In Singapore itself, there's a yearly demand of 4 to 6 million tons of credits.

It's not fully realized demand at the moment because many organizations are still figuring out.

how they play in this sort of a market.

But there's a yearly demand that's shaping up to be 4 to 6 million tons per year.

And in Japan, it's 100 million tons per year.

And recently we heard from the EU, from some of the experts, they're advising the EU that it's going to be a 140 million ton demand in the late 2030s that the EU is going to have for international.

Article 6 carbon credits that they're importing into the EU.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

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Welcome to the Carbon Sessions podcast, where we speak to some of the leading figures in the emerging carbon industry.

We're joined today by Adit Murthy, CEO and founder of leading soil carbon project developer, Bumitra.

Adit, thank you so much for joining us.

It's an honor to have you on the show.

And I can't wait to get into all the exciting developments around Bumitra.

I know there's really been a lot happening lately.

Before we do that, though, Adit, we have a tradition on this podcast to first get to know our guests' background and get an understanding of what led them to the carbon industry.

So if you don't mind, I'd love it if you could share with us a bit of what you used to do before starting Bumitra.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Violet.

And I look forward to this podcast.

So I personally, I come, originally I came from a more of a technical background.

I did my undergrad at California Institute of Technology and grad school at Stanford.

But of course, as many of your listeners might be aware, that carbon markets are this very complicated mishmash of technology, politics, social condition, environmental issues, all of that.

put together is a mishmash of all of these.

So it's been an interesting journey for me and for our team here to grow along with the carbon markets and get to the point where we are today.

Personally, though, how I came about to start Bhoomitra is about 9 or 10 years ago, I was traveling through a small village in South India when I actually saw a funeral procession.

a farmer had committed suicide.

And that year, the monsoon rains had failed and along with it, the crop yields.

And the farmer took his own life in response.

And that got me thinking, why do farmers have to struggle like this even in the 21st century?

And if there's anything that we can do with all the technology and resources that we have today to enable them to fight back against climate change.

That's how we got started.

And as with any young company, you undergo a few pivots before you figure out what actually works and what actually enables you to further your mission to the greatest level.

And some years ago, now about like six -ish years ago, we actually embarked on our carbon journey.

First, we were trying to actually sell insights to farmers.

using satellites and AI to provide insights to farmers.

And we were selling them insights.

But at some point, we flipped that model and then made it so that we were instead paying the farmers who were also receiving the insights, but were increasing their carbon by monetizing and enabling carbon sequestration to happen and turning it into carbon removal credits and selling these credits to corporations and governments worldwide.

And since we made that change, it's been a very rapid, rapid growth for us to where we are today.

That's amazing.

That's very, very inspiring.

What made you essentially choose soil carbon?

Like what is the appeal in it?

And particularly as a climate solution, what makes it such an appealing choice?

Soil carbon is likely one of the most appealing nature -based solutions out there because it enables us to have many core benefits at once without displacing people from their land.

Soil carbon allows us to work with crop lands and grasslands, farmers and ranchers and pastoralists all around the world.

And they just need to improve the management of their existing land.

And as they do so, they not only increase their soil carbon with the right management practices, soil organic carbon specifically, but it also enables them to improve their yields over the medium term.

So as soil carbon improves a few years down the line, as it gets to a higher level, your yields will also be better because the soil is able to store moisture better, soil is able to store nutrients better, and all of this contributes to higher yield for the farmer as well in the medium term.

In the short term, of course, the carbon finance helps to finance that transition and enable the farmers to be a part of that.

But is it just the solution that enables farmers to be...

not only have these higher yields, but be way more resilient to the effects of climate change.

So it's a form of climate adaptation that's also a form of climate mitigation removal at the same time.

It's a solution wrapped all in one.

The farmers are able to adapt better to the changes induced by climate change, but they're also able to mitigate its effects and remove CO2 out of the atmosphere all in one, all in this one solution.

So that's what makes it very fascinating.

And soil is also the largest terrestrial carbon sink.

There's more carbon stored in soils than there is within trees and living things and so on.

And it's the largest terrestrial carbon sink that is out there.

And just figuring out how we can store even a small percentage of more carbon in our soils is actually...

