Biochar sits at an unusual intersection in the carbon removal market: the same material that earns a durable carbon removal credit can also improve soil water retention and reduce fertilizer need when applied to farmland. That dual benefit is genuinely one of biochar's advantages over some other CDR pathways. It's also where pitch decks — ours included, if we're not careful — most easily blur two claims that buyers and reviewers should be able to evaluate independently.
Why blending the numbers is a problem, even when both numbers are real
A tonne of CO2-equivalent locked away in stable biochar carbon is a claim about permanence and quantity, verifiable against a specific protocol's methodology for pyrolysis conditions, feedstock characterization, and carbon stability over a defined time horizon. A soil health improvement — better water retention, incremental yield effect, reduced synthetic fertilizer application — is a claim about agronomic outcome, and it depends on soil type, application rate, crop, and local conditions in ways that don't transfer cleanly from one deployment to another the way a stable carbon fraction does. Both can be true for the same batch of biochar. But a grant reviewer or offtake buyer evaluating a carbon removal claim needs the first number on its own, verified against the standard the credit is issued under, without a soil co-benefit narrative doing work that belongs to a separate line of evidence.
What we can confirm today, and what we can't yet
Our own confirmed data, as a pre-seed operation converting coconut husk, shell, and frond waste from Mandya and Hassan into biochar, currently covers feedstock sourcing volumes, our pyrolysis process parameters, and the carbon fraction testing we've completed on early batches. We do not yet have field-scale, multi-season agronomic trial data on our own biochar's soil performance in local conditions. Where we cite broader biochar market or soil science figures, we label them explicitly as indicative industry data, not CocoChar-specific findings.
What this means for evaluating any pre-seed biochar supplier
Ask for the carbon removal methodology and verification standard being used, separately from any soil co-benefit narrative in the pitch. Ask which numbers are the company's own confirmed measurements versus industry-wide figures cited for context. And ask what stage the soil co-benefit claim is actually at — modeled estimate, lab-scale test, or field-verified outcome.
Grant bodies, climate-tech incubators, and corporate offtake buyers evaluating pre-seed carbon removal suppliers see a lot of pitches that lead with best-case blended numbers. We'd rather be evaluated on a smaller, verifiable claim than a larger, blended one that doesn't hold up to the separation above.