It’s been a week for the record books in CDR procurement — and today’s digest captures the clearest signal of all: corporate buyers are moving from commitments to contracts, and the volumes are starting to add up.
Our Coverage Today
🟢 Google + AMP Robotics: 200K Tonnes of Biochar by 2030
Google Partners With AMP Robotics on 200K-Tonne Biochar Carbon Removal Deal
Just days after Microsoft’s 1-million-tonne biochar deal with Liferaft, Google signed its own major biochar removal contract — 200,000 tonnes via Commonwealth Sortation (an AMP Robotics affiliate) by 2030. The twist: this project uses AI-sorted municipal solid waste as feedstock, not agricultural residues. It’s a notable proof of concept for waste-to-biochar at scale, and a signal that tech giants see biochar as a reliable removal pathway.
🟢 ClimeFi Launches Its Largest Procurement Round Yet — Up to 500K Tonnes
ClimeFi Launches Largest CDR Procurement Round Yet — Up to 500K Tonnes
Swiss CDR aggregator ClimeFi is running its most ambitious buying round: the Beyond 2030 RFP, seeking 100,000–500,000 tonnes of durable CDR with a minimum 200-year permanence threshold. All pathways welcome — no forestry offsets. This is the voluntary market growing up in real time: collective demand, strict standards, serious scale.
🟢 Bolivia Enters the CDR Market
Bolivia Enters CDR Market — Altitude Signs 305K-Tonne Biochar Deal With Empacar
CDR financier Altitude has signed a 305,000-tonne biochar deal with Empacar S.A., one of Bolivia’s largest industrial companies. First credits expected in 2027 under Puro.earth methodology. Bolivia wasn’t on most CDR maps. It is now — and this deal shows how established industrial companies in the Global South can pivot into the carbon removal market with credible supply chains.
🟢 Pulp Mills as CDR Infrastructure
Pulp Mills Could Become the Backbone of Industrial Carbon Removal
An often-overlooked angle: pulp mills already burn biomass and could become net-negative operations by adding CCS to their existing biogenic emissions. Canada, Finland, and Sweden are actively exploring this. The post digs into why BECCS at pulp mills makes more economic sense than purpose-built facilities — the capex is sunk, the biomass is already there.
🟢 China’s Cheapest CDR Path: Abandoned Cropland + Biochar
Tsinghua Study: Biochar on Abandoned Cropland Could Be CDR’s Cheapest Path in China
New Tsinghua University research finds that growing bioenergy crops on China’s ~3.4 million hectares of abandoned farmland and converting them to biochar could support 25.8 million tonnes of annual CO₂ removal — at costs competitive with any current pathway. The abandoned cropland angle sidesteps the food-vs-fuel competition problem that plagues most bioenergy proposals.
🟢 CDR Misconception #3: Enhanced Weathering Can’t Scale
CDR Misconception #3: Enhanced Weathering Is Just Spreading Rocks — It Can’t Scale
This week’s misconception series installment tackles enhanced weathering’s reputation problem. The dismissal — “it’s just spreading crushed rock” — misses the sophisticated geochemical process underneath. We break down the MRV challenges, the actual gigaton potential, and why the right comparison isn’t to other CDR methods but to conventional agriculture’s existing scale.
Noteworthy Stories We Didn’t Cover
Microsoft + Liferaft (story #615, score 40): A separate report on the 1-million-tonne Liferaft deal — the largest single biochar contract in US history. We covered the Google deal in more depth today, but the Microsoft context is important. Between Google, Microsoft, and ClimeFi’s ongoing rounds, tech-sector and financial-sector demand for biochar alone is approaching 2 million tonnes this week.
Canada CDR momentum (story #636, score 55): Climeworks and Microsoft activity in Canada continues — CDR is increasingly central to Canada’s near-term climate architecture, and the policy environment there is more stable than most.
Long-term CDR scenarios (story #643, score 70): A new modelling paper on long-term CDR deployment and energy system impacts. Strong academic signal on what deployment curves look like at climate-relevant scale — worth a standalone post next week.
Market Snapshot
Today’s theme is biochar procurement dominance. Three separate deals totalling over 1 million new tonnes were announced this week alone (Google 200K, ClimeFi up to 500K, Bolivia 305K). Add Microsoft’s Liferaft deal from earlier in the week and you’re looking at roughly 2 million tonnes of new biochar commitments in seven days.
The geography is shifting too — Bolivia joining alongside established hubs in the US and Europe signals that biochar supply chains are becoming genuinely global. Watch for more deals from Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa in the coming months, particularly as Puro.earth and Gold Standard methodologies gain adoption.
For CDI portfolio context: CDI has direct biochar exposure through Cotierra — one of our early biochar investments — and the deal volume this week validates the thesis that industrial-scale biochar buyers are here now, not in 2030.
That’s the March 27 digest. Six posts, one big theme: the CDR buying market is real, it’s biochar-heavy, and the volumes are accelerating.