula is widely marketed as another example. There would surely be scale efficiencies in all these techniques too? I think we are past catastrophe at this point and even with your math that sounds like more of a win than I would have guessed! We have spent Trillions in the last year on stimi. that could have been targeted for dual purpose... and especially the proposed infrastructure bill should be changed but that would be another longgg thread. Just trying to argue a point that even 'small' and maybe even not feasible at the moment ideas need to be actively pursued and scaled when they work, even if not as efficient as a HN engineer's dream we need to have basically an immediate all out war to fight climate catastrophe at this point. Do this on 1000 different ideas and spend much bigger much faster we might stand a chance..
- kisamoto 5y agoStripe bought 416 tons at $600/ton [0] and Shopify has committed $5million annually[1] to carbon removal (including Charm at what I presume is a similar price point) I am heavily bullish at the growth of carbon removal. Not as an excuse to continue emitting but as a growing awareness of necessity to restore more natural CO₂ levels. * [0] https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases * [1] https://www.shopify.com/about/environment/sustainability-fund https://www.shopify.com/about/environment/sustainability-fun...
- wedn3sday 5y agoThis seems like such an ass-backwards approach. They're making oil and injecting it into the ground using and old oil well. Wouldnt it be way better to just pay Saudi Arabia/Norway to NOT to pump this much oil out of the ground?
- m3kw9 5y agoMaybe they are already not pumping this much. Just discount it 20% from any number. It’s free carbon removal by your proposal. They’d fleece you if you offer that payment to them lol. You’d never be able to track it
- yaacov 5y agoThe idea is to figure how to do this cheaply now so that in the future when we have abundant clean energy we can deploy it at scale
- StavrosK 5y agoHow do you do that? Are you paying them to shut the pumps down for X hours? What if the rest of their demand remains constant? I don't see how this can possibly work.
- capableweb 5y agoI don't really know the subject, think it's called "Carbon sequestration"? Your "making oil and injecting it into the ground" made me curious, and it does seem like a grand simplification of what's happening.
- kisamoto 5y agoYes, absolutely. These are not mutually exclusive events. We need to reduce our emissions and stop pumping oil out (develop clean alternatives). We need to remove the existing excess of emissions in our atmosphere to get down to more natural levels.
- evolve2k 5y agoHaving someone actively put oil “back in the ground”, actually really helps the narrative and ongoingly highlights the hypocrisy you speak of. It’s a next step.
- pjfin123 5y agoPurchasing this type of carbon removal potentially has a massive second order effects if it helps encourage big unit cost reductions like what happened for solar. The Collinsons have talked a lot about creating the conditions for progress so I wonder how intentional this is.
- andrewpk 5y agoI know they make a point in reasoning "why not landfill?" but I have to wonder if "injecting our magic bio-oil deep underground" just sounded better to the VCs vs "we we just friggin' buried the corn husks."
- kisamoto 5y agoOn a serious note...that's not a bad idea. I will need to find out why that's the case (although I imagine it's something to do with the pyrolysis leaving a more stable and predictable carbon-rich mass rather than leaving the degradation to nature)
- quadrature 5y agothey cover this here https://charmindustrial.com/faqs#bury-biomass https://charmindustrial.com/faqs#bury-biomass "Others are working on this method. The landfills are expensive to dig, the geology is critically important, and we don’t believe the capacity to be as scalable or as permanent as injecting carbon-containing liquid into deep geological storage. The conversion of biomass into bio-oil via pyrolysis results in a liquid form with a higher carbon density, and is more easily handled, transported, and injected into existing wells."
- kisamoto 5y agoWell..that makes sense. Thanks
- klyrs 5y agoI dunno, it sounds potentially atrocious to me. If/when this stuff gets into the water table, how bad of an outcome will that be?
