Geo-Chemical Scientist

About Charm

Our mission is to return the atmosphere to 280 ppm CO₂. We convert excess inedible biomass into carbon-rich bio‑oil and inject it into underground storage for permanent carbon removal. At scale, we can use bio‑oil to make fossil‑free iron.

Our carbon removal efforts began in 2020 with initial purchases from customers like Stripe, Shopify, and Microsoft. Since then, we’ve scaled to thousands of tons of carbon removal, grown to over a hundred employees, and established three locations in San Francisco, Colorado, and Louisiana.

We're expanding our team of ambitious, creative, and hands‑on problem solvers. We value psychological safety, collaboration, and continuous learning. We take calculated risks and treat mistakes as opportunities to improve. If you're excited about tackling big challenges, we encourage you to explore our company values.

Come help us reverse climate change. Gigatons or bust!

We are seeking a Chemist, Geochemist, or Petroleum Chemist to support permanent carbon sequestration via subsurface injection as a member of our Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) team s role focuses on understanding how chemically complex, evolving bio‑oils and other injectates behave under subsurface conditions and how their interactions with reservoir rocks, brines, and gases affect material injectivity and stability over time.

Bio‑oils are distinct from conventional petroleum fluids: they contain oxygenated organics, reactive functional groups, water, etc. and undergo aging, polymerization, and phase evolution over time. This role is central to characterizing and managing those processes in the context of geologic storage. Your ability to leverage chemistry and analytical understanding of fluid behaviors across Charm’s portfolio of injectates will directly solve for key business outcomes around injectivity improvements and subsurface uncertainty as we expand our carbon removal impact.

Over the long term, these fluid interaction findings and analytical conclusions will serve as a foundation for Charm to employ more advanced subsurface strategies to improve injectivity, such as leveraging first principles from enhanced oil recovery (EOR), fracking fluid development, or related methods.

Your technical recommendations come to life through collaboration with fellow Charmers within Engineering, Operations, Measurement/Reporting/Verification (MRV), and Development organizations. This role will report to the Head of Engineering and Materials Science in Colorado.

• Design and conduct laboratory experiments to study behaviors of pyrolysis‑derived bio‑oils under reservoir pressures and temperatures
• Deeply understand bio‑oil aging mechanisms, including polymerization, condensation, phase separation, viscosity evolution, and solids formation; work with peers or 3rd parties to help characterize and study these mechanisms as needed
• Investigate chemical interactions between bio‑oil, formation brines, reservoir minerals, and gases
• Analyze the role of oxygenated compounds, acids, phenolics, and other chemical species on reactivity, corrosion, and mineral interactions
• Evaluate risks to injectivity and operational performance such as plugging, precipitation, emulsions, scale formation, microbial interactions, and material compatibility issues
• Develop and apply geochemical and reactive transport models to predict long‑term chemical evolution and storage permanence
• Support field operations by translating lab and modeling insights into fluid specifications, handling guidelines, and injection strategies
• Collaborate with pyrolysis engineers, geologists, and injection engineers to close the loop between biomass conversion and subsurface storage

• A safety first approach
• A commitment to rigorous science
• Minimum 5+ years of professional experience + MS in Chemistry, Geochemistry, Petroleum Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, or a related field
• Strong foundation in organic chemistry and/or geochemistry, including thermodynamics and reaction kinetics
• Experience working with complex organic fluids such as bio‑oils, petroleum fractions, heavy oils, or reactive mixtures
• Hands‑on laboratory…