Post by Ondrej Masek

Same clean biomass, two very different outcomes. Spread it on farmland as a soil improver and that is allowed. Pyrolyse it into biochar, locking the carbon away for centuries, and it can carry a waste code that keeps it off the land, even when it meets rigorous specifications. Stranger still, pyrolysis sterilises the material, destroying microplastics, organic pollutants and biological contamination. The biochar is often cleaner than the raw residue we already spread on fields, yet the cleaner, more climate-beneficial product faces the higher hurdle. This contradiction runs through how the UK regulates biochar, one of the few carbon removal methods in the @Climate Change Committee's carbon budget that needs no major new infrastructure. Yet we use a fraction of it, largely for regulatory reasons. On Monday I chaired the regulation huddle at the Energy Huddle's Net-Zero Pathways mixer during London Climate Action Week. Across five groups, one diagnosis recurred: the UK prizes biochar as a climate technology but often governs it as waste. Some feedstocks carry real risks and warrant strict control, but many benign materials are caught too, compost oversize and digestate fibres among them. In a circular economy, these are not wastes but streams moving between uses, which is why the Ellen MacArthur Foundation wants such classifications reviewed. Three barriers stood out in the discussions yesterday. Scale. Because the feedstock counts as waste, biochar facility needs an environmental permit above 50 kg per hour, while a biomass boiler faces lighter rules at higher throughput. The threshold reflects waste control, not climate value. Standards. There is no statutory quality standard for biochar, only a voluntary one, and no end-of-waste route, so each project is judged on a case-by-case basis. Fragmentation. Rules differ across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. @DESNZ is developing the UK's greenhouse gas removal standards through the British Standards Institution, and we need not start from scratch: the EU already has an end-of-waste route, and Denmark is streamlining pyrolysis approvals. We can match that, with a quality standard and a place in the removal programme. Regulation matters here, but managing biochar as waste while setting no quality floor for soil protects nothing and scales nothing. A standards-based framework would do both. No one party solves this. It is where my own work sits, e.g., in the Carbon-Loop Sustainable Biomanufacturing Hub, with Louise Horsfall and Stephen Wallace, I use pyrolysis to turn biological residues into stable carbon. Whether you work in research, policy, production, MRV or finance, which barrier would you tackle first? My thanks to the Energy Huddle and Bryony Senczyszyn for organising this excellent event. For more details and links to relevant documents, see comments below. #Biochar #CarbonRemoval #NetZero #CDR #LCAW #CO2RE #CSINK #LCAW2026 #theenergyhuddlemixer #EdinburghUniversity