C (4:09)

Thanks for having me.

B (4:11)

All right, give me a tour of ag waste to start. Like where is it, what is it, how much of it is there? Just give me the, give me the, the quick high level.

C (4:24)

Yeah, I think many people would maybe push back first on, on the word waste there. For the most part when you have egg residues, it's mostly things that are unutilized or very underutilized. And so in some sense there's waste there. But really I would think of it as sort of extremely underutilized and has a lot of value. Maybe that is, is going to waste or getting lost. But you know, there's, there's an enormous amount in the United States which maybe is where we can focus for now. Just Corn Stover, for example, obviously concentrated in the Midwest and particularly the northern part of the Midwest. There's about 90, 95 million acres of corn grown in the US every year, order magnitude 4 dry tons of Stover per year on each of those, on each of those acres. And so you're just, on Corn Stover, you're looking at 400 megatons of Ag residues that don't really get used. They just rot on the field and return to the atmosphere.

B (5:25)

What is stover actually like on this corn stock? What is the stover? And then I think you just answered this question. But in a default scenario, corn is harvested. The Stover just continues to sit on the field and eventually decomposes. That's what happens to it.

C (5:39)

That's right. And there's some geographical diversity to that. So we can get further into the nuance here. But the stover itself is the stalks, the leaves. Depending on the harvest method, you may actually have cobs in the mix, too. So it's everything basically kind of minus the kernels, because the kernels are really where the value lies. Whether it's animal feedstock or human consumption or high fructose corn syrup or ethanol, the kernels is really what we grow corn for today. But the actual practices around what happens to that stove are very pretty widely. There are a few places where it's used for cellulosic ethanol production, but it's really tiny, that's never really taken off. And as you get sort of farther north, you can have very moist soils that hold a lot of water. And as you get farther north, those will sometimes stay frozen deep into the spring when they actually need to plant it. So depending on the place, there can be quite different practices actually around whether you need to remove it so that you can actually plant in the spring and not be dealing with frozen soil, or in other places where actually, say, the Great Plains and western Kansas and Colorado, where you actually want to keep it on because it's more of it on, because it's going to help retain the soil moisture, which is a huge problem there. So there's geographic diversity to that.

B (6:54)

Yeah. I mean, I have a feeling a lot of this part of the conversation is going to be like, there is no uniformity in general. And that's one of the challenges with doing anything at scale with ag residue. I'll stop saying waste because you're even just talking about specifically corn Stover. Right. And, like, that's going to be different from almond shells in California, from what are whatever soybean husks or whatever else it is from a practical standpoint, I mean. Okay, so let's view ag residue as a resource. It should be a resource. Right? Like, it has value. It has various things you could do with it. And we're going to talk about, like, highest and best use. But one of the things that you and I have talked about a little bit that I think you have insight into that people don't often appreciate is, like, just the practical challenge of aggregation. And utilization of that resource. Talk me through. What does it take? Say you wanted to do something, forget what you're doing with it, say you want to do something with it. At scale, what does that actually entail?

C (7:56)

There is again some diversity depending on the residue. But if we stick with corn stover for a second and say you want to use the corn stover somewhere, typically you're not going to be able to use it on the field. Typically, if you're going to take some portion of it, whether that's 70% or 30% depending on the agricultural zone that you're in, you know, you need to get it off the field. And so there's actually a lot of steps to get the biomass off the field in a sort of usable format at a usable distance, where typically people are building centralized plants. And so, you know, that actually dominates the cost of the biomass, which is, you know, something that we're trying to, we're trying to invert this at charm by eventually operating on field to cut this all out. But you know, you have, let's say you have a field that's all laid flat, you know, a forage harvester came through and cut it all down. Now you need to first windrow it into a pile. Then you're going to bail it. Then once you have bales, you're going to have, you know, you're going to bring a machine that's going to stack the bales and bring them over to the edge of the field where put them in piles. And then you're going to need something like Telehandler to load it onto a, load it onto a truck and then you need to drive the truck and then you unload the truck. And so every one of those pieces, equipment is a big capex piece and opex to run. You need people to actually do every step of that labor. So it's a huge portion of the cost structure. Right? So if you're looking at getting corn stovers, say delivered to, you know, like Abengohutin was a huge cellulosic ethanol plant that failed in western Kansas because they were trans transporting their biomass 50 to 100 miles, they expected to pay maybe $60 a ton. They found in fact that they were paying like north of $120 a ton. And you know, the actual dollars that were getting delivered to the farmer for the stover that they had was maybe in the low tens of dollars. And all the rest of it was bundled up in the, in the consolidation and transport of the biomass. So it's quite an operation. To do it and requires sort of like specialized equipment for each different type of feedstock as well. So it's quite complicated. And there's some companies that, that do an incredible job of this. Like Pacific AG has a large operation in the, in the Texas, in the, in the panhandle kind of region. And. But yeah, it's tough, isn't it?

