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It may or may not be a perfect climate solution, but it is an extremely simple one.
Low-tech carbon removal is all the rage these days. Whether it’s spreading crushed rocks on fields or injecting sludgy biomass underground, relatively simplistic solutions have seen a boom in funding. But there’s one cheap, nature-based method that hasn’t been able to drum up as much attention from big name climate investors: biochar.
This flaky, charcoal-like substance has been produced and used as a fertilizer for millennia, and its potential to lock up the carbon contained in organic matter is well-documented. It’s made by heating up biomass such as wood or plants in a low-oxygen environment via a process called pyrolysis, thereby sequestering up to 40% to 50% of the carbon contained within that organic matter for hundreds or (debatably — but we’ll get to that) even thousands of years. Ideally, the process utilizes waste biomass such as plant material and forest residue left over from harvesting crops or timber, which otherwise might just be burned.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says biochar could store about 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 per year. And by some metrics, this ancient method of carbon removal is already leagues ahead of the rest. Last year, biochar accounted for 94% of all carbon dioxide removal credits that were actually fulfilled, according to CDR.fyi, which tracks the CO2 removal market. That means that while corporate buyers are purchasing carbon credits that use an array of different removal methods, biochar has thus far dominated the market when it comes to actually making good on these purchases.
Some of the largest corporate buyers of CO2 removal credits have biochar in their portfolios. Microsoft, by far the most prominent player in this space, has bought over 200,000 tons of biochar credits — part of its quest to become carbon negative by 2050 — although that’s still a mere fraction of the over 6.6 million tons of CO2 removal the company has bought overall. JPMorgan Chase, which aims to match every ton of its operational emissions with carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030, has bought nearly 19,000 tons of biochar credits, representing about 26% of its CO2 removal portfolio.
But despite its technical maturity, biochar has yet to generate the same level of excitement or venture capital investment as more complex methods of carbon removal such as direct air capture, which garnered $142 million in investment last year. By comparison, biochar companies raised a cumulative total of $74 million in 2023. While that’s no small change, it doesn’t compare to the amount of capital VCs and other climate tech funders have poured even into other similarly elemental carbon removal technologies.
For example, Frontier, a collaborative fund for tech companies to catalyze emerging solutions in this space, recently announced a $58 million deal with Vaulted Deep, a startup that injects wet biomass from food waste to poop deep underground. And at the end of last year, Frontier inked a $57 million deal with Lithos Carbon, a company pursuing enhanced rock weathering. This involves spreading crushed up rocks onto fields, which react with the CO2 in the air to form bicarbonate; that’s eventually carried out to sea, where the carbon remains permanently sequestered on the ocean floor. In other words, it’s just an acceleration of the natural weathering process, which normally takes hundreds of thousands of years. VCs backing Lithos include mainstream names like Union Square Ventures, Greylock Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures, while big-time climate tech VC Lowercarbon Capital led Vaulted Deep’s seed round.
The questions around biochar’s durability — that is, how long it can actually lock away carbon — are potentially unanswerable, and that’s at least partially driving investor reticence.
“Biochar falls in this very interesting middle ground - you create it, and then it is constantly degrading,” Freya Chay, program lead at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit that analyzes different carbon removal pathways, told me. She said that we just don’t have the scientific know-how “to predict, really clearly, how much is going to still be in your soil at 100 years or at 1,000 years.”
Frontier, for its part, only considers carbon removal “permanent” if it can sequester carbon for at least 1,000 years. Some studies indicate that a large proportion of biochar can achieve this, but it’s hard to definitively prove, and we’re far from a scientific consensus. Thus far the fund has steered clear of investing in biochar, noting that detailed protocols must be developed to measure its durability under a variety of soil and weather conditions.
Measurement, reporting and verification is often the downfall for nature-based solutions (see: the hoopla around bogus forest carbon credits). And while it is simple to measure how much of the carbon in biomass ends up sequestered in biochar, “it's where you draw the project boundaries in terms of where the MRV falls apart,” Annie Nichols, director of operations and project management at Pacific Biochar told me. For example, one might want to ensure that trees aren’t being cut down or crops aren’t being grown just for the purpose of creating biochar, and this often falls outside the scope of traditional measurement protocols. Pacific Biochar, for its part, sources its waste biomass from forests in high fire risk areas of California, where the excessive accumulation of woody debris poses a danger.
Pacific Biochar ranks as the world’s third largest supplier of carbon removal, with over 28,000 tons of credits delivered. Biochar “got a lot of attention before there was actually much utility,” its CEO, Josiah Hunt told me, referring to the period in the late 2000s when Al Gore was heavily hyping its benefits. In his 2009 book “Our Choice,” Gore called biochar “one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils, and sequestering significant amounts of CO2 for 1,000 years and more.” But at that time, Hunt said, “There weren't really carbon markets ready to work with it yet.”
Prior to 2020, Pacific Biochar’s revenue relied solely on biochar fertilizer sales to farmers. It was only when the carbon credits market picked up that the company was able to scale. Today, Pacific Biochar sells most of its credits directly, as opposed to on an independent exchange, though it works with the carbon credits platform Carbonfuture to deliver credits to customers and perform the necessary verification to ensure the company’s carbon removal data is accurate.
Pacific Biochar’s credits sell for $180 per metric ton, cheaper than nearly all other removal methods and far below the weighted average of $488 for CO2 removal. That’s because producing biochar via pyrolysis requires much less energy than something like direct air capture. It’s also a more mature process than most emergent nature-based solutions such as enhanced rock weathering, meaning that comparably less money needs to be spent demonstrating that the process works as intended.
A number of biochar companies told me they think biochar has been overlooked in favor of more novel technological solutions. “There's this fixation on trying to find the high tech solution, the SaaS app that's going to solve climate change,” Thor Kallestad, CEO and cofounder of Myno Carbon, told me. By comparison, biochar can seem like a relic of an earlier era that never quite reached its potential.
Myno, founded by oil and gas veterans, is self-funding the buildout of a large-scale biochar and electricity co-generation facility in Port Angeles, Washington, which will source its fuel from the copious timber waste in Washington State. It’s still in the initial design phase, but the ultimate goal is to produce about 70,000 tons of biochar per year alongside 20 megawatts of power. That amounts to about 100,000 carbon dioxide removal credits, which Kallestad hopes to sell for less than $100 per metric ton. Ideally, he said, the plant will serve as a proof of concept that will help drive future investments.
While there haven’t yet been any major scandals in the biochar-sourcing world, the BBC ran an exposé in 2022 on a biomass-fueled power station in the UK that was logging old-growth forests to create wood pellets that were then burned for power. The company, Drax, had previously claimed that it was only sourcing sawdust and waste wood. While Drax maintains that its biomass is “sustainable and legally harvested,” further reporting indicates that as of last year, the company was still sourcing from old-growth forests. The worry is that something similar could happen with biochar production as demand ramps up.
Chay says the cost-benefit analysis for making biochar gets even thornier when taking into account the “counterfactual of how we otherwise could have used biomass.” After all, biomass can also be burned for energy, and if the emissions are captured and stored, that’s a carbon removal strategy too. And with many looking towards biomass-based fuels as a way to decarbonize industries such as aviation and shipping, demand for waste biomass appears set to increase alongside uncertainty regarding its best use case. “Zooming forward to 2050, I'm not sure there is anything such as waste biomass,” Chay told me.
But in the short-term at least, there’s enough to go around. A recent Department of Energy report noted that “available but unused” biomass such as logging and agricultural residue could contribute around 350 tons to the nation’s supply every year. That’s about as much biomass as the United States uses for bioenergy today
“Certainly biochar has a place,” Chay said. She’s not convinced that it will ever make sense to conceptualize biochar production as “permanent carbon removal” though. “Maybe we just let it be this kind of interstitial durability. We figure out how to value that while also optimizing for agricultural co-benefits.”
Investors may remain wary of a solution that occupies this hard-to-define space between short and long-term CO2 removal, but Hunt’s not too worried. “I don’t think that’s horribly detrimental,” he told me. He sees biochar’s strong performance in the carbon credits marketplace as enough to sustain the industry for now. “I do think the buying community is what drives our growth. And even if we’re not the unicorns, even if we’re just the work mules, that’s fine with me. I don’t mind being the mule of climate change action.”
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When I reached out to climate tech investors on Tuesday to gauge their reaction to the Senate’s proposed overhaul of the clean energy tax credits, I thought I might get a standard dose of can-do investor optimism. Though the proposal from the Senate Finance committee would cut tax credits for wind and solar, it would preserve them for other sources of clean energy, such as geothermal, nuclear, and batteries — areas of significant focus and investment for many climate-focused venture firms.
But the vibe ended up being fairly divided. While many investors expressed cautious optimism about what this latest text could mean for their particular portfolio companies, others worried that by slashing incentives for solar and wind, the bill’s implications for the energy transition at large would be categorically terrible.
“We have investments in nuclear, we have investments in geothermal, we have investments in carbon capture. All of that stuff is probably going to get a boost from this, because so much money is going to be flowing out of quote, unquote, ‘slightly more established’ zero emissions technologies,” Susan Su, a climate tech investor at Toba Capital, told me. “So we’re diversified. But for me, as a human being, and as somebody that cares about climate change and cares about having an abundant energy future, this is very short-sighted.”
Bigger picture aside, the idea that the Senate proposal could lead to more capital for non-solar, non-wind clean energy technologies was shared by other investors, many of whom responded with tentative hope when I asked for their thoughts on the bill.
“The extension of the nuclear and geothermal tax credits compared to the House bill is really important,” Rachel Slaybaugh, a climate tech investor at DCVC, told me. The venture firm has invested in the nuclear fission company Radiant Nuclear, the fusion company Zap Energy, and the geothermal startup Fervo Energy. As for how Slaybaugh has been feeling since the bill’s passage as well as the general sentiment among DCVC’s portfolio companies, she told me that “it's mostly been the relief of like, thank you for at least supporting clean, firm and bringing transferability back.”
Indeed, the proposed bill not only fully preserves tax credits for most forms of zero-emissions power until 2034, but also keeps tax credit transferability on the books. This financing mechanism is essential for renewable energy developers who cannot fully utilize the tax credits themselves, as it allows them to sell credits to other companies for cash. All of this puts nascent clean, firm technologies on far more stable footing than after the House’s version of the bill was released last month.
Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures echoed these sentiments via email when he told me, “the Senate proposal is a meaningful improvement over the House version for clean energy companies. It creates more predictability and a clearer runway for emerging technologies that are not yet fully commercial.” Breakthrough invests in multiple fusion, geothermal, and long-duration energy storage startups.
Amy Duffuor, co-founder of Azolla Ventures and managing director at the Prime Impact Fund also acknowledged in an email that it’s “encouraging” that the Senate has “seen the way forward on clean firm baseload power.” However, she issued a warning that the unsettled policy environment is leading to “material risks and uncertainties for start-ups reliant on current tax incentives.”
Solar and wind are by far the most widely deployed and cost-competitive forms of renewable energy. So while they now mainly exist outside the remit of venture firms, there are numerous climate-focused startups that operate downstream of this tech. Think about all the software companies working to optimize load forecasting, implement demand response programs, facilitate power purchase agreements, monitor grid assets, and so much more. By proxy, these startups are now threatened by the Senate’s proposal to phase out the investment and production tax credits for solar and wind projects beginning next year, with a full termination after 2027.
“I think solar and wind will survive. But it's going to be like 80% of the deals don't pencil for a long time,” Ryan Guay, co-founder and president of the software startup Euclid Power, told me. Euclid makes data management and workflow tools for renewable project developers, so if the tax credits for solar and wind go kaput, that will mean less business for them. In the meantime though, Guay expects to be especially busy as developers rush to build projects before their tax credit eligibility expires.
As Guay explained to me, it’s not just the rescission of tax credits that he believes will kill such a large percent of solar and wind projects. It’s the combined impact of those cuts, the bill’s foreign entity of concern rules restricting materials from China, and Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made components. “You’re not giving the industry enough time to actually build that robust domestic supply chain, which I agree needs to happen,” Guay told me. “I’m all for the security of the grid, but our supply chains are already very constrained.”
Many investors also expressed frustration and confusion over why Senate Republicans, and the Trump administration at large, would target incentives for solar and wind — the fastest growing domestic energy sources — while touting an agenda of energy dominance and American leadership. Some even used the president’s own language around energy issues to deride the One Big Beautiful Bill’s treatment of solar and wind as well as its repeal of the electric vehicle tax credits.
“The rollbacks of the IRA weaken the U.S. in key areas like energy dominance and the auto industry, which is rapidly becoming synonymous with the EV industry,” Matt Eggers, a managing director at the climate-tech investment firm Prelude Ventures, wrote to me in an email. “This bill will still ultimately cost us economic growth, jobs, and strategic positioning on the world stage.”
“The only real question is, are we going to double down on the future and on American dynamism?” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, asked in an emailed response. “Or are we going to cling to the past by trying to hold back a future of abundant, clean, and affordable energy?”
Su wanted to focus on the bigger picture too. While the Senate’s proposal gives tax credits for solar and wind a much longer phaseout period than the House’s bill — which would have required projects to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and enter service by 2028 — Su still doesn’t think the Senate’s version is much to celebrate.
