Africa Biochar Aggregation Platform (ABAP)

Across Africa, the biochar opportunity is fundamentally a scale + coordination challenge—but the upside is enormous. ~40% of Africa’s soils are degraded, undermining farm productivity and resilience. FAO has highlighted this degradation pressure as a continent-wide constraint on food security and long-term agricultural performance. At the same time, sub-Saharan Africa generates vast volumes of agricultural residues and by-products: IRENA estimates ~22 EJ/year theoretical potential (and ~7.4 EJ/year technical potential) from agricultural residues in sub-Saharan Africa—yet these resources remain dispersed across smallholders and SMEs and are rarely mobilized into investable supply chains.

ABAP is designed to turn “many small” residue-to-biochar efforts into one bankable, repeatable pipeline by standardizing: sustainability screening and traceability, production QA, and digital MRV across multiple producers and landscapes—unlocking durable carbon dioxide removal, with IPCC noting biochar-carbon can be sequestered for hundreds to thousands of years when applied to soils.

ABAP is also built around the fact that modern pyrolysis/ gasification is not “char only”—it can co-produce energy carriers (e.g., syngas and bio-oil) that can be used for process heat, steam, and electricity, improving project economics and enabling local energy services. IEA Bioenergy describes pyrolysis as producing renewable energy products (syngas/bio-oil) alongside char, and NREL similarly notes that required process energy can be supplied by pyrolysis gas and/or char co-products. This matters in a region where the electricity access gap remains huge—Tracking SDG7 reports hundreds of millions in sub-Saharan Africa still lack electricity access.

On the farm side, ABAP is explicitly structured to support reduced overreliance on imported, often inefficient fertilizer use over time by improving soil properties and nutrient retention (through verified application protocols). The macroeconomic logic is simple: fertilizer imports are a foreign exchange drain—Reuters reports Africa imports >6 million metric tons of fertilizer annually, with associated foreign exchange costs motivating major new domestic production efforts. A World Bank analysis notes one such nation state in Sub-Saharan Africa imports ~$1.3B in fertilizers/soil conditioners/pesticides.

For carbon accounting, ABAP is registry-agnostic: Verst Carbon will structure projects under any suitable carbon standard based on fit-to-methodology, market demand, integrity requirements, and host-country conditions.

Call to Partners

Verst Carbon is actively seeking biochar producers, residue aggregators, cooperatives, depot networks, off-takers, EPC/thermal solution providers, development partners, and financiers willing to walk the journey from scoping → evidence → onboarding → commercialization, so that fragmented residue ecosystems become one auditable, investable scale programme.

Africa Biochar Aggregation Platform (ABAP)

Call to Partners

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