Is your project a carbon project?

The handout

The records checklist & five-question self-screen

Two pages. Records worth keeping from this week on, organized by part of your operation – feedstock, kiln pyrolysis, biochar – plus five questions you can run on your own site to see where you stand. It’s a screen, and most answers change your route rather than whether you carry on.

Download the handout (PDF)

About the session

July’s session covered the carbon methodologies available to low- and mid-tech biochar production. This one turns to the practical side: what actually has to happen, and in what order, for a pile of char to become a credit someone will buy. Wyatt Catron of 3Degrees, who presented in July, was on hand for follow-up questions from that session.

Most of what determines whether you have a project is decided before there is a project. A producer with a kiln running today is already generating the evidence base a carbon project will need, or losing it: where the feedstock came from, when production started, what got measured, and where the char ended up. Those records cost almost nothing to keep now and are expensive or impossible to reconstruct later. I walked the full project lifecycle from both sides at once: the paperwork and what’s happening at the kiln that same week, defining terms like PDD, MRV, and verification as they come up rather than in the abstract.

By the end, the sequence is clear: what comes first, what depends on it, and where a producer’s own choices carry the most weight.