Most CDR companies are building something new. Rewind Earth is repurposing something old — and toxic.

The company takes sustainably sourced biomass and stores it in deep underground mine chambers where oxygen-free conditions prevent decomposition. The carbon stays locked away. And the mines themselves benefit: less acid drainage, reduced land subsidence risk, lower methane emissions.

The Approach

Rewind’s flagship project operates in a deep mine in Georgia (the US state, not the country). The concept is elegant: abandoned mines are environmental liabilities — they leak acidic water, release methane, and pose collapse risks. By filling them with biomass, Rewind addresses multiple problems simultaneously.

The biomass doesn’t rot because the chambers are anaerobic. Carbon that was in living plant matter gets locked underground in conditions that could maintain stability for centuries or longer.

The MRV Challenge

Storing biomass underground is conceptually simple. Proving you’ve stored it — to the standards required for carbon credit issuance — is not. That’s where BlueLayer’s digital MRV platform comes in.

BlueLayer’s system automatically validates and timestamps every data entry from Rewind’s operations: biomass mass, moisture content, carbon composition. It runs mass balance and carbon content calculations in real-time, creating audit-ready reports.

This matters because CDR’s credibility problem isn’t “does the science work?” — it’s “can you prove it?” Rewind + BlueLayer demonstrate that even unconventional CDR approaches can meet verification standards if the monitoring infrastructure is right.

Scaling Potential

There are roughly 500,000 abandoned mines in the US alone. Most are environmental hazards. If even a fraction could be converted to carbon storage, the capacity is enormous — and the co-benefits (reduced pollution, stabilized land) make the economics more favorable than purpose-built storage.

It’s still early days. But the combination of CDR + environmental remediation + existing infrastructure is exactly the kind of multi-benefit approach that investors and policymakers love.

Source: Carbon Herald

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