Context: India plans to launch its carbon market in 2026 aiming to reduce carbon emissions. Among the potential carbon removal technologies, Biochar has emerged as a promising option.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Concept of Biochar.
Mains: Biochar: What, potential, benefits, challenges.
What is Biochar?
- Biochar is a type of charcoal rich in carbon produced from pyrolysis of biomass (agricultural residue, municipal solid waste) under limited or no oxygen conditions. It offers a sustainable alternative to manage waste and capture carbon.
India generates over 600 million metric tonnes of agricultural residue and over 60 million tonnes of municipal solid waste every year. A significant portion of both is burnt openly or dumped in landfills, leading to air pollution from particulate matter and greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide, and CO2.
Utility of Biochar
- Waste management: By using 30% to 50% of surplus waste, India can produce 15-26 million tonnes of biochar and remove 0.1 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent annually.
- Byproducts of biochar production, such as syngas (20-30 million tonnes) and bio-oil (24-40 million tonnes), can generate additional electricity and fuels.
- Utilising syngas could generate around 8-13 TWh of power, equivalent to 0.5-0.7% of India’s annual electricity generation, replacing 0.4-0.7 million tonnes of coal per year.
- Bio-oil can potentially offset 12-19 million tonnes (or 8%) of diesel or kerosene production annually, leading to lower crude oil imports and reducing more than 2% of India’s total fossil-fuel-based emissions.
- Carbon sink: Biochar can hold carbon in the soil for 100-1,000 years due to its strong and stable characteristics, making it an effective long-term carbon sink.
- Agriculture:
- Applying biochar can improve water retention, particularly in semi-dry and nutrient-depleted soils. This can abate nitrous oxide emissions by 30-50%.
- Biochar can also enhance soil organic carbon helping restore degraded soils.
- Industrial sector: In carbon capture applications, modified biochar can adsorb CO2 from industrial exhaust gases.
- Construction sector:
- Biochar can be explored as a low-carbon alternative to building materials.
- Adding 2-5% of biochar to concrete can improve mechanical strength, increase heat resistance by 20%, and capture 115 kg of CO2 per cubic metre, making building materials a stable carbon sink.
- Wastewater treatment: Biochar offers a low-cost and effective option to reduce pollution. India generates more than 70 billion litres of wastewater every day, of which 72% is left untreated. A kilogram of biochar along with other substances can treat 200-500 litres of wastewater, implying a biochar demand potential of 2.5-6.3 million tonnes.
What hinders Biochar’s Application?
Despite its theoretically substantial potential to capture carbon, biochar remains underrepresented in carbon credit systems due to:
- Absence of standardised feedstock markets and consistent carbon accounting methods, which undermine investor confidence.
- Barriers such as limited resources, evolving technologies, market uncertainties, and insufficient policy support.
- Viable business models are yet to emerge for large-scale adoption. Market development is further constrained by:
- limited awareness among stakeholders,
- weak ‘monitoring, reporting, verification’ frameworks, and
- lack of coordination across areas such as agriculture, energy, and climate policy.
Way Forward
To enable large-scale adoption :
- Sustained support for R&D is essential to create region-specific feedstock standards and to optimize biomass utilisation rates based on agro-climatic zones and crop types.
- Biochar should be systematically integrated into existing and upcoming frameworks, including crop residue management schemes, bioenergy initiatives in both urban and rural contexts, and state-level climate strategies under the State Action Plans on Climate Change.
- Recognising biochar as a verifiable carbon removal pathway within the Indian carbon market will generate additional income for investors and farmers through carbon credits.
- Deploying biochar production equipment at the village level has the potential to create approximately 5.2 lakh rural jobs, linking climate action with inclusive economic development.
- The additional benefits of biochar, such as better soil health, lower fertilizer requirement (by 10-20%), and higher crop yield (by 10-25%), should be systematically integrated into policy and market frameworks to fully realise its potential.
Biochar, though not a silver bullet, offers a science-backed multisectoral pathway for India to achieve its climate and development goals.