What is durable carbon removal?
Cutting emissions is the first priority and always will be. But even on the most optimistic path, some emissions will persist — from aviation, from heavy industry, from agriculture. And the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will not remove itself.
That is the gap durable carbon removal is meant to fill.
Removal is not the same as avoidance
The distinction is the most important thing to understand about this field.
Both matter. But when a company says it has reached net zero, the residual emissions it cannot eliminate must be balanced by removal, not avoidance. That is why serious buyers have moved decisively toward removal — and why avoidance credits have lost value while removal has held its price.
Avoidance
Prevents emissions that would otherwise have occurred — protecting a forest that might have been cleared, or replacing a fuel that would have been burned. The benefit is real but it rests on a counterfactual: a claim about what would have happened otherwise.
- Rests on
- a counterfactual
- Verified by
- a projection
Removal
Takes carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere and stores it somewhere it cannot readily escape from. There is no counterfactual. There is a physical quantity of carbon in a measurable place.
- Rests on
- a physical quantity
- Verified by
- weighing and testing
What makes removal durable
Storage duration is what separates a real climate benefit from a temporary one.
Carbon stored in a growing tree can return to the atmosphere in a fire, a felling or a drought. Carbon converted into a stable mineral or a condensed solid form does not. Durable removal generally means storage measured in centuries or millennia, not decades.
Each pathway has different costs, constraints and readiness. Biochar is among the most deployable today, particularly in agricultural economies with large volumes of surplus biomass.
Recognised durable pathways
Biochar
Biomass converted to stable carbon and stored in soil.
Bioenergy with carbon capture
Capturing CO2 from biomass combustion and storing it geologically.
Direct air capture
Extracting CO2 from ambient air and storing it underground.
Enhanced weathering
Accelerating natural rock weathering that binds CO2 into minerals.
Why India matters
India generates an enormous quantity of agricultural residue every year. A substantial share of it is burned in the open, contributing to air pollution that affects hundreds of millions of people.
At the same time, Indian agricultural soil is under sustained pressure — declining organic matter, degrading structure, worsening water stress.
Durable carbon removal from agricultural biomass addresses all three at once: it takes carbon out of the atmosphere, reduces open burning, and returns organic carbon to depleted soil.
Very little of this capacity has been built. That is the opportunity, and it is why we work here.
See how we do it- Carbon out of the atmospherestored in a form that lasts centuries
- Less open burningcleaner air for hundreds of millions of people
- Organic carbon back in soilwater retention and structure for depleted land