Theoretically sufficient to offset all of humanity's emissions, not just every year, but also historically.

And that's the idea behind the 4P1000 movement.

The idea that increasing soil carbon by 0 .4 % itself is sufficient to offset all of humanity's emissions.

That is the concept, and soil carbon is a very promising solution to get there because of all these co -benefits, its gigaton -scale potential on the earth, and also the relatively efficient costs associated with making these changes on farms and croplands and pastures to enable that carbon sequestration to happen.

It's a combination of all of these facts and the co -benefits, everything together, that makes soil carbon this very amazing solution.

I remember a couple of years back talking to someone in the space and my impression back then was that farmers were still very reluctant to adapt new practices and kind of were skeptical of the whole soil organic carbon thing.

Have things changed now?

Do you see people more eager to participate in these initiatives?

There's definitely a growing eagerness.

But just to add more color to your previous experience that you had with the previous interview that you had, I think it's important to note that the degrees of openness to these practices does tend to vary geographically.

There are some parts of the world where farmers and ranchers are just much more extremely willing to try new things and test out the region to agriculture.

see how it improves the situation for them compared to other parts of the world where maybe there's more of a reluctance.

That said, in general, the trend is towards more openness and more interest in regenerative agriculture because farmers can see the impacts that it's already having on their neighbors, especially in our existing projects.

It's very easy for farmers who are not yet with us to see how the impacts are already being experienced by their neighbors.

and then think that they want to see those positive impacts on their farms as well.

So they also come and ask to join.

So it becomes, there's an element of virality to it.

It's probably not as viral as those TikTok videos and trends, but there's still a virality.

It just manifests over the course of years, not over the course of hours and days.

But over the course of years, there is a certain virality.

Okay, that's definitely good to hear.

Now, I know that a core part of Bumitra's approach is using satellites and AI to measure carbon in soils.

Could you walk us through how that works and why it's so important to scale?

One of the challenges in executing a soil carbon project is doing the monitoring of these projects at a low cost.

And specifically monitoring for carbon, soil carbon levels at a sufficient cost point is a key.

thing with these projects.

Because at today's carbon -monitored prices, doing carbon monitoring, particularly soil carbon monitoring, just from a conventional perspective, would easily eat up nearly half of the carbon credits total price would be eaten up by just monitoring to do it in a purely conventional way.

So there is a need to approach things in a more of a cutting -edge, innovative way.

At Boometra, we utilize satellites and AI along with soil sampling just to do exactly that.

Now, our system is not devoid of soil sampling, but it's also not the same extensive soil sampling that will be done in a purely conventionally built project.

It's somewhere in between.

So let me give you an example of one of our projects.

It's in northern Mexico, or northern Mexico grassland project, which is a validated and registered.

Vera project.

That project has about 2 million acres in it and conventionally we would have to take soil samples every 40 acres or 50 acres and that would lead to nearly 15 ,000 soil samples having to be taken by this project, doing it in the conventional way.

Every five years we would have to go out and take like 50 ,000 soil samples and that would simply not be feasible for a multitude of reasons.

One of them is obviously the cost point of view but secondly it's also hard to find labs that are able to process that level of throughput of soil samples as quickly as they need to be measured and calculated and tested.

So it's simply not possible to find the logistical support to make it happen.

including the lab testing, but it's also quite expensive.

So for all of these reasons, we do need an alternative.

And at Boon Mitra, using our system of satellites and AI, along with soil sampling, we actually end up taking around 500 to 1 ,000 soil samples in the same project every few years.

And not every five years, much more frequently than that, but 500 to 1 ,000 samples every few years.

So there's already a significant decrease in the amount of soil sampling needed.

There's a over 90 % decrease in the amount of soil sampling needed.

And that enables us to have the monitoring cost much less than before, but also have it done in a much higher quality way because we can simply pick the best team on the ground and the best labs to do this soil sampling and testing so that we get the highest integrity results.

that come out of this process and for those 500 to 1 ,000 soil samples.

