Dive Brief:
- Google is making a significant investment into biochar as a carbon removal pathway. The global tech giant announced a pair of deals Thursday for carbon credits that collectively represent 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere.
- The company inked offtake agreements with San Francisco-based Charm Industrial and Gujarat, India-based Varaha for up to 100,000 tonnes of biochar removal credits to be delivered through 2030, Google said in a Thursday blog post.
- Separately, and collectively, the purchases represent “the largest biochar carbon removals to date,” according to Google. “The magnitude of these Google’s purchases speak to the importance of biochar as a carbon removal tool,” Varaha CEO Madhur Jain said in a LinkedIn post.
Dive Insight:
Biochar is created through the process of pyrolysis, which decomposes biomass like food scraps, wood chips and animal waste in the absence of oxygen. The remainder is a black carbon mineralized substance that can then be mixed with soil to increase its ability to draw down and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Agricultural Research Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Google Carbon Credits and Removals Lead Randy Spock said in the Thursday announcement that the deals will help support the company achieve its net-zero goals, and “help scale biochar as a carbon removal solution.”
“With these partnerships with Varaha and Charm, we’re adding biochar to a growing toolkit of carbon removal solutions Google supports (such as enhanced rock weathering and direct air capture), and as a complement to our ongoing efforts to kickstart the carbon removal field,” Spock wrote.
Google has a goal of reaching net-zero emissions across all its operations and supply chain by 2030 and reducing its absolute emissions across scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 50% by end of the decade, compared to a 2019 baseline.
This is the tech company’s second deal with Charm Industrial, both facilitated by Frontier Climate — a decarbonization initiative backed by Google, Meta, Stripe and others — Charm said in a blog post Thursday. The first deal between the companies was an offtake agreement for credits from Charm’s bio-oil sequestration process.
Charm’s company priority is the production and long-term underground sequestration of bio-oils — which use pyrolysis to turn biomass to oils. Although the company has always co-produced biochar, it will now offer it as an additional product that will “play a key supporting role in Charm’s production model,” Charm Head of Sales Harris Cohn wrote in the Thursday announcement.
“Getting permanent carbon removals to scale cost effectively is crucial over these next few years and Charm’s parallel production of both bio-oil and biochar is a key way to achieving these scale objectives while also delivering significant community benefits,” Cohn said.
The deal with Varaha represents Google’s “first large-scale carbon offtake in India,” and the scale of the combined purchases is “catalytic in many ways beyond its size,” according to Varaha’s chief executive.
“The world will need to produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of biochar for carbon sequestration in order to have a climate-relevant impact,” Jain said.
