Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, on forging a new path towards building trust in the carbon removal industry

Our 4th episode of The Carbon Curve is with Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-Founder of Charm Industrial, where they're developing novel carbon removal and renewable industrial syngas technology. Prior to charm, Peter was CEO and co-founder at Segment a software as a service customer data platform, which grew to 600 people before it was acquired by Twilio in 2020 for 3.2 billion. He previously studied aerospace engineering at MIT

Building trust is absolutely critical to generating the political will and stakeholder buy-in we need to scale up carbon removal or CDR.

The challenge is that there are few if any trusted third-party systems to stand behind a carbon removal project’s claims about tons removed, additionality, permanence, and a number of other factors that are important in ensuring high quality carbon removal did in fact happen.

Most of the certification and verification systems that exist today are built around avoidance-based carbon offsets - which have a whole host of their own problems around quality and trust.

Unsatisfied with the state of current standards, and recognizing the need to move quickly to solve this problem, Charm Industrial is charting a new path - building their own monitoring, reporting, and verification protocol with input from experts across the carbon removal sector.

I wanted to speak to them to learn more about whether their approach has the potential to build trust in the broader carbon removal ecosystem.

In this episode, Na’im and Peter discuss:

* Charm’s carbon removal process relative to other approaches

* Challenges with existing standard-setting systems in the carbon offsets world

* Why Charm took a different approach to MRV, and what that looks like

* If Charm’s approach is adopted by other companies, can it “abstract up” into a generally accepted, third party approach?

Show links:

* Charm’s website and blog post on their path to MRV

* Charm’s public registry on carbon removal deliveries

* Charm’s blog where more details on their protocol will be forthcoming

* Na’im’s report with CarbonPlan on barriers to scaling carbon removal, including stakeholder perceptions on existing standard setting systems

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Na’im Merchant is an advisor and thought partner to start-ups, policy groups, and research organizations on scaling up the climate technologies to meet the monumental challenge removing billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere to combat climate change. Every two weeks, Na’im will release a short interview with individuals advancing bold new ideas and taking a collective action approach to scaling up carbon removal.

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