Graphyte has already delivered carbon removal credits to customers. That is not a statement of future intent or a pilot-stage promise. It is the reason JPMorganChase just committed to buying 60,000 metric tons of them over the next decade — the largest publicly known purchase in Graphyte's history, announced April 9, 2026. This deal matters not because it is big in absolute terms, but because it is concrete proof that institutional carbon buyers have moved past waiting for the technology that sounds best on paper and are now locking up supply from the method that actually works today at a cost that pencils out.
Graphyte compresses agricultural and forestry waste into bricks, wraps them in impermeable barriers, and buries them underground. The company calls it Carbon Casting. The effect is simple: biomass that would otherwise decompose and release carbon back into the atmosphere stays locked underground for over 1,000 years. The process costs under $100 per ton of CO₂ removed, with minimal energy input — a cost floor that direct air capture (DAC) competitors have not come close to touching. JPMorganChase is not buying a prototype. It is buying from Project Loblolly in Arkansas, which started issuing credits in 2024 and is ramping to 50,000 tons of annual capacity by early 2025. The company also expects to begin taking credits from Project Ponderosa in Arizona, which will use biomass from forest thinning operations as feedstock. That second facility is still under development, but the JPMorganChase commitment likely de-risks the capital decision to build it.
The numbers are specific and verifiable. Graphyte received an 'AA' BeZero rating — the highest mark for biomass carbon removal companies — and is delivering credits on schedule from a live facility. The 60,000 tons JPMorganChase is purchasing translates to roughly 66,139 U.S. tons over ten years, an average of 6,600 tons annually. That is not trivial, but it is also not transformational on its own. The scale that matters is in the aggregate: JPMorganChase has been systematically building out a portfolio of high-integrity carbon removal suppliers. This deal fits that pattern. Graphyte was founded in February 2023 by alumni of forest products and carbon capture spaces, backed from the start by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' climate fund. The company is based in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where it can source rice hulls and sawmill residues — waste streams that already exist at volume.
What created the conditions for this deal is the collision of three things. First: institutional carbon buyers have realized that they cannot decarbonize their operations fast enough to hit net-zero commitments by mid-century. They will have residual emissions. Second: they need durable carbon removal to address those residuals, and they need it to be verified, permanent, and actually available — not vaporware. Third: biomass-based carbon removal is the only method that meets those criteria at a price that does not require subsidies or fantasy-scale volume assumptions. Direct air capture still costs $200 to $600 per ton, requires significant electricity, and has only a handful of operational facilities globally. Graphyte's method is cheaper, faster to deploy, and already generating supply. The forest thinning angle adds a fourth dimension: thinned forest material is currently a stranded asset. Wildfires are a growing crisis in the western U.S. Thinning reduces fire risk. But thinned wood is low-value, and the thinning work is often difficult to justify economically. By converting that material into durable carbon removal, Graphyte creates a revenue stream that makes the thinning work pencil out for land managers and the U.S. Forest Service. Project Ponderosa, located near Flagstaff, Arizona, would source material from this pipeline.
Here is what the deal actually means: JPMorganChase has decided that near-term carbon removal will scale fastest through biomass-based methods, not through engineered solutions. This is not because DAC will not eventually matter — it probably will, at higher cost, for hard-to-decarbonize applications. It is because JPMorganChase needs carbon removal supply now, at a cost it can absorb, from a method that is proven and available. Graphyte wins by being one of the first to deliver. The company also wins by being positioned at the intersection of climate and wildfire management, which opens a second revenue stream if federal policy or western state budgets start treating thinning as a carbon-mitigation investment. JPMorganChase wins by securing long-term supply at a known price and locking in the co-benefits — wildfire prevention and rural economic opportunity — that make the purchase defensible to stakeholders. The companies that lose, or at least face a harder path, are the DAC vendors who have been betting on technology-driven cost reductions and federal subsidy support. Barclay Rogers, Graphyte's founder and CEO, was explicit about this gap: 'We're muscling our way through without any federal policy support,' he said in interviews with sources. The 45Q carbon capture tax credit does not apply to Graphyte's method. If policy changes, Graphyte's economics improve dramatically. If it does not, Graphyte still wins because it is cheaper and more deployable than the alternatives.
Here is what this actually means for carbon removal as a sector: the speed at which institutional capital is now locking up biomass-based supply is a strong signal that the technology hierarchy for durable CDR has inverted. Six months ago, the conversation was about which DAC company would scale first. Today, the conversation is about how fast Graphyte, Charm Industrial, and similar biomass-based operators can expand capacity. Frontier, the Google-Stripe-Shopify coalition focused on carbon removal, has been funding pilot-stage DAC projects for years. The fact that JPMorganChase is moving faster with biomass-based offtake does not kill DAC, but it reorders priorities. The signal is: we need supply that works today, at a price that scales tomorrow. Biomass carbon removal meets that criterion. Direct air capture does not — not yet. This matters because it means the next two to three years will likely see a reshaping of climate tech venture capital, with more dry powder flowing toward biomass, waste-to-carbon, and forest-management-linked carbon removal projects, and less toward speculative DAC improvements. That reallocation will accelerate because JPMorganChase's commitment is now a market signal that other large institutions will follow. Microsoft just signed a 626,000-tonne deal with a Canadian carbon capture project in April 2026 — the same week as the Graphyte deal. If Stripe and Google move next into biomass-based offtake, the CDR market structure shifts completely.
Watch three specific things over the next six months to test whether this story plays out. First: Graphyte's final investment decision on Project Ponderosa. The JPMorganChase deal almost certainly de-risks that capital call, and the company has signaled a decision is imminent. If Ponderosa gets greenlit by mid-2026, that is confirmation that the offtake is real and that land acquisition and permitting are not becoming bottlenecks. Second: Treasury or Congressional action on the 45Q tax credit. If the Biden administration or a future Congress expands 45Q to include biomass carbon removal, Graphyte's already-cheap unit economics become subsidized, and the scale acceleration becomes exponential. Track Senate Finance Committee markup sessions closely. Third: whether Frontier coalition members — Google, Stripe, Shopify — announce their own biomass-based offtake deals in Q2 or Q3 2026. If they do, the shift from DAC-first to biomass-first becomes structural, and capital will follow almost immediately. If they do not, JPMorganChase may be ahead of the herd but not yet at a tipping point.