- Pfhreak 5y agoBiochar, the solid product of pyrolized biomass, is considered a beneficial soil amendment (it's basically elemental carbon -- like what you'd get in a charcoal filter). It's probably not a good idea to breathe it though. I'm not sure about bio-oil specifically, as it contains much more of the tar-like compounds. It's likely it contains benzene and other compounds. I found this in a cursory google search: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/37779.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy07osti/37779.pdf
- tito 5y agoAs someone working in carbon removal, this milestone is a big deal. Congrats to the Charm team on hitting this milestone! I hosted an interview at AirMiners with Shaun, Charm's Chief Scientist, last June right after they received the purchase order from Stripe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0k0ioXqkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk0k0ioXqkM The conversation included 3 of the other Stripe finalists (Vesta, Climeworks, and CarbonCure, who just won the Carbon XPRIZE), plus Ryan from Stripe. For those of you interested in more details, Charm has a blog post about their process here: https://charmindustrial.com/blog/2019/3/17/making-grass-flow-like-water https://charmindustrial.com/blog/2019/3/17/making-grass-flow... Congrats again, and cheers to many more.
- Pfhreak 5y agoOne thing I've been curious about -- I've got a few hundred acres of forest land, and I'm maintaining it in a natural state, but that still involves regular thinning/removal of biomass. I've wondered if there's a way to connect with someone like Charm (or any other company) to figure out how to supply biomass for their processes. Maybe it's too small scale -- a few hundred acres doesn't produce that much timber. Or too distant. Or something. But I have no idea how to even start reaching out about it.
- kisamoto 5y agoI'm looking at doing something similar (in Scotland) and am investigating the possibility of a small, on-site bio-char reactor. Without a huge amount of research so far my high level plan is to convert waste bio-mass into biochar to sequester the carbon and then use the biochar as a fertiliser; for drainage etc. As long as it doesn't get burned then it should also work as a carbon sink.
- Pfhreak 5y agoI've considered this too, and honestly considered exiting the software industry to dive into this space. But I haven't really sat down and done the legwork yet.
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- adamsvystun 5y agoLet me try to offset the cynicism here. These are welcome news. Seems like a small company in short amount of time was able to develop and validate carbon removal. Stripe's commitment helped them do this, which is great. I wish them further successes in making the process cheaper and faster.
- shakezula 5y agoI would love to see this model made feasible with a carbon tax, so that companies that couldn't meet a carbon goal could just buy their way down artificially or pay the government the taxes.
- exabrial 5y agoThe best way to ruin a well run industry is introducing taxes. Just let it be. We've endured 25 years of BS to get this far and all the taxes in the world didn't help.
- kolinko 5y agoCarbon tax is nit really a tax, but a patment for someone else to clean up your mess (released co2). And at the current prices it doesn’t cover even 20% of the cost of removal of co2, not to mention the environment destruction.
- young_unixer 5y agoI'm as libertarian as they come, but if there's one action that should be taxed, that's pollution. If everyone was simply free to pollute all they wanted, we'd all end up severely ill, which doesn't sound like freedom to me.
- kolinko 5y ago> but there should be no “but” in this sentence - the libertarian approach would be to allow anyone to pollute as much as they want as long as they clean up the pollution afterwards (or pay for cleanup :) )
- purple_ferret 5y agoIt's interesting to compare this (creating bio oil and injecting into the ground) to using ethanol in gas, which many people seemed to have concluded was/is a wasteful endeavor. It'd be funny if at some point they concluded, 'storing this is much less efficient than burning it as fuel. Let's just burn it instead of petroleum based oils!'
- 8ytecoder 5y agoI don't fully understand you so I'm going to assume you meant a sequestration process that captures CO2 as bio oil. If we capture existing CO2 and then burn it again to produce CO2, that's just re-circulation (from an ecological pov; pollution is a different story). Growing new crops to then burn it very likely adds new CO2 - not per se, but because these crops would/could only replace existing crops - which simply moves elsewhere or trees/forestland and not result in afforestation. Also, if our goal is reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere, not just keep the balance, we need permanent sequestration.
