The Race to Negative Emissions Technologies and the Centrality of Fossil Fuel Companies

[Geoengineering News]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00076503261447805?__cf_chl_f_tk=DrW9k0Igp4MLFP5VJIMPXXMyVt.rv73lZAb7J62DM_g-1783106820-1.0.1.1-pSr6nnEP9.P0hM5GDu5mU3QQJcBpyFyadtjT.jfL77A

Authors: Giorgio Tripodi, Linda Sabattini, Martina Iori, and Francesco Lamperti 

24 June 2026

https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503261447805

Abstract

Capturing carbon is increasingly critical to keeping the Paris Agreement within reach. However, developing and scaling solutions that permanently remove CO2 from the atmosphere represents a major technological and societal challenge. In this context, the role of incumbents in shaping the trajectory of emerging technologies remains unclear and often ambiguous. Adopting a competence-based perspective centered on technological coherence, this article examines the role of fossil fuel companies in the evolving carbon sequestration industry, contrasting carbon capture and storage—a technology that captures CO2 from emission sources—with direct air capture (DAC), a novel approach that directly removes carbon from ambient air. Using International Energy Agency data on carbon capture projects combined with corporate, financial, and patent records, we reconstruct and analyze the global network of organizations active in the sector. Results show that fossil fuel companies are central players in the global carbon capture landscape, leveraging established assets and expertise, but are largely disconnected from emerging DAC projects. This supports the view that DAC is a competence-destroying innovation for the fossil fuel industry, involving substantial process and product discontinuities, as further confirmed by patent analysis, which reports a substantial distance between incumbents’ and DAC-related technical knowledge. In contexts characterized by high entry barriers, technological coherence—beyond complementary assets and societal value—appears crucial for assessing how incumbents engage with technologies addressing grand challenges. Jointly monitoring collaboration networks and innovation activities within incumbent industries is therefore essential for understanding how new technologies may (or may not) contribute to sustainability transitions.

Source: Sage Journal

[GRETCHEN & RON LARSON]

Two Lists:  

 

     1. Below gives the title, authors, a link, and abstract.   I've only skimmed this as there is meager mention of biochar.  Authors not reporting much on a connection between CDR and petroleum companies.   If anything in CDR, they report DACCS.

      Thanks to "Geoengineering News" for picking up on this CDR story.

 

     2.   Anyone able to report a different story for petroleum industry interest in CDR?   I'm personally surprised at this lack of interest.

 

      3.   Mayne the most successful biochar company before it failed was "Cool Planet".  Mentioned here because a large portion (maybe most?) of their funding was from the petroleum industry.   I'm not aware of anything since, but am sending this simultaneously to "biochar.io", where several former Cool Planet employees are still active in biochar.

 

    4.   Given that former link, there are now probably more than 1000 biochar companies globally that might have a connection not found by these authors (who seem to have not singled out biochar).  There is biochar activity in Saudi Arabia.

 

     5.   There is an Irish company with the same "Cool Planet" name.  Zero connection.  

 

Ron

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[GRETCHEN & RON LARSON]

Johnny et al:

 

      1.   Acknowledge also useful follow-up comment from Wayne Teal.   Wayne has a nice cite to his longer piece discussing the topics below.   I am a subscriber and recommend his work.

 

       2.  Lots below to comment on, but again too late for all but one major question:

 

         In the start of your last paragraph below is reference to "CCR".   I think a typo - should be "CDR".   Correct?

 

         3.    CDR (not "CCR") was there as the first of four income streams that you are experiencing.   I think four is a max for biochar companies, with some (many?) only having physical sale of biochar, without CDR payments.

 

        4.   One way to five streams would be somehow tying in to the CCS possibility.  That is, add some of the business characteristics of BECCS.   This would counteract the BECCS claim that they are doing more CDR than biochar. 

 

       5.   For most users of biochar, there is the possibility of increased income because of increased yield - for decades.     So if one is both a producer and user, one can think of 6 income streams.     And maybe there are some acting as part-time consultants who are up to seven income streams?    And you might get into liquid co-products?    (This to prove biochar is not a typical business.)

