Ag residue and carbon removal

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Sep 25, 2025

In this discussion, Peter Reinhardt, the co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, shares insights on the innovative conversion of agricultural residues into bio-oil. He explains how these underutilized byproducts can be processed to improve soil health and support carbon removal. Peter delves into the economic challenges of collecting biomass and contrasts centralized processing with mobile pyrolysis. He emphasizes the importance of transparency in building buyer trust for carbon removal, highlighting the potential of this approach for high-value climate solutions.

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INSIGHT

Huge Underused Corn Stover Resource

The U.S. produces enormous quantities of underutilized corn stover, on the order of hundreds of millions of tons annually.
Most of that residue simply decomposes in fields and returns carbon to the atmosphere instead of being captured or used.

ANECDOTE

Field Logistics Balloon Costs

Getting biomass off a field requires many sequential steps like windrowing, baling, stacking, loading and trucking.
Each step needs expensive equipment and labor, and those logistics dominate delivered biomass cost.

INSIGHT

Transport Kills Centralized Economics

Transport and consolidation costs often far exceed the payment received by farmers for stover.
Centralized plants historically underestimated these logistics and failed when delivered biomass costs doubled expectations.

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Agricultural byproducts like corn stover, wood chips, and soybean husks typically get left to decompose and release carbon dioxide. Don’t call them “waste” though; some farmers use these byproducts as field cover to improve soil health. And industry uses a fraction of this biomass as feedstock for valuable products like ethanol, electricity, and heat. Theoretically, it’s a vastly underutilized resource.

The problem is that agricultural residue is really hard to collect. The economics of gathering, sorting, processing, and refining are tough. On top of that, it makes for a crappy fuel. It’s low energy density and high carbon, compared to oil, for example.

So in what applications does agricultural residue make the most sense? And how do you economically collect the material at scale?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, a carbon removal startup that collects agricultural residue and refines it in the field into what it calls “bio-oil.” It then injects the bio-oil underground for sequestration. Together, Peter and Shayle discuss the use cases and collection of agricultural residue, covering topics like:

How the difficult economics of collecting and transporting biomass have killed centralized biomass projects, except in a few niche examples
Why Peter says the processing and densification are key to improving the economics
The tradeoffs between big, centralized processing facilities and Charm’s on-field mobile pyrolysis units
The case for using agricultural residue for applications where the carbon content matters, like iron-making, sustainable aviation fuel, and carbon removal
What’s driving carbon removal buyers and what it takes to build trust with them

Resources:

Catalyst: Fuzzy math and food competition: The pitfalls of sourcing biomass for carbon removal
Open Circuit: What we learned from the ethanol disaster
Catalyst: Shopify’s head of sustainability on the realities of the carbon removal market
Catalyst: From biowaste to ‘biogold’

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

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