- jmstriegel 5y agoI'm excited for technologies like this to become available for regular individuals. I'm not sure what the current figure is, but in 2008 the average American was responsible for 20 tons of co2 every year[1]. At $600/ton[2], that's roughly a $12,000/yr unpaid externality on the American lifestyle. It's likely that even with incredibly aggressive elimination of co2 waste, several economic sectors will continue to produce significant amounts of co2, and we'll need sequestration to make up the difference. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.h... [2] https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases https://stripe.com/blog/first-negative-emissions-purchases
- graeme 5y agoActually you can buy Carbon Sequestration through Climeworks right now. They’re one of Stripe’s other partners: https://www.climeworks.com/subscriptions https://www.climeworks.com/subscriptions
- darepublic 5y agoPerhaps a naive question but what is the carbon overhead of the removal. And is that taken into consideration? edit: am I right in calculating that the average American citizen would need to purchase the 7 Eur plan 170+ times over to make themselves carbon neutral for a year
- graeme 5y agoIt’s certainly a good question. They may have done that analysis themselves, but I haven’t seen it. And yes it’s about $20,000 USD per year to account for the average american’s emissions. I’m actually cheered that this is a good deal less than average GDP per capita. So as the tech scales the costs are at least possible to pay. It would be much worse if the costs exceeded GDP. Meanwhile, buying a smaller subscription provides funds to help scale the technology which should lower costs. This is Stripe’s goal with Stripe Climate.
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- londons_explore 5y ago416 tons of CO2e is what... The amount emitted by a single family in a few days? I reckon I could turn my thermostat back a few degrees and save that.
- teej 5y agoQatar is the highest in the world at 49 tons per capita per year. So you’re off by a lot. That doesn’t make 416 tons a lot by any stretch, but we are still early in the technology cycle for carbon removal/sequestration.
- ktta 5y agoYour numbers are way off. ~7 tons of CO2 is what the average American family emits per year
- revax 5y agoI think your numbers are also way off, wikipedia cite 16t CO2 emission per capita (and not household) in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
- ktta 5y agoWell the numbers are all over, depending on what you look at. The number you quoted, which references EU report that I believe quotes CO2 emissions due to direct fossil fuel emission, and doesn't account for product use (which the US outsources to other countries, primarily China) and indirect emissions. I'm sure the numbers vary depending on what middle ground you choose. Here's another number that's higher than yours or mine - 48t CO2/yr: http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet Atleast the different numbers I see are off by much less than the GP's claim.
- Bedon292 5y agoThat link is 48t per household, so its pretty close to the 16t per capita. Depending on what you say household size is.
- whall6 5y ago> ‘ Research from Oxford, Stanford and Berkeley has found that 85% of nature-based carbon offsets sold today are not “additional”’ I was imagining that this would be the case. I was reading about pine farms being paid to halt harvesting. My very first thought was “I wonder if it makes sense to buy forested land to make a profit.” Clearly other people have already thought the same thing.
- rubyist5eva 5y ago> I was reading about pine farms being paid to halt harvesting. This explains the price of lumber right now, holy cow. I hate this.
- uxp100 5y agoProbably not. The price of logs has not risen like the price of lumber.
- jtsiskin 5y agoThis seems so silly - is this really how credits work? A fully grown forest won’t be removing any more CO2 (I assume the plant mass doesn’t keep growing without bound). Cutting the pine, replanting it, and using it to build homes and furniture would. Why can’t we make credits based on net CO2 change?
- Klwohu 5y agoCarbon removal seems like slapping a band aid on a sucking chest wound until the Chinese and Indian problems are dealt with.
- reissbaker 5y agoTo be fair the US is a bigger problem than India, and is only a smaller problem than China by virtue of having a far smaller population. The US is the second largest source of CO2 emissions in the world, and per capita is higher than both of those countries. However, building these technologies may help everyone reduce net CO2 emissions.
- Klwohu 5y agoThe US is absolutely nowhere near India's carbon emissions, nor China's. And none of the famously popular proposals such as Paris even address it. It's cool, they already serve as our garbage dumps and contain the toxic waste that fuels your iPhone. Just saying the USA isn't anywhere near the peak of the problem.
- porb121 5y agowhy would you say things that are so easily disproven with a 30sec google search? in 2017, the US emitted 5Gt, the EU 3.5, and india 2.5. india's also got a billion more people than the US. to make matters worse, these are attributional, not consumptive emissions. that is, if a US consumer orders a product made in india, the emissions from the creation of that product are attributed to india, and the emissions from shipping it are attributed to a global shipping counter. even though US demand and US consumption are responsible for those emissions, US emissions don't increase.
- j8014 5y agoIt looks like 2020 was China 11.5, USA 5.1, India 2.5. The biggest thing to note is both China and India are INCREASING every year.
