Pathway-101

Biochar: the pathway Biochar is what you get when you cook biomass — crop residues, forestry waste, sewage sludge — in a low-oxygen environment at several hundred degrees Celsius. The carbon that the plant pulled out of the atmosphere ends up locked in a stable, ring-structured solid that resists microbial decay for centuries when applied to soil or used as a filler in concrete and asphalt. It is, by volume, the largest delivered carbon dioxide removal (CDR) pathway today: biochar accounts for the majority of tonnes actually issued on registries like Puro.earth and the European Biochar Certificate (EBC), even as direct air capture attracts more capital per tonne announced. ...

The premise Biomass burial is the deliberate placement of plant matter — wood chips, agricultural residues, sludges, algae, even whole logs — into an environment where it cannot decompose. The carbon a tree pulled from the air over its lifetime stays as carbon, instead of returning to the atmosphere as CO₂ or methane within years or decades. The appeal is that the hard part of carbon removal — pulling CO₂ out of dilute air — has already been done, for free, by photosynthesis. The engineering problem is narrower: stop the rot. ...