Google has purchased 100,000 carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits from Varaha, an Indian company developing carbon removal projects in Asia.
The deal is seen as one of the largest purchases of biochar carbon removal credits by any buyer to date.
Biochar is biomass (wood, leaves, straw or other biosolids) heated at high temperatures without oxygen. This process, known as pyrolysis, concentrates carbon in a form resistant to biological decomposition. When applied to soil and other products, a large fraction of its carbon content is sequestered for 100+ years.
The credits in this offtake agreement, to be delivered to Google by 2030, are generated from Varaha’s industrial biochar project in Gujarat.
The biochar is made from biomass collected from small farmers in the state. After being pyrolyzed in a bioreactor, it goes back to the field as natural manure.
The average cost is $90-$100 per credit, while it is traded around $160 in the international market. The company denied revealing the cost of the deal with Google, but based on the average cost, the deal is expected to be over Rs 100 crore.
Varaha works with over 100,000 smallholder farmers for sustainable agriculture practices, removing more than two million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2e) from the atmosphere. Varaha was the first project developer in India to issue carbon removal credits for biochar under the Puro.Earth registry, a leading CDR registry.
The company has an in-house digital Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system that integrates remote sensing to monitor biomass availability.
Varaha’s mobile application captures geo-tagged, time-stamped images to document geographically distributed project activities, like biomass excavation and field application of biochar. This ensures the credits produced meet the highest global standards for transparency and scalability.
“We have a mobile app which takes the geostamp and the weighted slip that how much biomass is sequestered from which farm. Google did a very detailed due diligence on all these aspects, and it took almost eight months for them to decide from the time we started talking to enter into this deal,” said Madhur Jain, CEO and co-founder of Varaha.
For Google’s tie-up, the project will generate biochar from the biomass of an invasive plant species, Prosopis Juliflora, through a state-of-the-art pyrolysis facility in Gujarat. The current Prosopis Juliflora infestation reduces plant biodiversity and overtakes native grasslands originally used for livestock grazing in Gujarat.
“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.
This contract paves the way for Varaha to serve other buyers of biochar credits in the coming 12 months and to set up more biochar pyrolysis facilities in other regions of India with abundant biomass feedstock.