 

      6.   So thanks for a big addition on this topic - mainly about fossil companies and biochar.

 

Ron

On 07/07/2026 11:50 PM PDT Johnny Appleking via groups.io <returncalifornia=gmai...@groups.io> wrote:

Ron-

  The article directly answers the core question running through your email: Why is there such a surprising lack of interest from the petroleum industry in true CDR?

There is a fascinating nuance in the paper that actually flips one of the assumptions in your email, while perfectly validating the others. Here is a breakdown of how the article’s findings map onto your questions.

1. The DACCS Misconception vs. The Paper's Reality

Your email says that if the authors reported any connection between petroleum companies and CDR, it was Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS).

In reality, the paper's core finding is that fossil fuel companies are largely disconnected from emerging DAC projects.

The authors draw a sharp line between two technologies:

As for capturing carbon directly from industrial smokestacks or oil gas streams…The paper finds oil companies are central players.

As for true CDR - oil companies are conspicuously absent.

The authors explain this using the concept of competence-destroying innovation—an advancement that renders an existing industry’s hard-earned skills, assets, and infrastructure obsolete. Point-source CCS allows oil companies to protect their core business and reuse their existing engineering pipeline assets and deep-well injection expertise. DAC, on the other hand, requires entirely different chemical processes, supply chains, and business models. It represents a massive technological discontinuity for them, which explains the exact "lack of interest" you noticed.

2. Why Biochar is Invisible in This Study

Your email rightly notes a "meager mention of biochar" and suggests the authors failed to single it out despite there being over 1,000 global biochar firms.

The reason for this omission comes down to the authors' methodology. To track the global network, they relied heavily on International Energy Agency (IEA) databases, corporate financial filings, and formal patent registries focused on industrial carbon sequestration.

Because the biochar industry is highly decentralized, rooted in agricultural networks, and scales through localized or mid-tech pyrolysis rather than massive geological utility frameworks, it completely escapes the industrial "technological coherence" lens used by these researchers. The authors didn't find a biochar-petroleum connection because their data funnels were tuned exclusively to heavy engineering and mechanical carbon networks.

3. The "Cool Planet" Paradox

Your email points out that Cool Planet—perhaps the most famous failed biochar company—was heavily funded by oil majors like BP Ventures and ConocoPhillips. If oil companies lack interest in these technologies, why did they pour millions into Cool Planet?

The historical context of Cool Planet actually proves the paper's thesis perfectly. When those petroleum giants invested in Cool Planet during the 2010s, the company wasn't marketing itself simply as a biochar producer. Their primary pitch was a proprietary thermo-chemical process to create "drop-in" liquid biofuels (gasoline and jet fuel) from biomass, with biochar ("CoolTerra") produced as a agricultural co-product.

Fossil fuel companies invested because a drop-in liquid fuel fit their existing infrastructure—it possessed technological coherence with their refineries and distribution pipelines. When the liquid biofuel side proved economically unviable at scale and the company had to pivot toward being a pure-play biochar and soil-amendment business, the fossil fuel funding dried up, eventually leading to its failure.

4. The Saudi Arabian Context 

Your email notes active biochar operations in Saudi Arabia. The paper explicitly points out that "scientific production and collaborations cluster geographically by type of CDR."

In the Middle East, state oil enterprises (like Aramco) focus almost all their capital on point-source CCS and hydrogen production because it directly extends the life of their oil reserves (often using the captured CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery).

When you see biochar activity in places like Saudi Arabia, it is rarely driven by the core carbon mitigation strategies of the petroleum sector. Instead, it is typically driven by distinct state-funded agricultural or desert-greening initiatives (like the Saudi Green Initiative) looking at biochar purely for its water-retention capabilities in arid soils, rather than as an extension of the fossil fuel supply chain.

The Takeaway

You are entirely right to look at the 1,000+ biochar companies as a massive blind spot in this paper. The paper tells a highly accurate story about why big oil avoids mechanical CDR like DAC, but because it relies on industrial and patent-heavy data, it completely misses the decentralized, nature-based, and community-scale carbon removal efforts happening in OUR biochar space.

I went so deep into all of this because of all of the processes that we are exploring and navigating presently are facing similar challenges from corporate/economy-of-scale/agency/academia (extractive) approaches.