And then packaging it all together, we use our satellites and AI systems and using a significant amount of satellites, several dozen satellites across the electromagnetic spectrum, across all different types of wavelengths of light that are accessible to be measured, all the way from...

ultraviolet and visible to infrared to microwaves all these satellite data together along with these machine learning models that we have built to convert what the satellites see into carbon numbers on the ground so what satellites see is basically like your phone camera they see a count of photons a count of amount of light of a certain wavelength that has come to the camera that's what they see they don't directly see quantities like soil carbon or biomass or whatnot.

They don't see those things directly.

We have to use models that take in that data and convert it into those useful sets of information.

And we use machine learning models for that.

They are trained with significant amounts of existing ground truth data, which are soil carbon samples from various different sources, including our own and including from our partners that train these models.

And then our ongoing basis these models are validated for their performance using the 500 to 1000 samples that i said that we take regularly within the project that enable us to validate these models on an ongoing basis within these projects as the projects continue to operate now and into the long run so that is how the system is set up and that is how it is operation wise and all together that enables us using this hybrid approach of new technology and old technology all together to enable these projects to exist at a reasonable price point from a monitoring perspective.

But I must say that monitoring is just one of the facets of a carbon project.

There's other facets like what are the actual practices done, how are they implemented, the additionality, the permanence.

It's all these things together, the whole package that makes projects what they are.

But of course, the monitoring...

Doing it at a lower cost is definitely a key unlock that enables us to scale our projects the way that we do.

Absolutely.

And what about credibility?

Like you mentioned that one of your projects is verified by Vera.

How do things look with other projects?

Are there specific bodies that you work with on a regular basis?

What's your approach to that?

As time has gone by, Pumatra has tried to diversify more and more in this area.

But right now we do have five projects There are validated and registered projects that have gone through the full validation hours and where I review and made it to the registration, the registration of these projects and now are set up for verifying and issuing credits on an ongoing basis for their total lifetime, which the first crediting period of these projects is typically 20 years.

So you're set up to do that ongoing issuance of credits now for five different projects.

And these five projects are across.

Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Kenya, and India.

Beyond that, we have a few other projects in pipeline that are still coming along.

And then we have a few projects that have been developed or under development at different standards as well.

We have a social carbon standard project in India that recently issued a batch of credits working with smallholder farmers in India.

particularly in the southern regions of India.

We have a very large project in Mongolia that's under development, but it's being built primarily for the JCM, which is Japan's joint crediting mechanism to be a compliance credit stream into the JCM.

And we're working alongside partners such as Mitsubishi Corporation to fully productionalize and take that project to where it needs to be and supply into that market.

So that's completely different from Wera as well.

And we have a small but upcoming Puro project where it's a very interesting project in Southern Africa where we have a hybrid system between a soil carbon grassland restoration project and also a biomass burial project.

In that part of the world, there's an extensive problem with these.

invasive shrubs and small trees that have overtaken the grasslands.

It's due to, actually due to in a certain way, due to human interference with the humans preventing fires from being an actual phenomenon on grasslands because humans don't want fires.

This has led to an invasive growth of small shrubs and trees, which are now being collected and stored underground with the terrestrial storage of biomass protocol under Puro.

And then that's a hybrid project with an upcoming Vera project that will restore the grasslands in that area as well through improved grazing practice.

So grassland restoration plus a component of biomass burial.

So we have been working on expanding to many different standards and registries and also applicability to both voluntary carbon markets and compliance carbon markets.

Excellent.

Slightly different note, perhaps.

I'm also very curious as to the details of what supply and demand look like today and how both are evolving in the market over the years.

On the demand side, who's buying soil carbon credits today and what kind of buyers are most excited about this pathway?

If you had asked me this question a few years ago, the answer would have been different.

And now the answer is actually different.

And if you ask many market participants a few years ago, I think they would have resoundingly said it's the food and ag companies who are going to buy these products.

But at this point, honestly, we have a very diversified portfolio of clients across nearly every sector that you can think of.

Tech, aviation, logistics, energy, mining.

There are some clients who desire to have a lot of community co -benefits in the work that they do.

And those clients come to our, especially to our smallholder farmer projects that have excellent community co -benefits the smaller farmers are receiving the majority of the carbon credit revenue they're also getting all these benefits from these programs that we are deploying on the ground and overall they are benefiting both directly and indirectly from the carbon projects and everything that comes around with it in our system so even those clients who look for those kind of community benefits as the paramount thing come to us and lastly we have a very diversified geographical portfolio around the world.

