The scarcest thing in carbon removal is now a delivery record

Companies nearly doubled their purchases of biochar carbon removal in the first half of 2026, and at Climate Week NYC their main question was whether those tonnes would arrive. Supercritical’s September market report finds that 14 vetted projects hold about 60% of this year’s expected biochar supply, and 81% of their supply was committed by July. A track record of delivery is becoming the scarce asset.

Companies buy carbon removal to balance out emissions they can’t yet cut. One of the most established ways to remove carbon is biochar, made by heating plant waste without oxygen into a stable charcoal that locks its carbon away for centuries. It is usually mixed into soil. Each tonne of carbon dioxide removed becomes a credit that a company can buy.

For most of the industry’s short history, the hardest part of running a biochar project was finding someone to buy those credits. For projects that can deliver, that is no longer true. Companies contracted 2.99 million tonnes of biochar removal in the first half of this year, up from 1.59 million a year earlier, according to transaction data from CDR.fyi, which tracks carbon removal deals.

The hard part has moved to the other end of the contract. At Climate Week NYC last month, I moderated a panel at a carbon removal summit hosted by Puro.earth, one of the industry’s main certification bodies. The buyers in the room had already decided to buy carbon removal. What they wanted to know was how to plan for tonnes that arrive late, or short.

That shift changes what is scarce. Money and buyers are easier to find than they were two years ago. A record of delivering contracted tonnes on schedule is much harder to come by, and it is quickly becoming what separates projects a buyer can plan around from projects a buyer is taking a chance on.

Buyers have moved from testing to committing

Microsoft bought about 1.1 million of this year’s contracted tonnes. Excluding Microsoft, contracted volume grew more than fivefold, from about 350,000 to 1.89 million tonnes. Demand is still concentrated among a few large buyers.

Over the same period, the number of spot deals, one-off purchases of credits that already exist, fell from 570 to 224. Most of the volume now runs through offtakes, which are agreements to buy a project’s output over several years, often signed before the plant reaches full production.

Fewer, larger, longer agreements are what a maturing market looks like. They also change what a buyer has at stake. A company that bought a few thousand tonnes to see how it went could absorb a late delivery. A company that has signed a multi-year offtake has built that supply into its climate targets, its budget, and often its public claims.

The people signing these contracts are under pressure, too. A sustainability lead still has to make the case for carbon removal to the CFO, often while the company’s own emissions are rising and with less political cover than two years ago. Tonnes that arrive late are much harder to defend in that conversation than the original purchase was.

Treat a forecast as a plan and a delivery record as evidence

Biochar is where this shows first, because companies contracted nearly 3 million tonnes of it in six months from an industry that is still young. Turning a pilot plant into one that produces at commercial scale means securing a steady supply of plant waste, obtaining permits, getting equipment to run reliably at high temperature, and setting up the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) that proves how much carbon was actually stored. An independent auditor then has to check the results before a registry, the organisation that issues and tracks credits, can issue them. Any of those steps can slip, and each slip pushes delivery back.

In 2025, 73% of the biochar projects we track lowered their forecasts of how much they could produce, according to Supercritical’s September biochar market report. That shouldn’t be read as bad faith. Teams correct their forecasts as they learn what their plants can actually do. It does mean that a first-year forecast tells a buyer what a developer intends, while a delivery history tells them what the plant has done.

The best-vetted tonnes are already spoken for

The 218 biochar projects expecting to issue credits in 2026 add up to about 700,000 tonnes. The 14 that pass Supercritical’s 118-point vetting framework account for about 427,000 of those, roughly 60%. Supercritical hasn’t assessed every project on that list, so being outside the 14 doesn’t mean a project failed the checks.

The bar is deliberately high. Registry certification and independent ratings are an essential baseline. Supercritical further checks for additionality (whether the project would exist without credit revenue), methane (a potent greenhouse gas that a poorly run plant can release), delivery confidence, and conditions on site, including safety. Projects that are certified and rated can still fall short on those checks. Neither a certificate nor a rating guarantees that a project will deliver a specific contract’s volume on schedule.

By July, 81% of the 2026 supply from those 14 projects was already committed, through offtakes and exclusive agreements, including ours. In 2025, that point came in October. A company that buys in the fourth quarter, once its annual budget is set, now chooses from a much smaller pool, with less time to check it.

Europe’s carbon market will ask for the same evidence

The next wave of demand may come from regulation. The EU Emissions Trading System is Europe’s carbon market, which requires power plants, factories, and airlines to hold a permit for each tonne of carbon dioxide they emit. In July, the European Commission proposed bringing 250 million tonnes of permanent carbon removal into the system between 2031 and 2040. The proposal covers only two methods: direct air capture, which uses machines to pull carbon dioxide from the air, and bioenergy with carbon capture, which captures emissions from plants that burn biomass and stores them underground. Biochar would be reconsidered in 2034.

On 11 September, Peter Liese, the member of the European Parliament leading its response, published a draft report that would add biochar, capped at around a fifth of the removals purchased.³ That would mean as much as 50 million tonnes over the decade. It’s the most encouraging policy signal biochar has had this year.

It also raises the stakes on today’s contracts. If biochar is admitted, the EU becomes a large new buyer in the 2030s, and it will want projects with a history of delivering. The only way to build that history in time is to deliver on the voluntary contracts being signed now.

How to buy when delivery is the risk

A shortfall is more than a procurement problem. If tonnes a company counted on don’t arrive, it may have to report less carbon removed than it planned, or correct a claim it has already made in public. Two pieces of advice came up again and again: spread purchases across several projects, and allow for the delays that are common when new plants start up. In a contract, that looks like this:

• Ask for delivery history before price. For each supplier, compare the credits it has actually issued over the past two years with what it forecast. The gap between those numbers, and the supplier’s explanation of it, tells you more than the price per tonne. A supplier that missed a forecast and can explain why may be a safer bet than one with no history at all.
• Build a buffer. Buy from more than one project, and more than your target volume, so a delay at one site doesn’t leave a gap in your climate claims. The more of your portfolio depends on plants that are still ramping up, the larger the buffer should be.
• Put realistic timelines and remedies in the contract. Build start-up and verification time into the delivery schedule, and negotiate a make-good clause, under which the supplier delivers missed tonnes later or replaces them with tonnes from another project. A contract written as if nothing will slip puts the project under pressure from the first delay and leaves the buyer exposed.

These terms help developers too. A project with a multi-year commitment on a realistic schedule finds it easier to raise money for its next plant, and that is how the supply of deliverable tonnes grows.

New demand figures will keep coming, and most of them will be good news. The number I’ll be watching most closely over the next year is a different one: how many tonnes are delivered compared with how many were contracted. That gap will tell us whether biochar is ready for the buyers it is about to attract.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

The world needs sustainability knowledge. At illuminem, no interest group or shareholder can influence our work. Thank you for supporting our mission to make high-quality and independent sustainability information free for all. Every contribution helps. Thank you for donating today.