For a long time, the compliance and registry structures of the voluntary carbon market were built by industrial engineers, for industrial engineers. If a project didn't feature a multi-million-dollar automated pyrolysis plant with continuous emissions monitoring, the sheer cost of registration, third-party audits, and legal documentation would bankrupt it before a single credit was issued.

Today, decentralized, community-scale, and smallholder projects like ours are bypassing that industrial capital barrier through three highly specific mechanisms: aggregated project structures, specialized artisanal methodologies, and digital MRV (dMRV) technology.

1. The Project Aggregator (Clustered) Model

Small-scale practitioners almost never interact with registries like Verra or C-Sink directly. Instead, they operate under an Aggregator Hub framework.

A well-capitalized non-profit, cooperative, or dedicated social enterprise acts as the formal "Project Developer." This central entity bears 100% of the upfront financial and administrative burden: writing the massive Project Design Document (PDD), paying the registry entry fees, and contracting the independent Validation and Verification Bodies (VVBs) for on-site audits.

Once certified, this hub acts as a legal umbrella. They onboard hundreds of decentralized local producers into a single "clustered project." The credits are issued to the aggregator, who handles the corporate buyers (like Microsoft or Shopify) and distributes the carbon revenue back to the community stewards as direct cash payouts and/or agricultural services.

 

Verra’s landmark smallholder project, Project Reignite in India, uses exactly this model. It aggregates hundreds of rural farmers who have shifted from open-field agricultural waste burning to localized biochar production, funneling international carbon finance directly into decentralized communities.

Rather than forcing low-tech projects to match industrial plant standards, registries have developed dedicated pathways that actively embrace non-industrial production.

The premier framework for this is the Global Artisan C-Sink Standard, developed by Carbon Standards International (CSI) in partnership with the International Biochar Initiative (IBI). 

The methodology specifically certifies biochar produced using clean, non-industrial methods like flame-cap kilns or basic earth-pit pyrolysis. 

To protect the integrity of the standard from industrial capture, individual production limits are strictly capped—typically to less than 100m^3 of biochar per year for a single farmer. 

The methodology calculates carbon removal not just by the carbon fixed in the char, but by tracking the avoided methane and nitrous oxide emissions that would have occurred if those agricultural or forestry residues were left to rot or burned openly in piles.

In an industrial plant, verifying carbon removal requires automated gas chromatography and industrial weight sensors. For a community project, expensive hardware is replaced by Participatory dMRV via mobile apps.

Instead of a clipboard audit, the local practitioner uses a dedicated smartphone application to generate an immutable, blockchain-backed or registry-linked digital trail for every single batch of biochar:

1. Feedstock Sourcing: The user logs the type of biomass used (e.g., orchard prunings, fuel reduction “waste”), confirming no living ecosystems were cleared for feedstock.

2. Pyrolysis Verification: A time-stamped, geolocated photo or short video verifies that the burn is utilizing a proper flame-cap technique.

3. Sink Verification: The app tracks where the biochar is applied (e.g., specific agricultural plots or community compost heaps), ensuring the carbon is entering a secure, non-atmospheric pool.

The Methodological Shift

The landscape is diversifying rapidly. While CSI's Artisan C-Sink methodology was the pioneer for small scales, major shakeups occurred in early 2026 when alternative high-integrity registries, like Isometric, began publishing their own tightly scoped modules for distributed, small-scale biochar production.  

This ongoing evolution means that local land stewards, cultural fire practitioners, and agricultural cooperatives no longer need to mimic big energy or heavy industry to prove our ecological impact. By leveraging community aggregation and mobile technology, we can prove our permanence metrics to the global market using tools that fit the scale of the land we manage.

We survive and thrive by stacking four separate revenue streams from a single operational footprint: 

 

1. CCR

2. Physical Biochar Sales ($150–$300/ton bulk; up to $1,500+ for specialty grades): Sold to commercial agriculture and vineyards for water retention and microbial health and to industrial sectors as a structural additive (stable slurries for concrete amendments, for example).

3. Feedstock Tipping Fees ($20–$80/ton): Municipalities, agricultural food processors, and forestry operators frequently pay us to take their biomass, hazardous fuel loads, or orchard clearings off their hands.  