B (10:06)

Also when you talk about dollars per ton, like things in delivered biomass world get priced in dollars per bone dry ton. Right. But actually the part of the problem also is that what you're getting off the field is not like one ton is not one bone dry ton. And so there's more material.

C (10:22)

It gets priced both ways. Yeah, it gets priced both ways. But like there's no standard there.

B (10:27)

But I guess isn't that. Well, the bigger point is part of the cost that's loaded in there is that either you're transporting something that has partial value, right? Some, some piece of the stuff that you're transporting is actually valuable and another piece of it is not, and so you're carrying dead weight along with you, or you have to go process it before you transport it, in which case there's a different piece of capital equipment that you need at the site in order to avoid transporting this stuff that is waterlogged or has whatever other stuff in it.

C (10:59)

Yeah, that's true. The water content of Stover. Stover dries on the field pretty effectively into the like 15 to 20% range. So you're not carrying that much water. I mean there is water in there, but the thing that kills you on the transport less than the, or more than the dead weight there is actually the volume. So you, when you're trying to transport Stover, you cube out, meaning volumetrically you run out of space a lot faster than you, than you weigh out. And I mean, that's why you see these like insane trailers where it's like coming out all over the place trying to, trying to haul the biomass because like the volume just literally you can't, you can't fit it all in there because it's so fluffy. So from a cost perspective, at least for corn stover, that dominates. But for wood is quite different actually. Wood can easily be 50% water if it's, if it's young growth and you know, hasn't aged for a year post cutting. So when you look at like wildfire thinnings, for example, oftentimes we get wood that's in the 50% range and there, yeah, it sucks because you're half what you're Transporting is useless, right?

B (12:00)

What about heterogeneity? I mean, I think also this probably depends what you want to do with it. There's probably some things that you can do with it that are going to be super sensitive to heterogeneity in the actual feedstock and other things that won't be. But how big an issue is that? In general?

C (12:16)

It's an issue, but it's an issue because you encounter edge cases at volume as opposed to it being like, you know, like if you looked at, for example at our wood chips that we process in, in Colorado, where we're getting in these, taking this stuff from forest fire prevention thinnings that the Colorado State Forest Service and U.S. forest Service are running, and we work with the forestry contractors, they would power burn this stuff. Otherwise they send this sort of thinning material to us, which nominally should have a lot of heterogeneity to it because it's effectively a waste product that they would have to burn. If we were to stand there and look at it, you'd be like, this is pretty consistent material. Visually. It's not like, oh, this is all over the place. Um, but nonetheless, you can still get edge cases. You can get a rock that was like, you know, randomly stuck in a branch, or you can get, you know, people talk about like BAAL that had a handgun in it. You know, like it happens. And so if you're processing it at scale, you do have to have things in place to ensure that that doesn't happen. But it's the exception. Like the, the heterogeneity is problematic in, in its exceptions as opposed to like some sort of like continuous variability. Variability in moisture content is interesting. That can, that can really affect processes and so controls around drying or measurement of moisture content, or depending on your process, the form factor of the actual material going into a biomass processing system can matter a lot, right? Like aspect ratio, like a long twig often is way more problematic than the same amount of mass in like a well rounded chip. Just because you can create bridges and other things like that in equipment.

