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Charm Industrial is a climate tech company that takes biomass and converts it into a heavy, carbon-rich oil that can be injected underground, transmuting and storing the greenhouse gas far from the atmosphere. They’re scaling up fast and recently announced a new $20 million debt facility with JP Morgan; the bank also agreed to buy more than 60,000 tons worth of removals from them.
On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Peter Reinhardt, the CEO and cofounder of Charm. (He’s also the CEO of the trucking company Revoy, a founder of the autoimmune therapeutics company Antipode, and a board member at the electricity data company Arcadia.) They talk about what makes Charm different, how it is scaling operations as a carbon removal company, and the changing politics of climate change.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.
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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Robinson Meyer: You’ve had a very interesting career of starting in software, exiting a software company, and now working in the world of molecules. And I think there are two ... frankly, I’m gonna simplify things, but I feel like there’s two pathways that bring people into, let’s say, venture-backed climate startups. No. 1 is people worked at SpaceX or Tesla, or No. 2, people worked at a software company and then cared about climate change and got into the molecule space. And so as someone who was at a software company, exited, and now works with CO2 — works with physical things — what has surprised you most about working in molecules, and what have you brought from the land of bits to the land of molecules?
Peter Reinhardt: I think the main thing that i’ve brought is an expectation of pace, and that the pace can be faster, and the main thing that I have encountered that is new is the regulatory and policy environment. It doesn’t really exist in software — like it’s not a surprise that AI is the fastest growing sector in the economy right now. Everything else is regulated to stasis. And so you have an unregulated thing, relatively speaking; it’s growing super fast and creating all kinds of all kinds of good for people. We all use it every day because we get some value out of it. And so that has been hugely eye-opening. And the politics of deployment in hardware — politics of deployment don’t really exist. I mean, maybe they do around AI, but they don’t really exist in the software world. You deploy at your own pace and that’s it.
The politics of deployment in hard tech and climate are very complicated. And I think I went in with a very naive viewpoint, which is that in theory, Democrats are super aligned to climate and super aligned to deployment. In practice, I don’t know. If you look at like — I mean, I wrote a blog post about this, which is like, regulation is doubling the cost. It is impossible for us to get started in California. This is nominally the state that’s the champion of climate today. It’s not leading on renewable energy development. I tried to go there first in terms of deploying carbon removal. God knows the forests in California could use it, right? For the same reason that we’re here in Colorado, we were told it would be like 10 years to get the first injection while permitted.
That’s not what leadership in climate looks like, no matter how you slice it or dice it. It can’t take 10 years to try to deploy a novel technology. I would love to deploy in California. It’s my home state. I live there, and I come out to Colorado once every two weeks to be with most of the team here. But that’s not what leadership looks like. And so again, in theory, there’s a lot of talk. But particularly on the Democrat side, the gap between talk about climate and climate action versus the reality on the ground of actually trying to deploy stuff is massive, and like, deeply, deeply challenging, I would say, to my identity over the last few years. And like very, very discombobulating.
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
Mentioned:
Charm’s new deal with JP Morgan
The ProPublica story Peter criticized
“Over-Regulation is Doubling the Cost,” by Peter
The Cantwell-Sheehy bipartisan carbon removal bill
Previously on Heatmap: Charm Is Working With the U.S. Forest Service on a Carbon Removal Pilot
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow
