Biochar Carbon Credits in India: A 2026 Buyer's Guide to Durable Carbon Removal
Durable carbon removal used to be the line item Indian companies could postpone. That changed in 2026. The SBTi's revised net-zero rules put removals on a fixed procurement schedule, and the market that has to supply them is dominated by a single method. Biochar accounted for 93% of durable carbon dioxide removal volume contracted in the first quarter of 2026 and featured in all five of the largest transactions. India sits on the supply side of that market — which makes biochar the rare climate purchase where an Indian buyer can source domestically, at the low end of global pricing, from projects the sustainability team can physically visit.
Why biochar became the default durable removal
Q1 2026 was the largest opening quarter on record for durable removal, with roughly 2.3 million tonnes contracted. Biomass-based methods have taken almost all of it: in 2025 they accounted for about 96% of purchase volume and 91% of delivered volume, with biochar leading deliveries in both years.
The reason is unglamorous. Direct air capture and BECCS are mostly forward contracts against plants that do not exist yet. Biochar plants are pyrolysing biomass today, which means:
Credits actually arrive. A finance team can book a retirement in the year it was budgeted, rather than carrying a prepayment for a decade.
The technology is old and cheap. Pyrolysis is not a moonshot. Capital cost per tonne removed is a fraction of engineered capture.
It sits in the durable bucket. Unlike the avoidance credits many Indian portfolios still rest on, biochar is a removal with a defensible century-scale storage claim.
How a biochar credit is actually made
Biomass that would otherwise rot or burn is heated to roughly 450–700°C with very little oxygen. The labile plant carbon rearranges into fused aromatic structures that soil microbes struggle to break down. The resulting char is applied to farmland or bound into construction materials, and the carbon that would have returned to the atmosphere within a season instead stays put for decades to centuries.
A credit is issued on what is left after the project subtracts its own emissions — feedstock collection, transport, process energy — and then applies a permanence discount. Under Verra's VM0044 methodology that discount is a conservative factor derived from pyrolysis temperature and residence time, estimating the fraction of carbon expected to persist after 100 years. Two projects burning the same tonnage of cotton stalk can therefore issue meaningfully different credit volumes.
Biochar is the only durable removal category that is both commercially available at scale today and priced within reach of an Indian corporate budget. That accessibility is precisely why the diligence has to get tighter, not looser.
The standards that matter: VM0044 and Puro.earth
Two crediting routes carry most of the market. Verra's VM0044 v1.2 was assessed by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market in 2025 as meeting the Core Carbon Principles, making credits from it eligible for the CCP label. Puro.earth, which issues CORCs under its own biochar standard, was confirmed CCP-Eligible by the ICVCM in December 2025.
One timing note for anyone negotiating right now: Verra opened a public consultation on a major revision to VM0044 that ran from 15 July to 17 August 2026. If you are signing a multi-year offtake priced against the current methodology, read the proposed changes before you fix volumes. Methodology revisions move issuance ratios, and issuance ratios move the effective price per tonne. The five pillars of carbon credit integrity apply here exactly as they do to any other credit type.
India's position: feedstock, projects and the offtake wave
India generates somewhere in the region of 500–600 million tonnes of agricultural residue a year, alongside roughly 60 million tonnes of municipal solid waste. Published estimates suggest that converting 30–50% of that stream could yield 15–26 million tonnes of biochar and remove on the order of 0.1 gigatonnes of CO2e annually. Those are potential figures, not a pipeline — but they explain why international buyers keep landing here.
The commercial signals in 2026 have been unambiguous:
Microsoft and Varaha. An offtake for more than 100,000 tonnes of removal over three years, announced in January 2026, using cotton stalks from smallholder farms in Maharashtra. Reporting puts the programme at 18 industrial gasification reactors with a projected lifetime removal above two million tonnes.
Jain Irrigation. An industrial-scale biochar facility commissioned at Jalgaon, Maharashtra in June 2026, with annual processing capacity of about 20,000 tonnes.
A widening supplier base. Varaha, Mash Makes, ArSta Eco, Anulekh Agrotech and Ecochar are among the names now operating at commercial scale in India.
The co-benefit story is unusually strong domestically. Every tonne of residue pyrolysed is a tonne not burned in a field, which is a direct particulate-pollution argument in the northern crop belt, plus farmer income and soil organic carbon. For a CSR or ESG narrative, that combination is easier to defend than most offshore purchases.
What it costs, and why prices are not falling
Biochar removal has generally traded in the region of $125–200 per tonne through 2025–26, with Indian supply sitting at the low end — commonly quoted around €105–150 per tonne. That is an order of magnitude above the prices Indian buyers are used to seeing on avoidance credits, and budgets should be built on that basis from the start.
Do not assume time is on your side. A May 2026 pricing survey found the average buyer–supplier price gap narrowing from about $107 per tonne in 2025 to $98 in 2026, and expected to compress to roughly $48 by 2030 — but neither buyers nor suppliers expect durable removal to trade below $100 per tonne in the near term. For biochar specifically, tight supply and demand may keep prices firmer than the market average. Waiting for a crash is not a procurement strategy.
Six checks before you sign a biochar offtake
Feedstock additionality. Is the biomass genuinely surplus, or was it already being used as fodder, cooking fuel or board feedstock? Diverted biomass creates emissions somewhere else and the credit does not account for it.
Permanence basis. Ask for the methodology version, the pyrolysis temperature range, the H/C organic ratio of the char and the 100-year persistence fraction applied. Vague "1,000-year storage" marketing without those numbers is a red flag.
Delivery track record. Contracted volume and delivered volume are very different numbers across this market. Ask for issuance history on the registry, not a pipeline slide.
Double counting and host-country claims. Establish in writing whether the removal is claimed against India's NDC and whether a corresponding adjustment is contemplated. This is the question most likely to be reopened later.
End use and reversal risk. Soil application, concrete and asphalt have different monitoring stories. Understand what stops the char being dug up and combusted, and who bears that risk contractually.
Evidence behind the co-benefits. Farmer payment records, air-quality data and yield trials should be documented. If you plan to put these claims in a BRSR or annual report, they need the same audit trail as any other project-based credit you buy.
How biochar fits the rest of your climate plan
The demand driver is now written into the standards. Under the SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 published in June 2026, Category A companies must support eligible carbon removals from 2035, beginning at 1% of ongoing emissions and rising to 100% by their net-zero year, with residual emissions neutralised using eligible removals. Read that as a procurement calendar rather than a 2050 problem — the multi-year offtakes that secure supply at today's prices are being signed now.
Three boundaries are worth keeping clear. Biochar is not a substitute for abatement; buying removals ahead of cutting Scope 1 and 2 inverts the sequence auditors expect. It is also not a compliance instrument — Carbon Credit Certificates issued under India's CCTS are a separate currency, and a Puro CORC or Verra VCU does not discharge a CCTS obligation, though non-obligated companies can pursue the CCTS offset mechanism in parallel. And it is not the whole removals answer: most credible portfolios pair durable removals with afforestation and reforestation credits under VM0047, which cost less per tonne but carry a shorter and more reversible storage claim.
Where Csquare fits
Most Indian companies approaching biochar for the first time are trying to answer three questions at once: how many tonnes of durable removal they will actually need, which suppliers can deliver rather than promise, and what a defensible contract looks like. Csquare works on all three — sizing residual emissions from a verified inventory, screening Indian and international biochar projects against the checks above, and handling registry retirement and documentation so the claim survives assurance.
If durable removal has moved from a footnote to a budget line in your climate plan this year, talk to our team.
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