Carbon · Earth · Environment
CE2 takes the crop residue that Anantapur burns every season and runs it through controlled pyrolysis — recovering a soil amendment, a smokeless household fuel and an agricultural biostimulant from the same input.
Pyrolysis splits biomass into a solid, a liquid and a gas. We sell the first two, and burn the third to run the reactor. Select a product to go deeper.
Porous carbon skeleton for red and stony soils. Holds water, buffers pH, stores carbon for centuries.
Explore biochar → 02Densified fuel for village households. Burns hotter and cleaner than the fuelwood it replaces.
Explore briquettes → 03Condensed pyrolysis vapour. A biostimulant and natural pest deterrent, recovered from what would be flared.
Explore wood vinegar →Indicative ranges for slow pyrolysis of agricultural residue. The split shifts with feedstock, moisture and hold temperature — your own batch data replaces these once the kilns are running.
Biochar contains very little plant-available nutrient of its own. What it brings is physical structure — a rigid carbon lattice riddled with pores, inherited from the cell walls of the plant it came from and preserved because the material was never allowed to burn.
Surface area in that pore network typically runs into the hundreds of square metres per gram. That surface is the entire mechanism behind everything below.
The soils across Anantapur and Sri Sathya Sai are light, shallow and low in organic matter. Rain arrives hard and briefly, then drains past the root zone before the crop can use it. In a district that already runs a rainfall deficit, that loss is decisive.
Biochar pores hold water against gravity and release it slowly as the soil dries — effectively extending how long a single rainfall event remains available to roots.
The same pore network shelters soil bacteria and fungi from predation and from drying out. Colonised biochar becomes a reservoir of microbial activity rather than an inert filler.
This is why we inoculate before application — charging the char with compost or microbial slurry. Applied raw, fresh biochar will adsorb nutrients out of the surrounding soil in its first season before it starts releasing them, and the farmer sees a dip instead of a gain.
Compost returns to the atmosphere within a season or two. Biochar does not — the aromatic carbon rings formed during pyrolysis are structurally difficult for soil biology to break down.
Permanence is measured, not assumed. The H/C molar ratio is the standard proxy: the lower it is, the more fully aromatic the carbon and the longer it persists. Certification frameworks require it below a defined threshold, which is why every batch is lab-tested rather than estimated.
Ranges are typical published values for slow pyrolysis of agricultural residue, shown here as placeholders. Replace each with your own laboratory results once the first batches are tested — buyers and verifiers will ask for your numbers, not the literature's.
Run the reactor cool and you keep more mass but the carbon stays unstable. Run it hot and the carbon is durable but there is less of it. Drag the slider.
A qualitative teaching model of the yield–stability trade-off, not a process simulator. The direction of each curve is well established in the pyrolysis literature; the exact position of your optimum depends on your reactor, residence time and feedstock, and is found by testing.
A heap of cotton stalk or groundnut shell has energy in it, but almost no energy density. It burns fast and dirty, it cannot be stored compactly, and it is not worth the diesel to transport. So it gets burned in the field instead.
Meanwhile the same households buy or gather fuelwood, because that is the only dense heat available to them.
Under high compression the lignin in the biomass softens and acts as a natural binder, locking the particles into a solid block — no chemical binder needed.
The result carries far more energy per unit volume than the loose material, stacks and stores like firewood, and can be handled and sold by the sack.
Household air pollution from solid cooking fuel is among the largest environmental health burdens in rural India, and it falls hardest on the women and children who spend hours at the stove.
Fuelwood smoulders at low temperature with poor air supply and releases a heavy load of particulates. A dense, dry, uniform briquette burns hotter and more completely, producing markedly less visible smoke in the same stove.
Briquettes are not a side business. They are the mechanism that makes collection work: villages supply residue, and receive briquettes back at concessional rates.
No cash needs to change hands in either direction for the loop to close — which matters, because a cash-only collection model is exactly what has stopped residue aggregation from working before.
Note on carbon: briquettes are combusted, so their carbon returns to the atmosphere. That carbon is not claimable as removal. Only soil-applied biochar is counted.
Fill the calorific value and ash content from your own fuel testing before quoting to commercial buyers — boiler operators will specify on those two numbers.
As biomass decomposes it sheds a large volume of vapour. In a basic kiln that vapour escapes — visible as the smoke plume, and lost both as product and as an emission.
