A Charm Industrial pyrolysis site in Kansas, USA | Credit: Charm Industrial
Advance carbon credit purchase agreement marks largest to date from $1bn CO2 removals coalition backed by Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, Stripe, McKinsey Sustainability, H&M Group and more
A raft of global companies and household brands have joined a $53m deal to collectively buy hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon offset credits from US CO2 removals company Charm Industrial, marking the first major advance offtake agreement secured through the Frontier fund.
Under the terms of the deal announced yesterday, the $1bn Frontier fund has agreed to pay Charm $53m to pull 112,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere between 2024 and 2030 using its carbon storage technology. The US firm specialises in transforming wood waste into bio-oil using pyrolysis, and subsequently injects the resulting carbon-rich liquid into underground wells where it sinks and solidifies for permanent storage.
Frontier founding companies Stripe, Google-owner Alphabet, Shopify, McKinsey Sustainability, and Facebook's parent company Meta have all made carbon credit purchases through the advance offtake deal, alongside other fund members Autodesk, H&M Group and Workday.
Aledade, Boom Supersonic, Canva, SKIMS, Wise, and Zendesk are also participating in the funding round, having made CO2 removal credit purchases through Frontier's partnership with climate platform Watershed, according to the fund.
Since starting operations in 2021, Charm Industrial claims to be one of the first companies to successfully remove carbon from the atmosphere permanently, having to date permanently injected over 6,000 tonnes of previously atmospheric CO2 into solid underground rock storage through its technology pilots.
Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, said the offtake agreement announced yesterday would enable the firm to further scale its technology. "An offtake, especially one of this size, lets us move meaningfully faster than we'd otherwise be able to, accelerating essentially all aspects of our technology and operations," he explained. "Frontier has been an incredibly rigorous buyer, testing and pushing our limits across science, operations, engineering, finance, and our future cost curves."
The announcement marks the largest deal to date facilitated by the Frontier coalition, which launched in 2022 in a bid to ramp up corporate demand and funding for start-ups looking to scale nascent carbon removals technologies.
The price per ton negotiated between buyers and Charm was not disclosed, however Frontier said it expected costs to fall over the six-year term of the offtake deal by "at least" 37 per cent as the technology scaled and government incentives expanded.
Further offtake agreements with CO2 removals firms are expected to be announced later in the year by founding members of the Frontier fund, which stressed that all potential candidates for offtake agreements are vetted by its technical staff and a group of 50 expert scientific and technical reviewers in order to ensure integrity of the CO2 removals processes.
Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe and a member of Frontier's founder advisory board, praised the progress of Charm Industrial since its operations began in 2021. "In just three years, Charm Industrial has gone from concept to permanently removing thousands of tons of CO2," she said. "They've charted a feasible path to high-volume, low-cost carbon removal, and set the bar for executing with speed and rigour."
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