U.S. Bank has made its first carbon dioxide removal (CDR) investment, backing Carba on its biochar-centered deployment at a Minessota landfill.
Minneapolis-headquartered Carba has set out on a mission of transforming urban waste streams that increase wildfire risks around utility lines into durable CO2 removal.
Its CDR approach of burying CO2-dense biochar locks up carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere for over 1000 years, through a process that resembles the formation of coal 300 million years ago.
This technology is enabled through a reactor that uses molten salts as a heat transfer fluid. Carba’s novel reactor locks in more CO2 than a conventional biochar reactor while also managing high temperatures more efficiently.
According to Carba, this approach is attractive to buyers like U.S. Bank due to its high permanence and affordability, along with the meaningful community co-benefits it delivers, such as odor and toxin reduction and methane destruction or avoidance.
To date, Carba has deployed one of four reactors at the project’s landfill site in Minessota. At this location, the company will use wood chips from trees trimmed away from utility lines to create the biochar product that will then be buried underground to increase the CDR permanence.
At the beginning of this year, Carba inaugurated the world’s first molten salt pyrolysis reactor for CDR via waste biomass at its Burnsville site in Minnesota.
Relevant: Carba Inaugurates Innovative Molten Salt Pyrolysis Reactor
Carba’s cost-effective CDR method
By deploying its reactors directly on a landfill, the company eliminates the costs associated with transporting the biochar feedstock from its source to the pyrolysis location.
As shared by Carba, its innovative CDR approach is low-cost, unlocking a price under $100 per ton of CO2 removed, while removing atmospheric carbon for a thousand years.
The company has attracted Microsoft as a buyer, who invested in its biochar carbon credits back in 2025, and has also garnered support from investors in a funding round led by Rusheen Capital Management and Canopy Generations Fund, which successfully closed at $6 million.
Read more: Carba To Advance Biocarbon CDR With New $6M Funding From Rusheen And CanopyGen
