![]() ![]() KATIE VALENZUELA: Every time we have this great new idea that we want to test out, it lands in the Central Valley somehow and ends up having unintended consequences that weren't foreseen that then we have to deal with. Katie Valenzuela works with the environmental justice group the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. People living in communities where bio-oil may get buried have worries of their own. KLIVANS: The latest international climate change report calls for carbon removal, but a United Nations panel calls the technology unproven. NAN RANSOHOFF: We want to get more companies to the starting line and then help them get down the cost curve as quickly as possible so that we can build carbon removal solutions that have the potential to get to the scale that we need to solve the problem. Nan Ransohoff is head of climate at Stripe. That's just a tiny amount of what needs to come out of the atmosphere, but it's a start. In exchange, the company will bury the bio-oil equivalent of what 31,000 passenger cars emit a year. A group of companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Stripe, Alphabet and Shopify, plan to pay Charm millions of dollars. That's where the private sector is jumping in. KLIVANS: Startups like Charm Industrial need money to develop carbon removal technologies. But - and here's Cullenward again.ĬULLENWARD: The problem is if we don't intervene in these systems, they won't suck up enough because we put such an unfathomably large quantity of pollution in the atmosphere in the first place. The world's forests and oceans naturally pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Scientists agree that to avoid catastrophic warming, humans need to stop putting climate-harming pollution into the air, and we need to draw some down. KLIVANS: Danny Cullenward researches carbon removal as a fellow at American University. KLIVANS: Bio-oil is one approach in the burgeoning field of carbon removal.ĭANNY CULLENWARD: Carbon removal refers to things you can do, whether it involves nature-based systems or technologies to literally pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. KINETIC: That's where our well sites are, and that's where we're hiring. ![]() Charm isn't burying the bio-oil in California yet due to regulations, but they are in Kansas. Charm uses the same equipment fossil fuel companies extracted oil with in the first place. KLIVANS: It's injected deep down into old oil wells, where it solidifies. KINETIC: The bio-oil that's pumped underground is a permanent carbon removal technology. This is bio-oil, and Charm Industrial, which Kinetic helped found, is doing something interesting with it. It looks like molasses and smells like barbecue sauce. KLIVANS: In just a few seconds, a viscous black goo forms. ![]() KINETIC: Then we take that sawdust, and we inject it into a reactor that's about a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, this corn stover will get ground down to dust. They would normally get plowed back into a field or left to decompose, releasing stored carbon back into the air. KLIVANS: All these leftovers from a nearby farm are full of carbon. So this is everything left over after the corn harvest - leaves and stalks. What's behind me is - you'll see lovingly labeled bales of corn stover. LAURA KLIVANS, BYLINE: Shaun Kinetic points to a stack of what looks like hay bales on a parking lot in an industrial part of San Francisco. Climate reporter Laura Klivans with member station KQED takes us to the company's headquarters to see what that means. JPMorgan Chase and other companies are committing millions to a San Francisco-based climate startup that will pull carbon from the air and store it underground.
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