B (13:52)

So, okay, if we want to, let's just assume that we as a society or as entrepreneurs or whoever want to want to utilize this residue. Let's focus on ag residue here though. We could talk about wood chips or whatever else too. Let's assume that we want to use it, it has some use. What are the things that you think then need to be true to make it work? In other words, I assume that basically the trade off here is you can either do what the ethanol plant you described failed was trying to do, which is aggregate, centralize, build a big centralized processing facility to go make something with it, and that you get the economies of scale on the processing facility. So that's good because you want that, but you have to source from a wider aperture geographically. And so you end up paying these transport costs and logistics costs that kind of kill you, or you do something at the edge, which I think is closer to what you're doing, because you then don't have to deal with the transport costs, but you trade off the economies of scale on the processing side. So how do you think about that balance?

C (14:56)

In some sense, this is the fundamental thesis of charm, which is you can't bring biomass to market in its broadly heterogeneous, highly distributed, fluffy current existing capacity. You just can't do it. It doesn't work. People have tried it so many times and it just doesn't work. So the things that do work today are when people have large centralized sources of biomass that could be rice hulls coming out of a plant, or it could be sawdust coming out of a plant. Like, those are the places where it works. And so, but that's a tiny fraction. It's a tiny, tiny fraction of the total biomass. And so to your point, if you want to get it to scale, you do have to be able to go out into the field and convert it into some kind of format that actually is more homogeneous and transportable. And so that is basically the thesis of charm, which is, can we take that material and instead of people have tried pelleting, people have tried like all these things. But the problem is your starting density is maybe like 100-200 kg per meter cubed. And even if you get that up via pelleting to like 400, 500, 600, it's still really, really hard. And so our fundamental thesis is, can we go out into the field with pyrolysis equipment and consolidate that biomass by removing a bunch of stuff that isn't useful? So sort of reducing the total mass to what is the useful component in bio oil and biochar, and can we increase the density dramatically? So, like the density of bio 1200 kilograms per meter cubed, so almost more than a 10x in terms of consolidation. And so now actually you're weighing out your tanker and you have a pumpable fluid instead of having to deal with moving around bales that are super fluffy. And so the sort of fundamental thesis there is like, can you make it transportable and can you densify it such that the economics fundamentally change around your ability to centralize it for further processing or for consumption. So that's our fundamental thesis with pyrolysis. And people have tried a lot of other ways to do it, but we think this one will work.

B (16:58)

How much do economies of scale matter on pyrolysis? The trade you're making is you're saying I'll do a small pyrolysis unit, but in exchange for that I will get this high density, I will drive down logistics costs and transportation costs and all these things that blow up the economics of every other use of waste, biomass or I'm sorry, ag residue or whatever it is. Presumably you believe that to be the right trade to make, but how much of a trade off is it really? If you were doing paralysis at a 10x scale relative to what you are doing it at, would it be notably cheaper?

C (17:31)

It can get notably cheaper up to a point. So we today operate 2 ton per day systems. It is significantly cheaper to operate a 20 ton per day system. And that's what we're working towards is you'll have the same, basically the same amount of labor operating something with 10 times the throughput, maybe 15 times the throughput. And you get a lot of leverage out of that. You start to see some diseconomies on top of that. When you go beyond, we think that sort of equipment, farm equipment form factor, when you start moving away from a mobile piece of equipment into a fixed facility, you do get some economies of the construction but, but you actually take on a lot more risk. In every facility that you build. You have all the balance of plant, you have permitting, you have just more risk because you're going to build many fewer of them and each one is going to be uniquely sized. And so there's actually, I think there's a, you actually break the unit, the unit economics in some sense break and jump beyond that mobile form factor, and that's part of our thesis, is like how much throughput can we jam into a large combine kind of form factor is what we're ultimately going to be shooting for. And we think that there's great economics and in continuing to push that, push that throughput. But like if we look at the CapEx for example of our system today on a per dollars of CapEx per ton basis and compare it to say like state of the art pyrolysis facilities, we are already less than half of that cost on a dollar per capex basis. And that will decline drastically as we increase the throughput. So that's where you would expect to see the most economy there in labor and we already are realizing an economy relative to where you would expect to see an economy and sort of through this concept of mass production. The other place where you'd expect to see economy is on the labor side and I think we won't beat that, aside from sort of through automation and reliability that just requires fewer people over time per machine. But the capex thing is surprising to me. Actually when I went and ran those numbers I was surprised that we were already under the capex per ton.