4. Energy Co-generation ($30–$120/ton equivalent): The pyrolysis process generates an excess of synthetic gas (syngas) and extreme heat. We capture this energy to run our own operations, sell electricity back to the grid, and/or provide district heating to nearby industrial partners.  

This decentralized, waste-to-value framework means we can replicate our facilities wherever biomass is abundant and a local market exists for soil amendments or bio-energy. We operate entirely outside the centralized, multi-billion-dollar geological pipeline frameworks that keep the petroleum industry central to mechanical carbon capture.

Game, set, match.

Johnny

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[GRETCHEN & RON LARSON]

Johnny et al:

 

    This first to try to exhaust the threads you've continued below in your first five paragraphs  (since I don't recall any full listing on what one single person or company could do).   Might as well keep the topic  open a bit longer - I think now over a dozen in list.  So you present four income streams can maybe be tripled?.  

 

      For your first five paragraphs, we could have mentioned these additional words:           

     a.   methane,  N2O,  

     b.    water quality (besides your own main interest in soils) -- and other different customer classes for you?,  

     c.     energy aspects - could have mentioned cogen, thermal energy for alnyone producing electricity. (and/or liquid and gaseous fuels)

 

    No need to add more on Wayne, but I'm sure the list would like to hear more on your last two paragraphs - apparently mostly on controlled burns (could/should be an added income area tem "d" above?).  

 

        Of your three attachment photos, the middle one doesn't seem to fit in the controlled burn category - rather more dramatic look.   Why?,  How?

 

      You say in last paragraph below, you have a new oranization.  Looking for new members?

 

Ron.  

(nothing new below today from me - all comments above on only yours from today)

On 07/09/2026 6:44 AM PDT Johnny Appleking via groups.io <returncalifornia=gmai...@groups.io> wrote:

Hi Ron et al-

"CCR" was a typo for CDR. I'd like to blame my keyboard, but honestly, I must have had Creedence Clearwater Revival running through my head. There is probably a "Bad Moon Rising" joke in there somewhere about the climate crisis, but I'll spare the group text.

To your points on the economic architecture of biochar—you’ve laid out a great breakdown of why this isn't just a standard commodity business. Here is how that lines up with what's been top of mind lately:

 On CDR and the Core Streams (Points 3 & 4): You are spot on that many smaller operations are still surviving solely on physical sales without tapping into CDR markets. Bringing those carbon credits downstream is the big hurdle. Your point about countering the BECCS narrative is crucial. Industrial BECCS claims massive CDR volumes on paper, but it operates on a massive, heavy-infrastructure scale. Biochar offers a decentralized alternative that keeps the carbon—and the ecological benefits—right in the local ecosystem.

 The 5th, 6th, and 7th Streams (Point 5): The producer-user model is where the real magic happens. When you look at long-term soil resilience, water retention, and crop yields over decades, the ROI goes way beyond a simple cash-flow spreadsheet.

 Co-Products & Localized Production: You hit the nail on the head with liquid co-products like wood vinegar. When we move away from massive industrial burn piles and toward localized, cleaner utilization methods—like utilizing conservation kilns to handle forest fuel loads—we unlock those extra streams while actively regenerating the land.

I also completely echo your note on Wayne Teal's follow-up. His depth on these shifting paradigms is always worth the read, and I'm glad he threw his piece into the mix.

One of the other beautiful things that came out of this conversation was Stephen Joseph’s work. I can’t wait until his “kindred spirits” film takes the stage. He shared with me a sneak peek, and it is exactly what we are working on here in California through an aboriginal Australian lens rather than a native California one.

 

We just started a new organization that is already turning the establishment upside down. California recently adopted some very progressive controlled burning laws and created a clear pathway for us out of the huge mess that extractive, shortsighted, reactive (rather than proactive), fear-based land and resource management systems have created. Just last month, we hosted our first legal late season burn. Arguably the best thing that happened from all of it was the conversations that started happening in our community. It was the first time that negativity didn’t dominate the conversation. Many of our former adversaries are now allies.

 

All good things,

 

Johnny

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