Could Carbon Removal Be California’s Next Big Boom Industry? | KQED

The rest will get ground down to dust, injected into the 1,000-degree belly of a large metal cylinder — called a pyrolyzer — and be transformed within seconds into three products: a gas, an ash — or “char” — and a viscous black goo that looks like molasses and smells like barbecue sauce, called bio-oil.

“The gas is then burned to heat the process,” said Kinetic, co-founder of the company Charm Industrial. “The char is returned to the field as a soil additive, and the bio-oil is pumped underground as a permanent carbon-removal technology.”

Charm has sequestered some 6,000 tons of carbon since 2020, when Kinetic, who has a background in aerospace engineering, first invented the bio-oil sequestration technology.

Customers now include major tech companies like Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft.

And yes, Shaun’s last name really is Kinetic, which he and his wife, Kelly, one of the company’s four founders, adopted when they married a few years ago. The couple left Charm in February 2023 for reasons the company did not disclose.

The company uses physical equipment and even old, abandoned oil wells to send the bio-oil underground — one of the many approaches in the burgeoning field of carbon removal.

Charm frequently hires former fossil-fuel industry workers to orchestrate the process, as they are often the ones most familiar with the equipment involved.

A local job creator?

For California to meet its ambitious climate goals, which include becoming carbon-neutral by 2045 (PDF), the state will need to capture or remove about 100 million tons of carbon dioxide (PDF) each year, roughly equivalent to the pollution created by 250 gas-power plants (PDF).

Unlike carbon capture, which involves trapping polluting greenhouse gasses at their source of emissions, carbon removal entails pulling the gas out of the atmosphere through either nature-based approaches, like conserving existing wetlands, or technological methods, like the one used by Charm.

And local and state lawmakers are increasingly showing interest in supporting those efforts.

“Decades ago, San Francisco and the Bay Area were home to the explosion of the information technology sector,” said Assemblymember Matt Haney, a San Francisco Democrat. “It started small and then it grew to transform the world. We want to have the Bay Area be the similar home for carbon capture and carbon removal.”

Doing so, he added, could also create a lot of jobs.

“It’s not just folks who can do the engineering and the technology, the financing, but we actually need skilled industrial labor,” Haney said.

Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat from Irvine, said California could become a hub for this kind of work.

“I want those innovators to come to California. I want them to grow their businesses here,” Petrie-Norris said. “I think that there’s a lot of work that we need to do as policymakers to create a foundation and to create the right incentives to bring them here.”

Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere

To avoid exacerbating an already catastrophic climate crisis, humans need to first and foremost stop putting planet-warming gasses into the air. But there is also an urgent need to draw down an enormous amount of the carbon pollution that has already been created.