B (19:44)

Is that a function of the pyrolysis market is not enormous and it's not the most mature in the world, is it? Just in part there has been room for innovation because it's not totally optimized.

C (19:56)

Yeah. It's also the case that there are some processes that benefit drastically from a surface area to volume change. Right. Like a lot of these world scale chemical plants have like massive volumes inside their reactors and so as they scale up, the sort of like metal cost, physical metal cost of the reactor vessel is declining because the surface area to volume ratio is declining. I think that there are some process. I think pyrolysis in some sense is less influenced by that because you're sort of putting heat in and taking heat out and so you almost have like a surface area to surface area scaling law. So maybe also that pyrolysis is somewhat unique relative to other chemical processes.

D (20:41)

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B (22:27)

All right, so let's assume you can get your ag residue, you can get your biomass off the field, you can do it in a manner that is sufficiently dense and that is economic to do something with. And the next question then is, okay, so what should we do with it? Like, what's the highest and best use? So I know you have opinions on this, but talk me through the, I guess to start the suite of options, like what are the things you think of as being potential uses for that, that biomass once you get it off the field.

C (22:52)

Historically, biomass has been primarily used for industrial heat, sort of alongside an existing plant, or for electricity production in some cases, or for car fuel production like ethanol. These are not actually very good uses for biomass. They don't really take advantage of the best properties that biomass has. What really distinguishes biomass is not necessarily its energy content, which is actually quite low. So on a per kg basis, the energy content of biomass is about one third that of crude oil. So it's pretty energy poor. What's interesting about it is that relative to almost everything else, it's very carbon rich. And so the use cases that rely either on the chemical availability of carbon or on the sort of physical availability of carbon, those or like in the case of carbon removal, like literally on the amount of carbon in there. Those are the use cases actually that have the highest and best use over time. So carbon removal is obviously the market that we have gone into first where we can do bio oil sequestration and pump the carbon underground in a liquid form. That's actually a pretty high value use case for it because you're directly monetizing the carbon embedded in the biomass. There are other use cases where the carbon is really critical from a chemical perspective. So this is things like iron making. When you reduce iron oxide to iron, you need carbon monoxide and you can use hydrogen, but it's, it's endothermic. So if you really, if you want to make it sort of work on a reliable basis, you probably need carbon monoxide. You need that carbon. Well great. We have a carbon source. So iron making is a pretty compelling use case. Um, another one actually is SAF is jet fuel. We don't have a lot of great dense energy carriers that can actually do long haul flights. And there it is. So you know we're going to need probably for a long time going to need carbon there. So those are some of the cases may like asphalt, plastics. There's a bunch of these places where the carbon is an integral part either of the being an energy carrier or being chemically involved in the process or structurally involved as an atomic element. Those are the places where and World Resources Institute would agree with this in their analysis I think which is like that's where we need the carbon. And other use cases like car fuel are like pretty poor economic fits.

B (25:10)

Is your view on why historically we've used biomass as an energy source rather than a carbon source predominantly just a function of the market has been there for energy. The market has not really been there for the carbon stuff, certainly not for carbon removal. Historically SAF is a relatively new thing. Is it just like a market maturity thing or is there some other reason why we. We've gone down the wrong road historically?

C (25:36)

Yeah, I think it's a market maturity thing. I think also for the industrial heat and electricity use cases often that's when you have a concentrated flow of biomass and now we're.

B (25:46)

And you just want to co fire with something else and you might as well. It's like buying down your total cost. Yes.

