Soil-Carbon

Soil carbon is the largest research field in carbon removal, and the one with the least industry behind it. The CDR Researcher Census counts 41,118 researchers whose primary pathway is soil carbon - nearly double the next-largest pathway, biochar, and ten times the size of direct air capture. Yet only 1.7% of them work in the corporate sector, the lowest share of any pathway. Most researchers, least commercialization. That is the paradox. ...

What “soil carbon” means in a CDR context Soil carbon as a removal pathway is the deliberate addition — or protection — of organic carbon in agricultural and grassland soils so that atmospheric CO₂ ends up stored as soil organic matter rather than circulating in the air. In practice, almost every commercial project in the directory today is doing this through biochar: pyrolysing biomass into a stable, carbon-rich solid and burying it in farmland. A smaller share of projects pursue management-based sequestration (cover crops, no-till, compost, agroforestry) where the carbon gain comes from shifting the balance between plant input and microbial decomposition. The two approaches share a destination — carbon in soil — but the durability profiles and the science behind them are very different, which is the single most important thing for a buyer or journalist to internalise before going further. ...