If there’s one thing 2025 made clear, it’s that biochar is entering a new phase.
Its immediate deployability, scaling potential, and robust monitoring through measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) frameworks are driving growing interest and trust across carbon markets. Beyond carbon removal alone, actors in agriculture and supply chains are beginning to recognise the longer-term value biochar brings to their operations, from healthier soils and improved crop quality to greater resilience at the farm level.
And as the demand for biochar continues to grow, so does the responsibility that comes with scaling it. How do we make sure that, in the rush to grow, we scale without cutting corners and a way that still honours the land, the people, and the climate it is meant to serve?
Fred Hornaday, Global Supply Relations at Planboo, works closely with biochar producers to onboard new projects, optimize impact, and scale operations. In this reflection, he shares what he has learned along the way, where the pressure points are, and what it takes to move through the growing complexity of biochar and carbon removal with care, as a new year begins.
The first days of a new year always invite the opportunity to pause and reflect on where we’re headed and where we’ve been. And this year, I’m feeling a deeper thirst for reflection than usual, pondering not just the last 12 months, but the course of the last five years. Faced with an ever-growing volume of existential threats, I’ve had plenty to marinate on.
Those days of face masks and booster shots linger like a traumatic memory from the pages of ancient history, but in reality, half a decade isn’t even enough time to raise a fast-growing bamboo seedling to maturity. What’s really remarkable, is realizing that in 2021, I hadn’t even heard of biochar. Yet today, it seems as essential to my identity as the carbon molecule is to life.
From Cold War politics to depth psychology to bamboo cultivation, I’ve plunged my fair share of rabbit holes, and always with great intellectual satisfaction. But I don’t believe I’ve investigated anything as intensely and voraciously as I’ve studied biochar in these recent years, alongside a relentless cohort of climate champions at Planboo.
When I first discovered the notion of removing atmospheric carbon by converting agricultural waste into a high-quality, organic soil amendment, it immediately tickled my lifelong passion for sustainability. Back then, I thought that turning unmanaged tropical bamboo into charcoal briquettes (for cooking and heating) was the ultimate silver bullet, a revolutionary alternative to curb deforestation in the Global South. But the more I learned about biochar, the more I understood it to be the supremely circular solution for waste management, carbon removal and soil restoration.
Having worked with industrial hemp in the 90’s and bamboo products in the early 2000’s, I was already familiar with the challenges of being an early adopter. Every new space, no matter how promising or exhilarating, is infused with uncertainty. Biochar production and carbon removal markets are clearly no exception.
The fundamentals of the carbon cycle are simple enough, and the benefits of biochar production in place of openly incinerating crop residues are irrefutable. But when it comes to designing a profitable and effective operation, or maintaining the mountain of data required to issue a batch of carbon removal credits, or ensuring that the crops will enjoy the greatest benefits through the optimal mixing and application practices, you quickly find yourself in a wilderness of unproven assumptions and uncharted obstacles, while also being surrounded by astonishing opportunities to make direct impact.
Knowledge and Relativity
For every question we think we’ve answered, a freight load of new mysteries emerges. And anyone who tells you they’ve got all the answers is not telling you the whole story. With each riddle we unravel, an unexpected nest of hornets is rattled and released. On this never-ending path of scientific inquiry, I’m constantly reminded of Einstein’s analogy about knowledge and balloons. If you can imagine filling a balloon with everything we know, so the story goes, then you can think of the balloon’s surface area as all that remains to be learned. So as the volume of knowledge expands, the area of questions continues to grow, leading us always further and further away from having all the answers.
We don’t shy away from this reality; we embrace it. It’s the questions that keep us going. Science is not a dogma to cling to, but a process to follow. We are not attached to an orthodox set of beliefs; on the contrary, we are driven by curiosity and humility.
In this dynamic space where Planboo operates, we can say that we’re inflating our balloon from three separate air streams. First, we have the scientific foundations of biochar, related to crucial elements like carbon content, random reflectance, kiln emissions, water retention, nutrient uptake, and the list goes on, with new studies and papers appearing every week. Then we introduce a supplemental flow of data from our project developers who are constantly assessing factors like biomass availability, weather conditions, operational costs, transportation logistics and storage requirements, all of which can fluctuate and are heavily dependent on the location and the specific biomass (crop) types.
