Varaha partners with Google on one of the largest purchases of biochar carbon removal to date

We are excited to share that Varaha and Google are partnering on a biochar project that engages smallholder farmers in permanent carbon removal. Google has committed to purchase 100,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits from Varaha by 2030 as the catalytic first buyer of biochar credits produced by a Varaha facility in Gujarat, India. Marking Google's first large-scale carbon offtake in India, this partnership sets a powerful precedent for scaling permanent carbon removal in emerging economies.

Our team is thrilled that Google has chosen to invest in Varaha’s mission of mobilizing smallholder farmers to remove carbon from the atmosphere at a planetary scale. Smallholders steward 12% of the world’s agricultural land, including in some of the regions most vulnerable to climate change. Varaha’s efforts to strengthen smallholder livelihoods through carbon finance rely significantly on digital innovation. Google’s role at the forefront of technology and leadership in climate action will accelerate Varaha’s work of building the digital, physical, and market infrastructure for smallholder-led carbon removal in India and beyond. 

A Catalytic Transaction

By purchasing a combined 200,000 tonnes of biochar carbon removal credits today, Google has just made one of the largest purchases of biochar credits (by volume) to date. The magnitude of these Google’s purchases speak to the importance of biochar as a carbon removal tool. Moreover, Google’s purchase is catalytic in many ways beyond its size: 

• Viability of smallholder-led durable carbon removal: By involving smallholders both in the collection of biomass feedstock and in the application of biochar in agricultural fields, Varaha’s project serves as a model for smallholder farmer participation in the carbon removal ecosystem. This fosters not only local community engagement in our project but also provides tangible economic benefits for rural communities.

• Seeding demand for physical biochar: A key component of our project is conducting farmer education on the value of biochar as an agricultural input. We seek to spark market demand for physical biochar, which will unlock more demand for biochar carbon removal. Varaha has already contracted the sale of 1,300 tonnes of physical biochar produced by this project for agricultural applications. 

• Research into invasive species as feedstock: Our project utilizes Prosopis Juliflora, an invasive species, as the primary feedstock for biochar production. By removing Prosopis and restoring native grasslands, our project remediates the local ecological and biodiversity challenges posed by the unchecked propagation of invasive species. Google plans to continue to partner with us on examining the effects of  Prosopis removal in India, in order to deepen scientific knowledge on the carbon cycle impacts of utilizing invasive species as feedstocks for carbon removal. This knowledge can catalyze the use of other invasive species in other regions as feedstocks for biochar production. 

"Biochar is a promising approach to carbon removal, because it has the ability to scale worldwide, using existing technology, with positive side effects for soil health,” said Randy Spock, Google’s carbon removal lead. “We’re excited to partner with Varaha in putting maximum rigor behind this approach and setting the right foundation to help it reach the scale needed by Google and the planet to enable a net zero emissions future.”

Varaha’s Approach to Biochar

At Varaha, our approach to biochar is grounded in scalability, rigorous MRV, and durability of removals. 

On scalability, Varaha has already generated over 25,000 tonnes of biochar credits to date and was the first project developer in India to issue credits through the Puro.Earth registry. These milestones highlight our commitment to scaling durable carbon removal solutions like biochar with urgency. 

On MRV, Varaha’s in-house science and engineering teams, comprising 30 dedicated colleagues, have developed proprietary MRV technology to do end-to-end tracking of project activities, from feedstock collection to pyrolysis to biochar application and end-use. 

On permanence, Varaha is committed to pushing the frontiers of scientific understanding on the permanence of carbon sequestration in biochar applied to agricultural soils. We have shared our biochar samples with leading researchers on mean reflectance rate as a marker for carbon recalcitrance in biochar. We also conduct longstanding tests to determine the Hydrogen-to-Carbon (H/C) ratio of our biochar, another proxy for permanence. The results we have achieved both on mean reflectance and H/C ratio have been highly promising, demonstrating that biochar can store carbon for centuries up to over a millennium. 

Looking forward

The world will need to produce hundreds of millions of tonnes of biochar for carbon sequestration in order to have a climate-relevant impact. Varaha is proud to partner with Google in taking an important step on that journey.