CarbonPlan, Stripe, Charm Leaders on Carbon Removal

what we need to tok about now is how we get negative, how we go below zero, and i think let's start with danny: make the case for why at all we are toking about carbon removal when we are still pumping out 40 billion tons a year. i think that's so. that's the right place to start, and the right place to start and solving the problem is cutting those emissions. so i think we're all probably here on this stage in agreement on that point. but the reason we need to tok about removal is net zero is what's required to stabilize planetary temperatures and when you look at the pathways to decarbonizing the economy, we know there's a couple of sectors that are going to be difficult. so there might be some residual emissions even when we make our best efforts. i like to start, but just by thinking about the agricultural sector. we use a lot of nitrogen-based fertilizers. we put out nitrogen pollution that is part of a long-term warming scenario and just interacting with that piece of the the greenhouse gas emissions puzzle, you get to the need for gigaton scale carbon removal if you want to balance out just the residual nitrogen emissions from the electricity or, sorry, from the agricultural sector, and you can imagine needing to do that in other sectors as well. so we know we need to get there. yeah, i mean, this is a thing that you know- not everybody who's clued into climate change knows- which is that only about 75 of the the climate problem is co2- right, a quarter of the problem is all other gases. this is methane, this is nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide a little bit, and so even if we cut co2 emissions, stop burning fossil fuels, they're going to have this residual greenhouse gas problem that will require us to go negative on the co2, which sort of cools the planet, but uh allows us to get to a safer uh target. maybe, you know, if we get to net negative after 2070, we could actually get to 1.5 degrees celsius. now, this is a tiknology that we will need at scale decades later. um, but we, if we want a decade later, as we know, with solar or with batteries, which were invented decades ago, we're going to have to start on that problem now. uh, and and then stripe. you've been working on trying to make that happen, which you know. it's a little bit weird that a payments company is doing carbon removal, but maybe let's just start there. why do you do it and how do you do it. so our sort of hypothesis stripe has been that part of the reason that carbon removal has been so stuck in the mud is that there have been no customers to pay for that carpet removal. unlike energy, there's no intrinsic value of most carbon removal. if you're pulling it out of the sky or ocean and storing it somewhere, you can never use it and, as a result, very few want to pay for it. i think the thing that makes it partikularly challenging is that there are lower cost alternatives, and so new tiknologies that are going to be important in developing the portfolio of solutions we'll need in the future basically don't exist today, and the ones that do are super expensive. they're like the tesla roadsters of these tiknology, and they haven't gotten cheap yet. so our theory at stripe, which started as a pretty small corporate commitment for a million dollars back in 2019, was: we're gonna spend that million dollars, you know, uh, not looking for the maximum number of tons at the cheapest price, but instead trying to buy carbon removal from companies that we think have the potential to be low cost and high volume in the future, even if they're not there today, with the idea that you know, if you're an entrepreneur, why would you start a company if you're going to have no buyers? if you're an investor, why would you invest in a company that has no revenue? if we can give these companies more customers, then hopefully the sort of theory of change is that it unlocks a lot of other parts of the ecosystem. so we started with a million bucks from stripe. we turn that into a lot more uh, by building a software product that makes it easy for stripe stripes users to donate a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, which we then pull together and use it to buy even more carbon removal. and then last week we launched- two weeks ago. we launched- something called frontier, which is an advanced market commitment for carbon removal. um, it's a 925 million dollar commitment from stripe, google, shopify, meta and alphabet to basically do this over the next nine years. and the point is essentially to send a big demand signal to all the entrepreneurs we need working on this, all the investors we need investing in this, that there is going to at least be the seed of a market. um, and it's compelling for them to spend their time on. now. that's the best segue to get to peter to tok about all the wacky ideas around carbon removal. but before we get there, you could have just bought offsets for two dollars a ton, or maybe 50 cents a ton if you search for it on the un carbon neutral website, danny. why can't we do that? well, there's a couple of reasons. we maybe shouldn't- i guess some people are. one thing is that very few of these offsets deliver carbon removal. most offsets are paying people to not pollute in the first place, which something we need to do, and we can't get to net zero if everybody's trying to pay one another not to pollute and justifying their own pollution in that way. um, but i think maybe the broader reason is: i think a lot of the voluntary offsets market is very low quality and the claims that are being made by those credits don't actually deliver the carbon services that we want. and i think one of the key distinctions that that stripe- and now with frontier- is making is, instead of trying to find the cheapest, which often means the lowest quality, they're defining quality first and they're saying: how can we deploy this fund most effectively? how can we bring into existence the companies and strategies that are delivering real carbon removal services, rather than sort of paper claims that don't hold up when you dig into them. so peter's going to tell us about a wacky idea. then i want each of you to tell me about your favorite wacky idea. i mean, you'll have to pick a favorite from your kids who you fund, nan, so start, uh, yeah, so i run a company called charm industrial and we offer carbon removal in the form of bio-oil sequestration. so this is a new carbon dioxide removal method as of two years ago that my co-founder, sean, cooked up, and the idea is that we take waste agricultural residue, things like corn stover or sugarcane, degas or wheat, straw, timber, slash all this waste cellulose that is already captured co2 and we cook it into a liquid called bio oil. it's not actually oil, it's actually mostly water and acetik acid and a bunch of other stuff. so we take that liquid that's super rich in carbon and we inject it deep underground, thousands of feet down into old oil reservoirs, old oil and gas formations, and so you have co2 captured in the plants, turned into a liquid and injected underground. and uh, you know, stripe was actually our first customer. uh, we probably would not have moved forward with this pathway that we sort of accidentally discovered if uh, stripe hadn't showed up like a week later and and made the first purchase, so it was incredibly catalytik for us and the last two years since we went to this. we completed the first injection in january of 2021, a little over a year ago, and last year we sequestered about 5400 tons of co2 equivalent, which, well, a very small number in the scheme of things, as far as we know, is about 90 of all the permanent carbon removals that were delivered last year, and so that should be shocking in its own right that only 6000 tons was delivered, and that's what we can do in uh two years. so you know, 2017, not a problem, right? yeah, yeah, we only have to grow. we only have to grow like a factor of two million uh in the next 28 years, uh, which is like 65 percent year-over-year growth compounded uh twice as fast as software. easy, easy, uh, your wacky idea man. uh, well, i'm partikularly excited about ideas.