Step inside the Mexican Pavilion at COP31, put on a virtual reality headset, and suddenly the noise of the conference floor disappears. In its place, Ambisonic surround sound and 3D spatial video transport you straight into the heart of a quiet revolution happening in Mexico City – a metropolis that generates a staggering 12,000 tons of organic waste every single day.

For seven years, Mexican cleantech company G2E has been working on a solution that sounds almost too intuitive to be overlooked: hydrochar. While the carbon removal world has largely focused on biochar, which requires energy-intensive drying before heating biomass to around 600°C through pyrolysis, G2E flipped the script. 

“Instead of drying it, we submerge [the biomass] even in more water, we heat it up to 200°C, and that’s how we convert it into hydrochar,” Founder & Director General Daniel Camarena Elizondo explained. “And the main difference is we’re saving all this energy from drying the biomass, which in its natural state is already wet. So we receive the waste from the city, and 8 hours later it’s already fertilizer.”

Yet, as Camarena Elizondo discovered over years of pitching and presenting, explaining a breakthrough that sits outside the mainstream climate vocabulary is half the battle. Even among seasoned negative-emissions specialists at COP31, hydrochar often draws blank stares. Traditional slide decks simply couldn’t capture the full circular journey from household trash sorting to industrial hydrothermal conversion and agricultural regeneration.

To bridge that gap, G2E teamed up with Mexican filmmaker Carlos D.

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