Finally, because this doesn’t already create enough complexity, we triangulate all that data against the needs and whims of the voluntary carbon market (VCM), the diverse body of carbon removal investors, each with its own decision-making matrix. Among the multitude of criteria to consider and quantify, the gamut runs from strict science to pure perception, encompassing issues like pricing, leakage, social benefits, soil impact, storytelling, brand recognition, and so on.
Mounting Interest
Despite these Himalayan challenges and ongoing avalanches of data, interest in biochar continues to grow exponentially. At first glance, it seems straightforward enough. Certainly, compared to measuring and validating the quantity of carbon dioxide sequestered by a thousand hectares of clumping bamboo, calculating the CO2 equivalent contained in a ton of tangible biochar seems like child’s play. And in fact, it can be measured with a far higher degree of confidence, but this is only the tip of a shiny, black iceberg.
The lure of easy income leads many to believe that, thanks to the carbon markets, producing biochar from waste residues is comparable to printing money on scratch paper. The agricultural waste is free, so isn’t their biochar operation destined to generate pure profit? And Chat GPT told them they can gather 40 tons of biomass per hectare. Far be it from me to convince them otherwise.
From biomass conversions to the market prices for biochar and carbon removal credits, the rosy assumptions pile up faster than soggy seed pods at an equatorial coffee mill. And the conclusions on their spreadsheets are enough to make me misty-eyed. But these are just the most obvious sorts of examples.
I learned long ago to avoid working with project proponents who see biochar as a means to generate carbon credits. It needs to work the other way around. What I’m looking for are people who recognize carbon credits as the tool to enable the production of biochar. It’s not about naming as many co-benefits as possible in order to ratchet up the price of credits and pad your bottom line. If there’s one thing I learned this year, it’s that the biochar and the soil improvement are a paycheck in themselves, and the carbon credits are your co-benefit. Biochar is the cake, and the carbon removal is just the frosting.
Despite our best efforts, the VCM has created all kinds of ambiguous (or even perverse) incentives. The crediting system, for example, rewards carbon content and carbon stability. In doing so, it overlooks important factors like surface area and water-holding capacity. Neither do they prioritize the agronomic impact, which, in order to truly optimize, requires some complicated and labor-intensive examination of mixture and application strategies to address a host of local, site-specific constraints.
Instead, what we increasingly see is a race to the bottom. Who can generate the most credits, the fastest, at the lowest price? If they can bring a few thousand credits to the market for $80 or less, the buyers will jump, and many will be willing to turn a blind eye to a shortcut here or there.
Meanwhile, others among us work tirelessly to raise the standard — as Planboo does with its robust dMRV system MRVin — to maintain the strictest levels of integrity, to monitor the sourcing of biomass, and to carefully measure the soil impact through extensive trials and testing. And naturally, this degree of thoroughness and transparency comes with a cost.
Onward and upward
The sheer volume of knowledge and data required to design and maintain a successful and impactful biochar project often feels staggering and overwhelming. Just understanding which projects to work with and which to avoid can take weeks or months of careful assessment.
Once upon a time, we simply examined the quantities of biomass to gauge the potential scale and output of a project. But soon, it became obvious that there is no shortage of biomass in the tropics. What’s scarce are the proper partners, and what we really need to source are the right people who share our vision and values surrounding agronomic circularity, socio-economic impact, and authenticity. Whether it’s a basket of bamboo offcuts or another bundle of sensitive data, the load is always lighter when we lift it together.
Still, this is only the beginning. As the modern biochar industry crawls out of infancy and prepares to take its first galloping steps, we need to know that we can stand on two feet. Attempting to sprint across the field at this stage of the game will only lead to disaster. In this day and age, it’s all too easy to be seduced by oversimplifications, whether it’s a seven-second meme or a snazzy seal of certification. Ample biomass and quality partners are essential, but defeating climate change and restoring tropical farmlands will take a lot more than just suitable feedstock and team spirit.
Slowly, deliberately, and collaboratively, we will move the proverbial ball down the field. By always prioritizing win-win relationships, long-term thinking, and scientific integrity, biochar can rise to become the sterling solution so many of us hope for.
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