C (25:51)

A facility owner is like well I have this thing, why don't I use it? Right. Whereas the sort of biomass that we're talking about maybe is like a different type of biomass which is like okay, but then there's like like 5 gigatons of this stuff all over the world and like you know, it rots or burns today which is a different.

B (26:05)

Yeah, maybe the more. Right. Probably the more accurate way to put it is that like a lot of the stuff has not been used actually historically. It's not that it's been used for this other stuff to the extent that it has like if it's being used to produce ethanol, we've sort of distorted a market of into existence for ethanol that is tax credit driven predominantly. And so there's an economic reason to do that that doesn't speak to the underlying rationality of leveraging it for energy.

C (26:32)

Yeah, to be clear, there's geopolitical reasons also to ensure that we have massive amounts of corn and food grown in the United States. It maybe gets more complicated than just what's the highest and best use of biomass.

B (26:42)

But yes, okay, so I've seen the analyses too. That basically suggests that. Look, okay, so let's just assume we care about CO2 emissions. Let's assume we care about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in general, then. And then if you look at biomass, if you look at waste biomass, clearly if you could do it cheaply enough, the highest and best use of it is carbon removal. Like, you just get the most bang for your buck, even over the other things that leverage the carbon saf or whatever else, which is where you guys have started. The question then is like it is less, I think in my mind, what is the highest and best use of the material? And rather what is the market for that? Which is the sort of underlying question in cdr. So I want to transfer to talking about that a little bit because you've been a kind of. I think you've delivered more tons of permanent CDR than anybody else in the world, or at least that was true at one point. And the other thing that I think you've done that has been interesting to me is, is that you found a more diverse set of buyers for CDR than most other folks. I think listeners podcast probably know that if you just look at like overall tons purchased in the CDR market, it's basically Microsoft, followed by like an order of magnitude lower frontier, which is the stripe coalition, followed by a bunch of little minnows, you know, in. In relative terms. And so a lot of the CDR market, to the extent that they have actually generally pre sold tons as opposed to selling tons, which as you've done, that's the buyer universe for them essentially. But you have found some others on that list. So just give me your overall take on how the CDR demand side has evolved and what your approach has been to finding those buyers.

C (28:36)

I think I have a little bit of a unique perspective here also as an ex buyer, the reason that I'm in this market at all is because previously built a software company called Segment, which sold in 2020. And along the way we were trying to figure out how to offset our carbon or remove our carbon. And I was really pissed off at the quality of what was there. And so I come from a perspective of sitting in the buyer's seat beyond the folks that have gotten really excited and have driven forward the carbon removal industry, the stripes and Shopify and Microsoft's and Google's and Facebook sort of core tech group, beyond that I feel a bit of some of the pain that the broader market has, has encountered in trying to buy offsets historically, because I went through it and specifically my experience was I went and bought some like offsets in Indonesian rainforest and Amazon rainforest and it was like 20k or something. And then I came back a year later and I was like, wait a second, like what happened? What happened when I bought those offsets? Like, is there any clarity of, you know, can I look up, like, which acres exactly did I protect? And like, did it, did it have an impact? Is it still there? You know, and then you see in the news like, Amazon is on fire and you're like, oh shoot, maybe I need to go rebuy something. Did my protection totally fail here? And so the deeper that I got into that, the more I was like, this is bad. This is really bad. There's no clarity on it, there's no trail of evidence, there's no FedEx style delivery history of what happened there. And so I think there's a few things that have differentiated Charm and sort of appealing to a broader set of buyers. The first is extreme transparency. So you can go to the website and this comes from that experience. You can go to the website traumaindustrial.com ledger and you can see a complete history of every delivery. You can click in and you can see where the biomass came from and so on. I still think it's a really crappy v0. Like I want to get to a point where you can, like when the doordash deliverer takes a picture of the food on your doorstep, like every picture, every step of the process, I want to have photo evidence of what happened and make that public. So that's one thing that still is extremely differentiated. We've made a big point of it over the years and I've tried to push other suppliers to do that. And for whatever reason it's still differentiated. And so from a risk perspective, if you're a buyer and you've been feeling all this risk of these junky offsets that you maybe got burned by, that's a pretty different feel in the sort of broader market. And the other is just all the co benefits associated with Charm's process. There are many other processes that are sort of arbitrage of delivering tons in a cheap fashion that are real but probably can't get to climate scale. What's different is not only can Charm kind of get to a very large scale due to the feedstocks that we're going and getting access to, but the potential Wildfire impact, the potential orphaned well cleanup. There's a bunch of things along the chain that I think are big co benefits to human health and communities that buyers want to help support.

