About $25 million. That's what a single carbon-removal purchase agreement was reportedly worth when India's Equilibrium and the Swiss financier Altitude signed an eight-year deal for roughly 180,000 tonnes of biochar carbon removal. The money isn't a grant and it isn't equity — it's a buyer committing to purchase durable carbon removal for years, and that commitment is what lets the producer scale output from around 15,000 to 22,500 tCO2e per year.
That structure has quietly become the way biochar plants get built. Five years ago, a would-be operator walked into a bank with a technology deck and a spreadsheet. Today the conversation starts somewhere else entirely: who is buying your carbon, for how long, and at what price? Get that answer locked and the plant tends to finance itself. We call it offtake-first, and if you're thinking about building capacity, it's the sequence that matters most.
What “Offtake-First” Actually Means
An offtake agreement is a long-term contract where a buyer agrees to purchase a defined volume of your output — in this case, verified carbon-removal credits generated by permanently sequestering carbon in biochar — over a multi-year term. The Equilibrium–Altitude deal runs about eight years. Bolivia's Exomad Green agreed to deliver 105,000 tonnes of biochar removal to Berlin's Senken across 2026 to 2028. These aren't handshake letters of intent. They're contracted demand with a price and a schedule attached.
Here's why that changes everything on the financing side. A lender or an equity partner evaluating a new plant is really evaluating one question: will this thing generate predictable revenue? A signed multi-year offtake answers it. The contract becomes the collateral. Instead of betting on a spot market that may or may not exist when you come online, the financier is underwriting against a purchase order that's already in hand.
And the buyers behind these contracts are serious counterparties. Durable carbon-dioxide-removal demand from corporate buyers like Microsoft and Google is what sits underneath the whole model. When a Fortune 100 company commits to buying removal for a decade, that's a credit-quality signal a bank understands, even if the banker has never seen a pyrolysis reactor.
The Money Is Already Moving
This isn't theoretical. Capital is flowing into biochar production specifically because the offtake structure de-risks it. In India, ProClime and Japan's Cadira are mobilizing $10 million to build seven plants. Oikocredit lent NetZero $2.5 million to expand in Brazil. The Exomad Green and Equilibrium deals are funding real tonnes coming out of real reactors.
The pricing supports it too. Biochar carbon credits averaged around $164 per tonne in 2025. When you pair a per-tonne price like that with a multi-year contracted volume, you get exactly the kind of revenue visibility that makes a plant bankable. The producers landing these deals aren't necessarily the biggest — they're the ones who lined up demand before they poured concrete.
How a Company Actually Gets From Idea to Financed Plant
When we help a client work through this, the path breaks into a few concrete steps. Getting the order right is most of the battle.
- Nail down the feedstock and the tonnage math first. Your carbon-removal volume is a function of how much biomass you can reliably process and how much carbon that biochar locks away. A ton of biochar sequesters roughly 2.5 to 3.0 tons of CO2 equivalent, so your feedstock supply directly sets the ceiling on what you can promise a buyer. This is the number everything else keys off of.
- Line up the offtake before you finalize the build. This is the inversion that trips people up. You don't build and then sell — you sell the future output, then build to serve it. Our carbon-credit guidance walks through which registries and methodologies buyers actually accept, because a contract is only as good as the credits behind it.
- Match the plant to the contract, not the other way around. Once you know your committed tonnage, you can size the system. This is where our Build + Operate program comes in — we help develop, build, and run the plant so the output actually meets the volume and quality your buyer contracted for.
- Choose equipment that de-risks delivery. A missed delivery on a carbon contract is expensive. Modular, proven systems reduce that risk, which is exactly why our OEM equipment lines are built in the 5 to 75 TPD range — predictable throughput a financier can underwrite.
Why the Technology Choice Underwrites the Contract
A carbon-removal offtake is a promise to deliver verified, permanent sequestration on a schedule. That promise is only as credible as the plant behind it. Registries and buyers want documented, consistent carbon content — not estimates — and they want to know the plant will still be producing to spec in year seven of an eight-year deal.
That's why the engineering matters to the financing. Our fast pyrolysis technology is designed for consistent operation at the 450 to 550°C window where you get stable, high-fixed-carbon biochar. Consistency isn't just an operational nicety here — it's what makes the carbon accounting defensible, which is what makes the contract deliverable, which is what makes the plant financeable. The chain runs all the way back.
The Second Revenue Stream Most Plans Undersell
The offtake underwrites construction, but the biochar itself still has product value on top of the carbon credit. The same tonne you sequester can be sold as a soil amendment, a filtration medium, or a construction additive. And your reactor is producing bio-oil and syngas alongside the char. If you're building capacity anyway, those additional streams — through our biochar and biofuel offtake channels — improve the economics beyond what the carbon contract alone delivers.
We point this out because financiers increasingly like to see it. A plant underwritten by a durable-carbon offtake and supported by product sales is more resilient than one leaning on a single revenue line. The carbon contract gets you built; the product revenue helps keep you comfortable across the life of the deal.
Where This Leaves a Would-Be Operator
If you're sitting on a biomass supply and thinking about building, the lesson from 2026's deals is clear: the bottleneck isn't the technology and it usually isn't the capital. It's contracted demand. The producers getting funded are the ones who sequenced it right — demand first, then a plant sized to serve it.
That's the part we can help a company get right, because we work all three sides of it: the carbon-credit pathway that makes the offtake real, the plant that delivers on it, and the equipment that makes delivery predictable. The idea-to-running-plant journey is a lot shorter when you start from the buyer and work backward.