You have the waste. Maybe you already char it, maybe you burn it. Either way, you have heard that the carbon locked in biochar is worth money, that companies in Europe and America will pay to keep it in the ground. So you ask the obvious question: how do I actually turn this pile of shells into a cheque? This is the honest, step-by-step answer, including the two places almost everyone gets stuck.
Let us start with what a carbon credit actually is, in plain terms. When you make biochar and put it in the soil, you are taking carbon that a plant pulled out of the sky and parking it underground for centuries. A company that is polluting somewhere else pays you to do that, so they can balance their books. One verified credit equals one tonne of carbon dioxide kept out of the atmosphere. That is the whole trade.
Registering a project is the work of proving, to a strict outside referee, that your tonne is real. Here is the path.
Step 1: Make sure your biochar even qualifies
Before you spend a naira, four things have to be true:
- The material is plant-based waste: palm kernel shells, cashew shells, sawdust, crop residue.
- It is sourced cleanly. No forest was cut to make it, and you are not stealing it from someone who needed it.
- It was made by pyrolysis, heating biomass with very little oxygen, not just burned to ash.
- The char goes into the ground or into a stable product, and stays there. It does not get burned later.
If the char ends up in a fire, it is fuel, not a credit. The credit only exists because the carbon stays solid.
Step 2: Pick your referee (the registry)
You cannot grade your own homework. An independent registry sets the rules and certifies your credits. The four that matter:
- Puro.earth. The biggest name for industrial projects, trusted by the largest buyers.
- Rainbow. A fast-growing registry for biochar and durable carbon removal, focused on high-integrity credits.
- Isometric. Built for the most demanding, science-first buyers.
- Carbon Standards International. Friendlier to smaller, artisanal projects.
This single choice shapes your costs, your paperwork, and which buyers will even look at you. For an industrial mill in West Africa, Puro and Rainbow are the usual starting points.
Step 3: Get the char tested (this is the first wall)
A registry will only pay you for char that stays put for a hundred years or more. They prove it with a lab test, a number called the H to C ratio, which has to come in under 0.7. They also measure how much actual carbon is in it.
Char made too hot, or with too much air, comes out weak and can fail this test. If yours fails, you have no project. So test a sample early, before you spend money on anything else. This is the first place projects quietly die.
Step 4: Prove where the waste came from
Auditors want a clean paper trail. Where the biomass came from, how much, that it was legal and sustainable, and that nobody else had a real use for it.
This gets harder if you buy your feedstock instead of producing it. Buying shells from another factory is allowed, but now you have to document that supplier too. Build this record from the first day. Reconstructing it months later, the night before an audit, is a nightmare.
Step 5: Track everything (your MRV)
MRV stands for measure, report, verify. It is the boring backbone that makes a credit believable. You track three things, all the time:
- How much waste goes in, and how much char comes out.
- What your machine was doing while it ran.
- Where the char ended up, usually with a photo, a date, and a GPS pin proving it went into the soil and not a furnace.
Most serious projects now do this with an app and sensors instead of paper. That is also what lets you grow beyond one site without drowning in spreadsheets.
Step 6: Do the honest math (the LCA)
You do not get paid for the carbon in your char. You get paid for what is left after you subtract everything you emitted making and moving it: the diesel, the grid power, the transport. A lifecycle assessment does this sum.
One useful trick lives here. If you run your process on your own biomass gas instead of diesel, your final number goes up, because you took the fossil fuel out of the equation.
Step 7: Audit, certify, and then the second wall
Now an independent auditor checks your work. If it holds, the registry issues your credits and lists them. Congratulations, you have certified carbon credits.
And here is where the story usually goes quiet, because nobody warned you about the second wall.
Having credits is not the same as selling them. This market does not work like a shop where you list a price and buyers walk in. It is dominated by a tiny handful of enormous buyers. As of 2026, a single company, Microsoft, accounts for roughly three quarters of all the big carbon-removal deals on Earth. By late 2025, more than 90% of available industrial biochar supply was already spoken for, locked up by Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan and a few others through multi-year contracts signed directly with project developers they trust.
So a newly certified project in Benin or Cross River is not walking into an open market. It is competing for the attention of a dozen sophisticated buyers who do deep due diligence, who prefer to sign long-term deals, and who already have most of their needs met by people they already know. The carbon is real. The buyer relationships are the hard part, and they take time and reputation to build.
That is the part of "register your project" that the step-by-step guides leave out. Issuing the credit is the science. Selling it is the relationships.
What it costs and how long it takes
Time: usually three to nine months from start to your first issued credit. If you already run a working pyrolyzer with clean records, you are at the fast end. Messy data and greenfield builds push it longer.
Money: lab tests, the lifecycle assessment, registry fees, the audit, and your tracking setup all come due before a single credit pays out. Expect to spend real money upfront and wait for the revenue to follow.
Doing it yourself, or doing it with someone who has
Every step above is learnable. If you have the months, the patience, and someone on staff who understands carbon accounting, you can absolutely run this yourself, and you now know the map, including the two walls that stop most people.
But the two hardest steps, passing the permanence test and reaching real buyers, are exactly the ones that reward having done it before. That is the gap we close.
Biochar Industrial Group has already walked this whole path. We run a certified project, we have sold credits to global corporate buyers, and we now run the process for partner mills: the registration, the certification against what buyers actually demand, the tracking, and the part nobody else talks about, the relationships that get your credits bought. You bring the waste. We bring the know-how, and often the machine, with financing options and no big costs upfront.
The fastest way to know what your waste is worth is to ask.
Sources: Sylvera (2026), Are Biochar Carbon Credits Reliable?; Sylvera (2026), Microsoft & CDR; Planet2050 (2026), CDR Spotlight: Biochar; Senken (2026), The Buyer's Guide to Biochar Carbon Removal; Puro.earth Biochar Methodology (2025).