So many different clients, they are very specifically tied to certain geographies of where they want to work.

And we're usually able to satisfy those requirements from somewhere in our portfolio.

And likewise, for the compliance scenarios as well, especially Article 6 .2, as you may be aware, is dependent on bilateral agreements between countries.

We are lucky that we are well situated with projects across many different countries, out of which A good number of those countries are participating in Article 6 as host countries for projects.

By doing the correct set of projects here and the correct matchmaking required in the project, we're able to drive a good set of demand across diverse industries, sectors, governments, all of that.

Wow, that's a lot of customers, a lot of different types of customers.

I'm really glad you mentioned the Singaporean government earlier, though.

We won't have time to discuss all of them, unfortunately.

Government purchases are very interesting to me, and especially this one was, in total, was for over 2 million tons of high -quality nature -based carbon credits.

Correct me if I'm wrong on this.

What can you tell us about this deal specifically?

So the Singapore government purchased 2 .1 or so million tons in entirety, out of which Buhamitra's South America grass -time project, specifically the Paraguay ranchers that we have, form 31 % of that portfolio.

So we are 31 % of that portfolio.

And of course, the Singapore government also purchased from a few other organizations as well.

But Momotra Project is 31 % and they purchased 625 ,000 tons from us over the course of five years.

And the thing with government contracts is that most of this information is completely public access to everyone.

But what is interesting specifically is that this is one of the One of the world's first and one of the world's largest government carbon credit contracts and, of course, government carbon removal contracts in our case as well.

And it feeds directly into the Paris Agreement NDCs for Singapore.

These credits are crucial to Singapore achieving its 2030 NDC that it has already reported under the Paris Agreement.

And they will continue to buy more credits like this going into the future as well to help meet their NDC requirement.

So it's a significant demand signal from one of the leading governments in the world.

And it's a decent amount of volume at it at the same time.

And it's not one of those contracts that's really, really long and has most of its volume in the late 2030s or something.

This contract literally spans from 2026 to 2031.

It would be considered a medium duration offtake in today's carbon markets.

And it covers the 625 ,000 tons within this medium duration itself.

But of course, there's way more demand in the future coming from governments like Singapore and others.

So it's a very good start to the compliance markets.

We've been talking about compliance markets for a long time.

And as in we, I don't just mean...

Me and Bhumikra, but like the market as a whole has been talking about the convergence between voluntary and compliance.

And at New York Climate Week, we heard how we are not to use the word voluntary anymore.

We should always say verified carbon markets now because everything is moving to a hybrid system.

But we are actually making it a reality at Bhumikra with deals such as our Singapore government deal, where it's actually happening right now.

It's no longer just talk.

It's actually happening.

Deals with governments are actually happening and driving real value back to local communities around the world.

And in that line of thought, would you say that government support would actually play more of an important role than corporate demand in scaling the carbon markets?

Government support in sort of a hybrid way, I would say.

I'd say that there is government direct purchases like what Singapore has done with us.

But there's also going to be demand produced by carbon taxes, both domestic and international, and also emissions trading systems and regulatory systems of that type.

And if you consider all of those together, then, and in addition, you can also throw in programs like Corsia, which is a semi -compliance scheme on its own.

If you add up all of those things together, then surely the compliance markets, which include government, Corsia, UN action, all that together.

will probably be a much larger thing than the pure voluntary segment of the carbon markets as we go forward into the future.

And we already see that as sort of the case.

In Singapore itself, there's a yearly demand of 4 to 6 million tons of credits.

It's not fully realized demand at the moment because many organizations are still figuring out how they play in this sort of market.

There's a yearly demand that's shaping up to be 4 to 6 million tons per year.

And in Japan, it's 100 million tons per year.

And recently we heard from the EU, from some of the experts, they're advising the EU that it's going to be a 140 million ton demand in the late 2030s that the EU is going to have for international Article 6 carbon credits that they're importing into the EU.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg because there's other domestic programs would also be using these credits.