Passing it through a condenser instead recovers a dark, acidic liquid: pyroligneous acid, commonly sold as wood vinegar.
The condensate is largely water, carrying a complex mix of acetic acid and other organic acids, phenolics, alcohols and aldehydes drawn out of the plant material.
It is strongly acidic in its raw state and must be settled and filtered before use. It is applied heavily diluted — a small volume of product covers a large area.
Diluted wood vinegar is used across Asian agriculture as a foliar biostimulant, a soil conditioner and a natural pest and fungal deterrent — the phenolic fraction is what pests avoid.
It also pairs directly with our own biochar: wood vinegar is a common charging agent for activating char before it goes into the ground.
Dilution is not optional. Applied undiluted, an acid this strong will damage foliage. Every drum ships with rate guidance, and we recommend a small trial plot first.
Confirm your dilution guidance against local agricultural extension advice and your own trial plots before printing it on a label.
A pyrolysis plant is only as sound as what it eats. Sourcing wood that could have been timber moves carbon around instead of removing it — and fails verification besides.
The backbone stream across both districts. Groundnut in particular is grown at scale here, and its shell is already separated at processing — aggregated rather than gathered field by field.
Cotton stalk is the highest-value target: woody, high in lignin, and currently burned in place because uprooting and moving it costs the farmer money with no return.
An invasive thorny shrub that has spread widely across dryland Andhra Pradesh, crowding out grazing land and drawing down groundwater.
It is dense, woody and makes excellent feedstock — and unlike crop residue, removing it is an ecological gain in its own right rather than merely a diversion from burning.
Dense, low-moisture and already concentrated at processing points, which makes collection cheap. Shell-derived char is typically harder and higher in fixed carbon.
Volumes are smaller than crop residue but the quality and the collection economics are both better.
Crop residue arrives in bursts tied to harvest. A plant sized to peak residue sits idle between them, and idle capacity is what sinks the unit economics.
Perennial streams — juliflora and processing waste — are what carry production through the gaps. The feedstock plan is built around the lean months, not the peak.
Burning and pyrolysis start with the same material and the same heat. The difference is air. Give biomass oxygen and it oxidises completely — heat, ash, carbon dioxide, and the carbon is gone.
Restrict the oxygen and the reaction cannot complete. The material breaks down instead, shedding its volatile fraction as vapour and gas and leaving a rigid lattice of aromatic carbon that biology struggles to digest.
That resistance to decomposition is not a side effect. It is the product.
Aggregated from nearby villages
Haul distance decides whether the economics work, so collection is deliberately local. Material is gathered on a reciprocal basis — residue in, briquettes back at concessional rates — which removes the cash barrier on both sides. Feedstock is then sun-dried, because wet biomass consumes energy that should be going into conversion.
450–600 °C, sealed and oxygen-limited
Without oxygen the material cannot combust, so it thermally decomposes. Volatiles leave as vapour and gas; what remains is porous carbon. Temperature is the control variable — too cool and the carbon stays unstable, too hot and yield collapses.
Solid, liquid and gas
The solid is biochar. The vapour is condensed into wood vinegar. The syngas is routed back into the kiln as process heat, so the reaction largely sustains itself after start-up — which is what keeps both operating cost and emissions down.
Pressed into fuel, or prepared for soil
Briquettes are pressed for household and commercial use. Soil-bound biochar is crushed and inoculated with compost or microbial slurry first, because raw char will otherwise strip nutrients from the soil in its first season instead of holding them.
Incorporated at agronomic rates
The pore structure holds water in soils that drain too fast, buffers pH, and gives microbes habitat. Unlike compost it does not break down within a season — the same carbon skeleton is there decades later, which is why this is storage and not just amendment.
Every batch logged against method
Feedstock mass, moisture, temperature curve, output mass and laboratory H/C ratio recorded per batch. Only soil-applied biochar counts as removal — briquette carbon is combusted and claiming it would fail verification. Building this record from the first batch avoids reconstructing a year of it later.
From carbon challenge to carbon opportunity
Plants already pull carbon out of the air. The problem is that they give it straight back when they rot or burn. Pyrolysis interrupts that return.
By converting residue into a form that resists decomposition and putting it underground, the carbon a crop captured in one season stays out of the atmosphere for generations rather than months.
A single process is asked to justify itself on four different measures at once.
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