nothing in hardware is cheap until it scales up. in fact, the cost vs. scale dynamics are well understood, see Wright's Law.
the "huge assumption" is our entire roadmap... and the major things that drive cost-down are: (1) increased carbon yield by integrating existing pyrolysis technology, (2) shrinking transport distances by operating pyrolysis near injection wells, and (3) increased throughput by making our pyrolyzers larger. these take time, but are hardly shooting for the moon.
Still, I will allow myself to provide some feedback. There's a chance that in your position as the CEO of a startup (and an MIT graduate), maybe not a lot of people are willing to tell you thinks that they think you won't like to hear.
It looks like your business model involves carbon sequestration (you just mentioned here "injection wells", plus it's in the last figure of the article). That means you are proposing a process that smelts iron ore using hydrogen rather than coke. Something like this plant in Sweden [1]. There are two problems now. One is that you are making the assumption that it's quite easy to get such plants in the US too, but the recent history is not very promising ([2], [3]). The second problem is that you are a step ahead of what people want right now. Most people would be happy to make net-zero steel. You are pitching something that is net-negative steel. A lot of people will say it's laudable, but they are not willing to pay extra for that. And if net-zero is their goal, then you need to compete with steam reformation using natural gas. And I don't think this is possible in any scenario, not matter how heroic assumptions about economies of scales or learning curves, or technological improvements one makes.
Bio-oil production itself has a small amount of net positive emissions associated with it. We also purchase renewable electricity, renewable diesel, etc. to minimize those emissions. The net carbon negativity comes from the balance of the biomass/bio-oil carbon content ending up permanently sequestered deep underground.
Biomass don't have C, it has sugars (C6O6H12, mostly polymerized) and fatty acids (H-(CH2)n-COOH, mostly in oil molecules).
Do you have the chemical composition of the bio-oil? I only found this https://www.music-h2020.eu/publications-reports/MUSIC_D6-1_W... that in page 20 claims 25% of water, so it's a polar solvent like thick sugar syrup, not a non polar solvent like petrol.
That make sense if the graphics are accurate and it's produced from corn stalks (that are mostly cellulose that is polymerized glucose), instead of making it from vegetable oil (that is made of 3 fatty acids and glycerin) and can be transformed in biodiesel by a very different process.
The graphic shows injection after use to make iron. Are you injecting the liquid bio-oil or the CO2 gas after combustion? I very skeptical and expect gas to escape sooner or later.
I think that it's important the "unused carbon" part of the graphic. Here we used to have a big steel mill that had a huge eucalyptus forest to make coke coal (in Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla
Wildfires.org is doing really awesome work on unblocking and accelerating environmental review and planning for all kinds of wildfire prevention treatments.
If you or your friends are mechanical engineers, we're looking for great meche's with experience in thermal, fluids, combustion, ag processing and more. Would love to chat: https://charmindustrial.com/team or email in my profile.
Does Charm ever plan to be remote-friendly? Asking more for some talented friends living in a remote small town, though I've admired Charm from afar for some time.
Entirely understandable, and a major driver in my transition from industrial automation to web software (though industrial hardware work is so rewarding!).
Actually we aren’t burning the biomass, we’re heating it without oxygen (pyrolysis) to create a transportable biomass intermediate called bio-oil. That bio-oil is rich in carbon, molasses-like consistency, and the overwhelming odor of barbecue sauce. Today we primarily pump that bbq sauce underground as carbon removal (Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage - BiCRS), but in the future it could be used for BECCS processes like you outline.
How is this an overall improvement over leaving the corn stalks in the field to decompose and return nutrients to the soil? This process moves soil nutrients away from point of origin. (Serious question from former Iowa farm boy who still owns corn ground operated by others. Should I let my tenants ship stover away? I want to be a good steward of the soil. )
The process separates the biomass carbon into bio-oil, and the NPK in the biomass separates into the biochar/ash (2% of the N, 70% of the P, >90% of the K). That biochar/ash goes back into the soil. So we recover most of the nutrients, plus you get biochar which improves soil carbon, water retention, microbial health, etc.
Yes, but why is this better than leaving the biomass in the field and perhaps doing some soil building techniques?
You also need to hire some farm kids or pay for some scholarships to get interns. Some of the problems you described solving over months would have been trivially solved by someone with farm experiences.
You’d really benefit from going to farm auctions, finding one of these, taking it apart, and adapting the mechanisms to your purposes. https://youtu.be/aYv8aDRv998
By contrast, our process retains the nutrients, improves the soil health relative to the baseline of just leaving it, and you get permanent carbon removal.
Yes, we're hiring for great mechanical engineers with experience in these areas ;) Lots to do!