Like, for example, in Mexico, our carbon credits in Mexico are eligible as tax credits within the state of Querétaro, which has a very high carbon tax of $34 per ton, where companies there can just buy our credit and use that as a tax credit against that carbon tax.

And the same thing is being rolled out on the scale of the entire country of Mexico with the emissions trading system that's shaping up.

in Mexico to be implemented imminently.

So all of these things collectively together, they will take the demand for these carbon credits easily into the several, several hundreds of millions per year, if not billions per year of credits.

And they will be primarily high quality credits that meet not just the minimum bars within the voluntary side of the market, including...

Of course, ICBCM and basic VERA standards, whatnot.

But they will go even beyond that because the countries themselves will have their own basic standards towards which they approve these credits.

And the price points that will be paid are also going to be much higher than what is the average within the general voluntary carbon market.

Because as most of us know, who are in this industry and space, If you go and look at some of the indices, like, for example, NGO or NBT that are trading futures contracts against nature -based credits or any kind of credit for the matter, they're all in the single digits or lower in terms of carbon price.

But what is accessible from these compliance markets is a streamlined set of demand that will be able to do much higher prices, but also be in much larger demand.

So it's a double whammy.

You not only have increased the price of the grid, but you also have more volume of demand.

And collectively, that will help us to scale climate action much faster.

Because at the end of the day, the farmer, when we pay them, the farmer does not care whether the money came from a compliance market program or a voluntary sale to a corporate.

They care that they got money for their hard work and are incentivized.

for doing these improved practices that restore soils and no CO2 in the atmosphere.

That is what is important.

So that logically kind of brings me to the other side of the equation, which is the supply side of the market.

How, you know, with these changes that we're seeing on the side of demand, obviously supply is changing too.

And like we've seen so much volatility, so much uncertainty in the market.

But also, as you mentioned, a lot of growth.

How have project developers been adapting?

One of the challenges with being a project developer is that these projects take a very long time to develop.

And as a result, if you are reacting to market trends, you have to have a really good clairvoyance.

You have to be able to predict the future in order to properly manage project development and take it where it needs to go.

Because as listeners are probably aware, It takes quite a while to stand up these projects.

It takes a few years to stand up a soil carbon project.

It takes like seven or more years to stand up a ARR, afforestation, reforestation type of project.

So it really takes a long time and it's not very easy to be able to predict where the market will be a few years into the future so that you decide your product development based on that.

That's like the main challenge that's definitely shaping up.

There are certainly...

a good number of projects around the world that thought that they might have demand from a certain source, but then it evaporates later and so on.

There's this type of uncertainty that does tend to manifest itself.

So it does make things slightly difficult.

On the other hand, there are definitely projects and developers who have suddenly found their projects very well placed to serve a huge market and just got lucky from geographical placement.

At Boomitra, ourselves, We adopt a diversified strategy of working with farmers and landowners across the world.

Like we have significant projects in Latin America, significant projects in Africa, significant projects in different parts of Asia.

And it's that degree of diversification that has really enabled us to continue to grow here and have a lot of activity that is happening from many different parts of the world at any given point in time and continue to chug along here.

If we had projects only in one geographical region, I think the story would be very different.

But it's due to our scope internationally, it has enabled us to do so many things and do what we do right now.

So there are many choices to be made as a project developer, where you do the project, when you get in, what is the right timing, why this geography, why not this other place, why this system.

You have many choices to be made and well thought of choices.

were what will enable the right projects to rise up and not only have high quality supply, but also have a lot of demand.

I was curious if you could perhaps walk us through actual examples of where the perfect sweet spot of supply and demand, such as your deal with ECP and Restoration Climate, which I believe is still the largest purchase of soil carbon credits to date.

What goes into this type of deal?

Well, maybe not anymore.

No?

Maybe not anymore because the Singapore contract is slightly larger.

True, true, yes.

Yeah, isn't it?

All right, second largest then in that case.

But yeah, what goes into this type of deal?

Yeah, so each project, of course, has its unique set of farmers and ranchers that participate in that project.

But also, each project has a unique story to tell.

at the global stage when we go out and go and seek demand.