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- kisamoto 5y agoSelf plug but I have seen people saying they wish they could also support Charm and other carbon removal methods. Please check out Carbon Removed[0] which offers negative emissions subscriptions and one-time purchases. We are partnered with Charm Industrial and Climeworks (as well as others) and aim to offer a removal portfolio. We do this for two reasons: 1) To support the progression of as many different removal methods as possible. There is no "silver bullet" when it comes to fighting the climate crisis and we will need tech based carbon removal - we're past the point that nature can do this on her own. 2) To make carbon removal more affordable - as somebody rightfully calculated, removing the average US footprint (16 tons) would cost around $16,000 purely with Climeworks and $9,600 purely with Charm. We spread the removal across expensive tech and cheaper natural methods to help lower the cost. Happy to discuss carbon removal and offer custom plans if you want to contact me directly: Email me @ "ewan at (@) carbon removed dot (.) com" * [0] https://carbonremoved.com https://carbonremoved.com
- Bedon292 5y agoI had actually been looking at things like Climeworks recently, and your service looks like an interesting portfolio. Although it is heavily weighted towards planting trees, and I think that turned me off to it initially. Do you plan to offer any larger subscription plans as self service? Your Gold subscription is only 6 tons of the average 16 ton footprint. And then a family being multiples of that. While you could make one time purchases over time, it would be nice to have more options. Even a 'make you own' plan of sorts. Specify what you want to offset annually and pay in monthly installments. Are you getting a lot of subscribers? I think one other thing that had me hesitant was only having removed 121 tons so far. Seemed pretty new and unused, and was not sure how sustainable the model was. If that makes sense. Although now I realize the numbers in my head are probably off because you are calculating the trees over time, and its only been about a year since you started, so they have a lot of time left in them. FYI the first two links in your Transparency sheet are bad, one asks for a login and one seems dead.
- kisamoto 5y agoThanks for the feedback. I'm actually both happy and sad that the weighting of trees puts you off a little. Happy because it shows you know and value the active carbon removal, sad that you're a little deterred from using the product. We did initially start with a much higher weighting towards Climeworks & Charm however the high costs were not gratefully received hence why we do add a stronger weighting to cheaper forestation. To give you an idea, without forestation (and an equal split between Climeworks, Charm and Greensand) the 500kg/month plan would be $500-600/month... Our subscriber base is growing 1-5 subscribers each month and we're seeing a growing interest as people look for alternatives to carbon credits. At the moment neither founder takes a salary as all money is reinvested into developing the product, educating on carbon removal and spreading the word. Thank you for the heads up on the transparency sheet. We recently shuffled things about and I had not noticed them, I shall fix them today. If you are interested in purchasing a custom plan please feel free to email me your requirements and I shall get back to you with a price.
- tareqak 5y agoI dislike the idea of trading carbon credits because it implicitly assumes that all the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions is reversible. Sure, on a long enough time scale, it is a chemical process where the carbon dioxide emitted today is captured back into the ground. However, the loss of animal and plant life and the negative impacts on human beings are not reversible within the timespans of relevant entities. A family that loses their home because of rising sea levels submerging their home will likely never live in that home ever again in their lifetime. I find it weird that one company can trade away a taxpayer-funded subsidy allocated to them another company and claim it as a profit. On what basis was the subsidy granted to the first company in the first place?
- lmm 5y ago> I dislike the idea of trading carbon credits because it implicitly assumes that all the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions is reversible. Sure, on a long enough time scale, it is a chemical process where the carbon dioxide emitted today is captured back into the ground. However, the loss of animal and plant life and the negative impacts on human beings are not reversible within the timespans of relevant entities. A family that loses their home because of rising sea levels submerging their home will likely never live in that home ever again in their lifetime. Paying that family for the economic value of their home is not a complete replacement for the lost home. But it's a hell of a lot better than giving them nothing, which seems to be the usual alternative. Tradeable carbon credits seem to be the least-bad option that's actually workable.
- shrubby 5y agoUnfortunately carbon is only one of the overconsumption caused problems we have. When that's fixed (I have no doubt that us with bourgeois lifestyles will add pressure to tech) we're still facing a crapton of other greed and selfishness created issues. Self reflection is not one of the best qualities in our species.