B (31:35)

So is your view that there's like a significant volume of latent, I don't know whether this is the right way to put it, but latent demand for CDR that has not been unlocked largely because one, a sort of lack of trust in the market, which I 100% agree with you. I worked in the carbon market world, the voluntary carbon market world, like geez, 15 years ago now and it's the legacy carbon offset world is a disaster in my opinion. So there's definitely some repair that needs to be done there. But so your view is that combination of trust and co benefits deliver this big wave of demand that we haven't seen fully show up yet outside of just that core group. You said the tech companies, et cetera.

C (32:25)

I think so.

B (32:26)

And like why, what are they driving toward? Is it net zero commitments that they're trying to meet? Is it like what's the underlying motivation for corporates at least do you think?

C (32:34)

I think our underlying motivation for corporates is impact and they want to trust that that impact is actually happening in like a measurable way. And climate impact is great, but they also, if they can double dip simultaneously into having climate impact as well as health impact because there isn't particulate coming out of a wildfire and into you know, community impact because homes aren't getting burnt down and into community impact because a well is getting cleaned up and like it's not spewing radioactive brine at the surface anymore or methane. Like you know, it's just, it's just their, if their goal is having a positive impact with, with these kinds of purchases, that's like, that's a lot more, right. There's just more there on the bone as opposed to, you know, some, some other approaches often have trade offs in this sense. Whether that's like, you know, consuming a lot of power or other kinds of things, right. Where it's like that can be less appealing.

B (33:23)

Are there other categories of buyers that you think are likely to scale? I mean, I guess the way I think about it is right now it's been the tech industry first and foremost, followed maybe by the financial sector where there have been a few buyers who have stepped. Like some of the big banks have made some larger volume purchases. Is that the next big beachhead for cdr?

C (33:45)

Yeah, I'd say certainly we started in high tech or technology. Big Software companies, AI hyperscalers. We see a lot of activity in banking, financial services. We see a lot of activity in consulting, have a lot of consulting companies as customers. We're starting to see more activity in advanced manufacturing that's, you know, like aircraft chips, pharmaceuticals, like, you know, if you look at a sort of chart of like, profitability per ton or EBITDA per ton, like, it's. It's the companies that have a lot of EBITDA per ton that are going to lead the way on helping things down.

B (34:19)

Per ton of emissions, in this case, not removal, Right? It's like, yeah, how much money do they make? It's basically saying, like, how hard is it for them to afford to purchase credits to offset a significant chunk of their emissions?

C (34:32)

Yeah. I will say, though, that there are some companies that, you know, have done the analysis, right, of like, they've reduced all their obvious emissions in terms of just buying clean electricity and so on. And they're getting down to the point where they're like, hold on, like, it's going to cost like $2,000 a ton for me to go, like, tear down a building and rebuild it with like, a proper H vac system that does, like, heat pumps, you know, it's like. And have clean concrete. Like, you know, at some point you get down to this, like, baseload of like, amortized embodied emissions and things that are, like, in the built structures. And it's really hard and really expensive. And as they get down there, it's like, well, maybe this is just cheaper to remove.

B (35:13)

All right, Peter, this was fun. Thanks for talking through ag residue and carbon removal with me, but appreciate the time.

C (35:20)

Thanks for having me.

B (35:23)

Peter Reinhardt is the co founder and CEO of Charm Industrial. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Hello, I'm Shaya Khan and this is Catalyst.