I just did a quick search on impact of biochar on corn yield and the research seems mixed, at best. It seems to have the most impact on poor soil, but little impact on yield in good soil (e.g., the corn belt). A public benefit may be reduction of nitrate leaching—-so applied at scale that could help the Gulf. Water retention can be improved, too; it’d be interesting to see whether there’s impact on yield in drought years.
So ideally one of your systems would be at the local elevator to make stover dropoff/biochar pickup easy? And then maybe someday combines would have a baler on them? And the biochar could go in a manure spreader for application?
Is there waste heat/syngas coming off the pyrolysis (beyond what's needed for sustaining it)? If so, have you looked into applying that to grain drying?
Whatever their answer they'll need to account for the fuel cost of the trip to a facility, lifecycle cost of the instrumentation, and fuel cost of a return trip for where ever the whatever is going to go.
I can tell you right now having done experimental LCA previously, its not gonna pen out. The cost of moving massive amounts of 'stuff' to do 'something' with it when its an extremely low margin, low value add product; this will end up generating more CO2 than it sequesters.
If you can't do it in place, you likely can't do it.
Couldn't the bio-oil generated by the process be used to power the transport and supply lines? Or don't the maths work out? I don't know any of the numbers here...
Yes, I understand that, but I thought that most of the CO2 is bound to the ash that's supposed to be buried underground? So there would be a net reduction of CO2, even if the bio-oil was burned?
Yes, that is my take. It only works economically if the soil nutrients come back to the field, and it costs no more (net) than adding a stalk chopper to the combine.
Extra trips over the field burn fuel, and something needs to pay for the dollar cost of that (in added fertilizer value or something) not to mention the net carbon emissions of burning diesel to go over the field again.
(Another former Iowa farm boy)
This is a CO2 sequestration process, and one still in development. The carbon in the corn stalks is obviously pretty neutral—it’s the petroleum for tractors, drying, and fertilizer that are the CO2 emissions problem.
For soil health, I think you’d want your renter to go no-till (if isn’t already). And then for emissions, look into putting solar panels wherever, seeing whether there are electric/heat pump dryers available (???) if you have drying bins, and encouraging renter to use biodiesel.
This depends on the conditions the biomass is decomposing in. A lot of carbon can be captured in the soil if handled well. No till, no spray, cover crops, and managed grazing of the cover crops can create an environment where the soil is a carbon sink and a better base for future crops.
Yes. And also no. Practices like that are good, but the majority of your carbon sequestration will come in the form of the roots of plants. (This is part of why no till is good.)
Getting surface vegetation to deposit carbon in the soil long term is trickier. You aren't wrong, but it's also not as simple as some folks believe. Just cutting the corn stalks and cobs and leaving them on a field won't put much carbon back in the soil.
How are you heating it? How are you powering all the chippers, blowers, conveyer belts, and other machinery? Along with the transportation of crop residue to your facility, how much carbon is re-emitted with your consumption of all these industrial products of the primarily fossil fueled powered energy system?
Pyrolysis is an energy positive reaction. It requires an initial heat input, but after getting started it produces more heat than it needs. That heat can be used to generate electricity or warm water.
Pyrolysis is entirely endothermic - it requires applying heat to biomass. Pyrolysis yields a vapor that will combust in the presence of oxygen and release energy.
The energy released in the combustion of pyrolysis products can be used to drive further pyrolysis. A "Top Lit Updraft Gasifier" is a simple apparatus to achieve this.
Capturing the heat from pyrolysis in this way does however convert the pyrolysis vapor from hydrocarbon into combustion byproducts, namely C02. This company claims to be condensing all of these hydrocarbons, not combusting them.
For a nice and understandable example of pure pyrolysis without combustion, there is this project [0] wherein an airtight vessel is loaded with biomass, heat/energy is applied with electrical resistive heating elements. The pyrolysis occurs and the resulting vapors are captured and stored as a low pressure vapor for later use in cooking or powering internal combustion engine.
Pyrolysis could in theory be done with concentrated solar thermal energy. The issues would be:
-- How much mirror area [heat] would be needed?
-- Mirror geometry: Troughs may lend themselves to continuous processing and gas recovery a bit better than central point concentrators but they provide less heat potential.
-- Can the economics work if you only process when the sun shines?
Totally. I am currently experimenting with TLUDs for waste products from some forest land I own. I didn't realize they were also attempting to capture the gases from pyrolization rather than using them to continue the pyrolysis.
In that case, you are totally correct, they'll need an input heat source.
My main concern is about whether you're sealing all the plant nutrients deep underground too, or are they separated out at some stage?
As a world, we're going to need to put all those nutrients back into the soil to be able to keep growing stuff. Particularly phosphorous has limited mineable stocks.