“The specific changes that came through in the Senate version are really kind of nibbling at the edges and at the end of the day, this is a huge blow for our emissions trajectory,” Su told me. She’s always been a big believer that there’s still a significant amount of cutting edge innovation in the solar and wind sectors, she told me. For example, Toba is an investor in Swift Solar, a startup developing high-efficiency perovskite solar cells. Nixing tax credits that benefit the solar industry will hit these smaller players especially hard, she told me.
With the Senate now working to finalize the bill, investors agreed that the current proposal is certainly not the worst case scenario. But many did say it was worse than they had — perhaps overly optimistically — been holding out for.
“To me, it's really bad because it now has a major Senate stamp of approval,” Su told me. The Senate usually tempers the more extreme, partisan impulses of the House. Thus, the closer a bill gets to clearing the Senate, the closer it usually is to its final form. Now, it seems, the reconciliation bill is suddenly feeling very real for people.
“At least back between May 22 and [Monday], we didn't know what was going to get amended, so there was still this window of hope that things could change more dramatically." Su said. Now that window is slowly closing, and the picture of what incentives will — and won’t — survive is coming into greater focus.
Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors.
You might not think that often about medium-duty trucks, but they’re all around you: ambulances, UPS and FedEx delivery trucks, school buses. And although they make up a relatively small share of vehicles on the road, they generate an outsized amount of carbon pollution. They’re also a surprisingly ripe target for electrification, because so many medium-duty trucks drive fewer than 150 miles a day.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with John Henry Harris, the cofounder and CEO of Harbinger Motors. Harbinger is a Los Angeles-based startup that sells electric and hybrid chassis for medium-duty vehicles, such as delivery vans, moving trucks, and ambulances.
Rob, John, and Jesse chat about why medium-duty trucking is unlike any other vehicle segment, how to design an electric truck to last 20 years, and how President Trump’s tariffs are already stalling out manufacturing firms. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What is it like building a final assembly plant — a U.S. factory — in this moment?
John Harris: I would say lots of people talk about how excited they are about U.S. manufacturing, but that's very different than putting their money where their mouth is. Building a final assembly line, like we have — our team here is really good, that they made it feel not that hard. The challenge is the whole supply chain.
If we look at what we build here in-house at Harbinger, we have a final assembly line where we bolt parts together to make chassis. We also have two sub-component assembly lines where we take copper and make motors, and where we take cells and make batteries. All three of those lines work pretty well. We're pumping out chassis, and they roll out the door, and we sell them to people, which is great. But it’s all the stuff that goes into those, that's the most challenging. There's a lot of trade policy at certain hours of the day, on certain days of the week — depending on when we check — that is theoretically supposed to encourage us manufacturing.
But it's really not because of the volatility. It costs us an enormous amount to build the supply chain, to feed these lines. And when we have volatile trade policy, our reaction, and everyone else's reaction, is to just pause. It’s not to spend more money on U.S. manufacturing, because we were already doing that. We were spending a lot on U.S. manufacturing as part of our core approach to manufacturing.
The latest trade policy has caused us to spend less money on U.S. manufacturing — not more, because we're unclear on what is the demand environment going to be, what is the policy going to be next week? We were getting ready to make major investments to take certain manufacturing tasks in our supply chain out of China and move them to Mexico, for example. Now we’re not. We were getting ready to invest in certain kinds of automation to do things in house, and now we're waiting. So the volatility is dramatically shrinking investment in US manufacturing, including ours.
Meyer: And can you just explain, why did you make that decision to pause investment and how does trade policy affect that decision?
Harris: When we had 25% tariffs on China, if we take content out of China and move it to Mexico, we break even — if that. We might still end up underwater. That's because there's better automation in China. There's much higher labor productivity. And — this one is always shocking to people — there’s lower logistics costs. When we move stuff from Shenzhen to our factory, in many cases it costs us less than moving shipments from Monterey.
Mentioned:
CalStart’s data on medium-duty electric trucks deployed in the U.S.
Here’s the chart that John showed Rob and Jesse:
Courtesy of Harbinger
It draws on data from Bloomberg in China, the ICCT, and the Calstart ZET Dashboard in the United States.
Jesse’s case for EVs with gas tanks — which are called extended range electric vehicles
On xAI, residential solar, and domestic lithium
Current conditions: Indonesia has issued its highest alert level due to the ongoing eruption of Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki • 10 million people from Missouri to Michigan are at risk of large hail and damaging winds today • Tropical Storm Erick, the earliest “E” storm on record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, could potentially strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, on Thursday.
