Biochar Carbon Credits 2026: Who's Buying, Who's Selling, What They Cost

In Q2 2025, biochar delivered 89.4% of all durable carbon dioxide removal credits issued globally. Not 89% of commitments. 89% of credits actually delivered into the registry, certified, and retired. This is the number that matters, because the durable CDR market is full of contracts for tonnes that have not been produced yet.

The voluntary carbon market is roughly $949 billion in cumulative value, but the vast majority is avoidance credits: REDD+ forest protection, renewable energy methane capture, cookstoves. Avoidance is not removal. It says "this would have been emitted, and now it will not be." Removal says "this carbon is in the atmosphere, and now it is not." The price difference reflects the difficulty. Avoidance trades at $5 to $8 per tonne. Durable removal trades at $131 to over $1,000.

Within durable removal, biochar is the dominant pathway by an enormous margin. According to CDR.fyi, the live tracker for carbon dioxide removal purchases, total durable CDR commitments crossed roughly $15 billion by the end of 2025. Biochar is the largest single category within that pool. Direct air capture gets the press. Biochar gets the contracts.

The reason is simple. Biochar is the only durable removal pathway that can be produced at scale today using existing technology, existing feedstocks, and existing distribution. Pyrolysis equipment exists. Agricultural and forestry residues exist. Buyers can verify the carbon, certify the permanence, and take delivery within months rather than years. Every other pathway is either earlier in the cost curve or earlier in the build cycle.

The biochar buyer side is concentrated. Five entities account for the majority of durable CDR commitments, and biochar features prominently in nearly all of them.

Frontier Climate is the anchor. Frontier is an advance market commitment funded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, McKinsey, JPMorgan, Klarna, Block, and others. The structure is borrowed from vaccine procurement: a pool of buyers commits in advance to pay a premium for verified removal, giving suppliers the confidence to invest in capacity. As of 2025, Frontier has committed over $1 billion to durable CDR. Roughly 30% of that pool, by value, has gone to biochar. Frontier 2024 commitments alone directed approximately $60 million specifically to biochar suppliers.

Microsoft is the largest single corporate buyer in the world, by a wide margin. In Q1 2024 alone, Microsoft contracted 129,000 tonnes of biochar removal. Across 2024 and 2025, Microsoft committed an estimated $200 million to biochar-specific contracts, including a multi-year deal with Exomad Green in Bolivia for forestry residue conversion. Microsoft's CDR portfolio also includes direct air capture and enhanced rock weathering, but biochar dominates by tonnage delivered.

Google buys both directly and through Frontier. Google has signed multi-thousand-tonne deals across several biochar suppliers since 2023, integrating biochar into the Alphabet sustainability ledger. The deals are smaller than Microsoft's individual contracts but consistent and growing.

Stripe is the founding Frontier member and has been buying biochar since 2021, before most of the corporate world had heard of durable CDR. Stripe Climate operationalizes the procurement mechanism that became Frontier.

Shopify runs a Sustainability Fund that includes biochar alongside other removal categories. Shopify is also a Frontier funder, so it has dual exposure to the market.

Beyond the top five, the next ring of buyers is forming. The Symbiosis Coalition, launched in 2024 by Salesforce, JPMorgan, BCG, and Visa, is a billion-dollar commitment to nature-based removal. Symbiosis is broader than biochar (it includes reforestation and soil carbon banking), but biochar is part of the procurement scope. Klarna and Block buy through Frontier. The pattern is consistent: when a corporate sustainability team builds a serious removal portfolio, biochar is in it.

The geographic distribution of buyers is heavily concentrated in North America, with Europe second and Asia barely present. This matches the broader pattern of corporate net zero commitments. Buyer demand is a function of disclosure pressure, regulatory incentive, and shareholder expectation, all of which are strongest in jurisdictions with mature ESG frameworks. For a deeper view of how capital is moving across the green economy generally, see Follow the Money.

The headline number is the average. The interesting numbers are the spread. Biochar credits traded at an average of $131 per tonne CO2 equivalent in 2023 and reached $164 per tonne in 2025, a 25% increase in two years. Most analysts now expect the average to push past $200 per tonne by 2027 as committed demand outpaces delivered supply.

The position of biochar within the broader durable removal cost curve explains the demand. Biochar is the cheapest verifiable durable removal pathway available at scale today. That position is what attracts the buyer concentration described above.

Within biochar, the price spread is defined by quality tier. Standard wood-feedstock biochar trades at $140 to $160 per tonne. High-temperature biochar produced above 700 degrees Celsius reaches $160 to $200 per tonne because higher pyrolysis temperatures produce more aromatic carbon structures, which extend permanence claims past 100 years. Biochar co-located with district heating, like Carbofex and Carbon Centric, commands $170 to $180 per tonne because the verifiable energy displacement strengthens the lifecycle math. Smallholder and social-impact biochar, like Husk and NetZero, trades at $180 to $250 per tonne because buyers pay a community premium on top of the carbon.

The pricing trajectory is upward across every tier. In 2024, total biochar credit purchases globally crossed $400 million. In 2025, that figure is projected to exceed $700 million. Microsoft alone accounted for roughly $200 million across the two years. The buyer pool is expanding faster than the producer pool, which is the textbook condition for sustained price growth.

For context on what a carbon credit actually represents and why durability matters, see What Is a Carbon Credit? and What Is Carbon Removal?

Here is the structural condition that determines the next five years of biochar pricing. Demand for durable removal contracted as of 2025 stands at roughly 10 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year. Biochar production capacity actually delivering credits is roughly 1.5 million tonnes per year. The gap is 8.5 million tonnes. That gap is the entire investment thesis.

This gap exists because building biochar capacity takes time. A pyrolysis facility needs feedstock contracts, off-take agreements, certification approval, environmental permits, and capital investment that ranges from $5 million for a small operation to $50 million for an industrial-scale plant. The lead time from financing decision to first delivered tonne is 18 to 36 months. Buyer demand can spike in a quarter. Supply cannot.

The price implication is direct. As long as committed demand exceeds delivered supply by a factor of 6 or more, prices will continue to rise. The 2023 to 2025 price increase from $131 to $164 per tonne was the early signal. The 2025 to 2027 trajectory is likely steeper. The number to watch is total delivered tonnes per year, not commitments. Commitments are paper. Tonnes are real.

The investment opportunity is on the supplier side. Every credible biochar producer that can certify under Puro or Isometric has buyers waiting. Capital is available. Feedstock is available. The constraint is execution: project finance, permitting, off-take negotiation, and the operational discipline to actually deliver into the registry. Agroforestry carbon credit projects face a similar execution constraint and frequently use pruning biomass as a feedstock pathway that connects both credit streams. Companies that can compress that 18 to 36 month build cycle will capture disproportionate share.

For the buyer side, the strategic question is different. Buyers who locked in long-duration contracts at 2023 prices are now sitting on positions that have appreciated 25% in two years. Buyers who waited are paying more and finding less inventory available. The advance market commitment structure that Frontier pioneered is being copied because the buyers who used it first got the cheapest credits and the most reliable supply.

The puck is moving toward two things. First, capacity expansion, particularly in regions with abundant feedstock and supportive policy frameworks (Nordic countries, parts of Africa, the US Pacific coast). Second, methodology refinement, as Isometric and others tighten the carbon math and force lower-quality credits out of the market. Both trends push prices up. Both trends consolidate the buyer-supplier relationships described above.

Biochar is not the only durable CDR pathway, but it is the one that is delivering today. For comparison with other pathways, see Biochar vs BECCS. For the complete economic context of what is winning in the green transition, see The Green Revolution Is Winning.