So in the case of our Mexico project, it has that very interesting story of how ranchers in northern Mexico are restoring these grassland habitats and returning habitats for the Mapimi tortoise, which is this giant tortoise that lives only in this certain part of Mexico.

It's a very endangered species.

There's all sorts of native birds and there's migratory birds from different parts of North America that also come to this part of Mexico.

There's Mexican prairie dogs that only reside in certain parts of the region where we have our grassland restoration activities as well.

And their habitat is improving and growing thanks to this project.

There's many factors like that that come together to make this project what it is.

And uniquely, it's also a project that is located within North America.

If you define North America as Canada, United States, and Mexico, which is a typical definition of North America.

So it's a large cross -land restoration project at North America that's able to produce carbon removals at a reasonable price point.

And altogether, packaging that makes it very interesting to clients who are...

who have some degree of North America focus.

So it makes it very interesting to that set of clients.

In the case of Ethereum and restoration climate in that particular deal, the team at Ethereum really wanted to figure out how they could incentivize native ecosystem restoration in a unique way that enables them to not only remove All of the historical emissions from Ethereum, which is the main purpose of their purchase, is to neutralize the historic emissions of Ethereum that occurred before they switched the way in which they confirm transactions.

They wanted to neutralize that.

But then at the same time, they wanted to have a strong additionality to their activity.

Like their purchase should have been catalytic to enabling a certain set of land to be restored.

and for carbon to be sequestered.

And we were able to find that suitable opportunity in the case of our Mexico project, where it fit all of the parameters to make that happen.

So in some ways, for some of these large deals, it is a collaborative exercise to bring together all of the different elements.

What the client wants, what our projects have, what are the different resources on both sides, how can we meet them, make them properly meet, and enable a significant deal to actually happen.

Excellent.

Thank you so much for sharing that.

It's always very interesting and very rewarding to kind of see the insides of these deals, or a little bit of that at least.

Adit, I have one last question for you today, and it is regarding Boomintra's plans for the future.

What cool new ventures do you guys have lined up for the weeks and maybe months ahead of us that you can share with us at this time?

Yeah, for us, you can broadly think of the future as the short -term future and also the long -term plans for us.

In the short term, we are quite excited about making deliveries on our existing contracts and also bringing a significant amount of spot volume into the market.

So for those interested, we will be having a few million tons of carbon removal credits available in the spot market as well in the very near future.

We are certified VM42 carbon removals from a few different geographies, including from Mexico, from Argentina, and a few other places we'll have.

spot credits also ready for transactions.

So it'll be interesting to see how the spot market also reacts compared to the long -term off -take market, which are two different markets that operate with slightly different parameters, as people at this point are probably aware.

So it'll be interesting to see how things happen on the spot front as well over the course of the next few weeks and months.

I'm sure as many in the voluntary side of the market are observing, it'll be interesting to see what happens in this quarter, like October, November, and December.

Does the voluntary market pick up in a very significant way?

Does it grow in a linear way?

Does it grow exponentially?

Does it remain stagnant?

What is the outcome for the market?

Is it going to continue to grow?

Is it going to grow fast or just at a medium pace?

This quarter will provide all of us with very interesting learnings.

Beyond that, like looking into the future, further future, I'm very excited about how agricultural transition in the farmers and climate finance is being linked into these compliance programs globally so that it can really be made into more of a process and enable the farmers to get significant amount of value out of these programs, regardless of the number of farmers that participate in them.

Like achieving true scale through linkage to the compliance markets.

We're already seeing that with our Singapore deal and some other work that we're doing.

But it's quite exciting to see how that linkage will happen in more jurisdictions and more value will go back to the farmers.

And likewise, more demand will be there, more supply will be there.

It'll just be a much more active type of a market with those compliance linkages.

they're coming into the fore.

So I'm quite excited about those things.

Absolutely, we are.

We all are.

I'm sorry.

We are all very much looking forward to that.

And yeah, watching this market grow and mature into the market, it should be in order to really facilitate climate impact.

Adit, thank you so much for this conversation today.

I'm very happy that we got to do this.

And thank you for making the time.

I wish you and your team all the very best.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Violet.

And look forward to future episodes of your podcast as well.

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