Watershed customers are contributing to $53M worth of purchases of permanent carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from Charm Industrial as part of our partnership with Frontier, the advance market commitment to accelerate carbon removal. Aledade, Boom Supersonic, Canva, SKIMS, Wise, and Zendesk are contributing to offtake agreements that will remove 112,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and store them permanently underground between 2024 and 2030.
Founding Frontier Members Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey Sustainability, as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, and Workday, also contributed to the Charm purchases. The Watershed-Frontier partnership enables Watershed customers to buy into Frontier at a wider range of commitment sizes, broadening access to climate-critical permanent carbon removal technologies.
“Watershed customers are accelerating decarbonization by supporting new technologies like permanent carbon removal,” said Claire Kiely, Carbon Removal Products & Partnerships Lead, Watershed. “By acting collectively, these companies will have an outsized impact on the climate economy. We’re excited to be working with our close partner Charm Industrial to help our customers achieve their climate goals while building the next generation of climate technology.”
“We are grateful for Watershed’s longtime advocacy for permanent carbon removal and their early support of Charm as a supplier in the Watershed Marketplace since 2021. They’ve been a significant entry point to permanent carbon removal for many companies, and we’re thrilled to continue our deep partnership through our engagement with Frontier,” said Katie Holligan, Head of Operations, Charm Industrial.
Charm removes carbon from the atmosphere for 1000+ years through biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) technology. They collect waste biomass that’s left over from agricultural harvests or forest fire management and heat it to a very high temperature in an oxygen-deprived environment—a process known as pyrolysis. The resulting bio-oil is then injected into EPA-regulated wells, where it sinks and solidifies permanently. Pyrolyzers are small and modular, moving from farm to farm on the back of a truck-bed, minimizing the need to transport the raw biomass. Charm was one of the first companies to successfully remove carbon from the atmosphere permanently and today leads the market, having delivered 6,160 tons to date via pilot processes. Charm has been a supplier in the Watershed Marketplace since 2021.
BiCRS offers a promising approach to permanent carbon removal because it harnesses the natural capture of CO2 by plants and it has the potential to reach climate-relevant scale in the medium-term. Experts estimate that enough waste and residue biomass could be available by 2050 globally per year to support gigatons of carbon removal annually.
BiCRs is one of many compelling approaches to carbon removal that Frontier is considering as it builds a diverse portfolio of solutions. Frontier will announce a series of additional offtake agreements by the end of the year. Frontier looks for companies that have the potential to be low cost at scale—even if they’re expensive today—and help accelerate them down the cost curve via offtakes.
Candidates for offtakes are reviewed by Frontier’s technical staff and a group of 50 scientific and technical reviewers with expertise ranging from bioenergy, geochemistry, ecology, geologic storage to governance and waste management.