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center said Tuesday that they intend to sue Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations at its Memphis facility. Per the lawsuit, xAI failed to obtain the required permits for the use of the 26 gas turbines that power its supercomputer, and in doing so, the company also avoided equipping the turbines with technology that would have reduced emissions. “xAI’s turbines are collectively one of the largest, or potentially the largest, industrial source of nitrogen oxides in Shelby County,” the lawsuit claims.
The SELC has additionally said that residents who live near the xAI facility already face cancer risks four times above the national average, and opponents have argued that xAI’s lack of urgency in responding to community concerns about the pollution is a case of “environmental racism.” In a statement Tuesday, xAI responded to the threat of a lawsuit by claiming the “temporary power generation units are operating in compliance with all applicable laws,” and said it intends to equip the turbines with the necessary technology to reduce emissions going forward.
Shares of several residential solar companies plummeted Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee declined to preserve related Inflation Reduction Act investment tax credits. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, Sunrun shares fell 40%, “bringing the company’s market cap down by almost $900 million to $1.3 billion,” after a brief jump at the end of last week “due to optimism that the Senate Finance bill might include friendlier language for its business model.”
That never materialized. Instead, the Finance Committee’s draft proposed terminating the residential clean energy tax credit for any systems, including residential solar, six months after the bill is signed, as well as the investment and production tax credits for residential solar. SolarEdge and Enphase also suffered from the news, with shares down 33% and 24%, respectively. You can read Matthew’s full analysis here.
Chevron announced Tuesday that it has acquired 125,000 net acres of the Smackover Formation in southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas to get into domestic lithium extraction. Chevron’s acquisition follows an earlier move by Exxon Mobil to do the same, with lithium representing a key resource for the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources “that would allow the company to pivot if oil and gas demands wane in the coming decades,” Bloomberg writes.
“Establishing domestic and resilient lithium supply chains is essential not only to maintaining U.S. energy leadership but also to meeting the growing demand from customers,” Jeff Gustavson, the president of Chevron New Energies, said in a Tuesday press release. The Liberty Owl project, which was part of Chevron’s acquisition from TerraVolta Resources, is “expected to have an initial production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year, which is enough lithium to power about 500,000 electric vehicles annually,” Houston Business Journal reports.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency prepared a memo titled “Abolishing FEMA” at the direction of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, describing how its functions can be “drastically reformed, transferred to another agency, or abolished in their entirety” as soon as the end of 2025. While only Congress can technically eliminate the agency, the March memo, obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg, describes potential changes like “eliminating long-term housing assistance for disaster survivors, halting enrollments in the National Flood Insurance Program, and providing smaller amounts of aid for fewer incidents — moves that by design would dramatically limit the federal government’s role in disaster response.”
In May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was fired one day after defending the existence of the department he’d been appointed to oversee when testifying before the House Appropriations subcommittee. An internal FEMA memo from the same month described the agency’s “critical functions” as being at “high risk” of failure due to “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” President Trump has, on several occasions, expressed a desire to eliminate FEMA, as recommended by the Project 2025 playbook from the Heritage Foundation. The March “Abolishing FEMA” memo “just means you should not expect to see FEMA on the ground unless it’s 9/11, Katrina, Superstorm Sandy,” Carrie Speranza, the president of the U.S. council of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told Bloomberg.
The Spanish government on Tuesday released its report on the causes of the April 28 blackout that left much of the nation, as well as parts of Portugal, without power for more than 12 hours. Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen, who heads Spain’s energy policy, told reporters that a voltage surge in the south of Spain had triggered a “chain reaction of disconnections” that led to the widespread power loss, and blamed the nation’s state-owned grid operator Red Eléctrica for “poor planning” and failing to have enough thermal power stations online to control the dynamic voltage, the Associated Press reports. Additionally, Aagesen said that utilities had preventively shut off some power plants when the disruptions started, which could have helped the system stay online. “We have a solid narrative of events and a verified explanation that allows us to reflect and to act as we surely will,” Aagesen went on, responding to criticisms that Spain’s renewable-heavy energy mix was to blame for the blackout. “We believe in the energy transition and we know it’s not an ideological question but one of this country’s principal vectors of growth when it comes to re-industrialisation opportunities.”
Metrograph
“It seems that with the current political climate, with the removal of any reference to climate change on U.S. government websites, with the gutting of environmental laws, and the recent devastating fires in Los Angeles, this trilogy of films is still urgently relevant.” —Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal on the upcoming screenings of the Anthropocene trilogy, co-created with Nicholas de Pencier and photographer Edward Burtynsky between 2006 and 2018, at the Metrograph in New York City.