I'd guess the ash/gunk remaining from the pyrolysis would be a mixture of carbon, phosphorous, maybe some nitrogen. It'd probably make a decent fertilizer/soil amendment, particularly for degraded low-carbon soils.
Oh, this is your company! I heard you were working on this and thought dang way to go Peter.
Are there companies buying bio-oil yet? If I understand correctly, I like that you’re plugging into a larger system and applying engineering to make a piece of it more efficient. It’s always easier to get bigger than it is to get smaller!
Presumably it takes some amount of energy currently to run this process, so the "cost" of the carbon removal is energy usage currently. Would a BECCS process remove the need to use external energy altogether?
Initial testing was in San Francisco, where corn stover is relatively tricky to come by because corn is not widely grown in California, and agricultural residues cannot be brought into the state because of the bugs. Wheat straw was much easier to procure in-state.
Since encountering the differences, we tracked down the rarer corn growers in California and now use corn stover for testing as well.
If corn stover is a critical importance to your business and business model, wouldn't it be more effective, efficient, and beneficial to your business to be where the critical resource and information and experience is? Basically why not move to Kansas instead of stay put in California?
I've worked in agriculture my entire life, and seven weeks is a pretty good turnaround for fixing these types of problems. the next batch of issues they're likely to encounter is handling product with variations in moisture content that further bungs the system. Then it will be incorporating new feedstock from other crops.
Agriculture is the intersection of industrial mechanization and biological systems. Unlike traditional manufacturing, flexibility and efficiency is learned over time as situations are encountered that exceed previously theorized boundaries/ranges.
I have a grower who used gigantic wood burners for heat instead of natural gas. When I walked through his boiler room I noticed a wheelbarrow full of nails and other fasteners. He said 90% of his labour and headaches with that system were dealing with steel chunks in the feed stream, something they barely accounted for beyond adding a magnet when they built the system. Not everything can be planned for in advance.
Because Charm is being run as a VC tech startup rather than a traditional industrial company and there's a recent movement of trying to do ag-tech in the bay rather than places like the Midwest or even central valley. Probably doesn't hurt that the CEO/co-founder already lives in the bay.
Come on. No one wants to live in Kansas. And it's extremely difficult to build in a rural setting. You try prototyping an experimental cutting-edge technology in the middle of a corn field 2 hours from the nearest Home Depot or metal fabricator.
There are less drastic options than Kansas that would work fine. Chicago has an international airport. Indianapolis as well (though it’s not listed in Wikipedia, which makes me wonder how complete that is). St Louis and Minneapolis are major hubs. Large airports besides those I’m less familiar with, but if you’re planning to process corn waste what you need is rail access, not air. So then you can add a lot more of the midwest and still maybe be able to find Bulgogi for lunch. The Quad Cities, Peoria, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Omaha.
That’s not a list of international airports, though. I’m unclear what page I was looking at now, but it only had about a dozen on it and IND was not one of them.
Disconnected data is just information, not knowledge.
The wikipedia page for Wichita, Kansas claims Boeing, Airbus, and Learjet among others operate design and manufacturing facilities there. You should be able to find a metal fabricator and a home depot.
John Deere might find that interesting. Now headquartered in Moline, IL (Iowa border), they started up and built their company exactly in the rural America (Grand Detour, IL), when Home Depot didn't even exist. Yes it was over 150 years ago, but there's nothing that prevents you from starting an agtech company where the resources are if they are in the midwest. The Kauffman Foundation, a major entrepreneurial resource is based in Kansas City, MO.
Oh for heaven’s sake. You can find a whole bunch of talented mech e’s and ag e’s all over the corn belt that already live there and like it. John Deere in Waterloo is just one name of many. My nephew works at Ag Leader (he’s an EE). There is a lot of ag engineering talent in the midwest, it is silly to try to recruit it here in Sili Valley.
This is like the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street light because the light is better than whete he dropped them.
If you rely on material that is scarce in one location but widely available in another, wouldn't it make sense to test where the material is abundant..?
Ordinarily, I do not reply to these kind of comments, but this article is receiving a lot of them along these lines. The comment breaks down to "Why did you not predict everything that could possibly go wrong before you started this new tech project?"
I hope that it is clear that it would be impossible to identify every problem before field testing. Even in commercial manufacturing, you will run up against novel problems and have to engineer a solution onsite, even though we have had factories for about 250 years.
When they start testing in a different state or country, they will discover a new crop that breaks their system and will go though this process once again. But now, they are more experienced, and it will probably be easier.
the "huge assumption" is our entire roadmap... and the major things that drive cost-down are: (1) increased carbon yield by integrating existing pyrolysis technology, (2) shrinking transport distances by operating pyrolysis near injection wells, and (3) increased throughput by making our pyrolyzers larger. these take time, but are hardly shooting for the moon.