Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Three deals this week show the same pattern. Hyperscaler and industrial buyers are not buying carbon removal credits anymore. They are buying portfolio construction services from a thin layer of intermediaries who now sit between every supplier and every dollar.
Start with Boeing. The aerospace giant just contracted for 20,000 tonnes of removal across biochar and enhanced rock weathering, a process that grinds silicate rock to speed up natural CO2 absorption. But Boeing did not pick the suppliers. Supercritical assembled a six-supplier basket across two pathways and sold it as a single product. The buyer outsourced the diligence.
Then Climeworks. The Swiss direct air capture company signed a removal deal with NTT DATA that does not just sell its own tonnes. Climeworks is positioning as the portfolio curator for a data-center buyer, the same move it made when it added biochar to its offering earlier this year. The pure-play DAC supplier is becoming a multi-pathway shop.
Carbonaires went further. The trader launched an RFP that uses offtake contracts to back project finance, inserting itself between developers and capital. The intermediary role is no longer just sales. It is now a capital-stack function.
And Gallagher, an insurance broker, just teamed with CDR insurer Kita to launch a data-heavy buyer-side advisory service. The intermediary layer is now thick enough to support specialization: portfolio assembly, finance, risk advisory. Different firms, different sub-roles, same tier.
David LaGreca of EcoEngineers named the dynamic this week. “By the time a carbon dioxide removal project reaches offtake, the diligence burden has already shifted. Buyers want a counterparty who has done the work for them.” - David LaGreca (@carbonherald.com). That is the gap. Intermediaries are filling it.
Here is the tension. Buyers keep saying they want high-integrity, pathway-specific, durable removal. Their actual behavior is the opposite. They are handing the pathway-mix decision to a third party whose selection methodology they barely audit. The Carbon Drawdown Initiative noted that “enhanced rock weathering has real potential as a carbon removal pathway. It’s no surprise that interest from buyers, policymakers is rising.” - Carbon Drawdown Initiative (@linkedin.com). True. But no Boeing-scale buyer is going to diligence a weathering supplier on their own. They will buy ERW inside a Supercritical or CUR8 basket.
Glen Peters put the buyer side bluntly. “If I was a tech bro that had a few billion to give to philanthropy, and I wanted the best bang for my buck on climate, and I understood the science, the money would go to solutions today.” - Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social). The intermediary boom is the flip side of that frustration. Buyers with money are choosing convenience over rigor, and a layer is monetizing the gap.
So what does this mean right now?
If you are a CDR supplier under roughly 50,000 tonnes per year, your real customer is no longer the logo on the press release. It is the three or four portfolio assemblers who decide which suppliers get into the basket. Sales strategy has to follow. Spend less time pitching corporates. Spend more time getting on the shortlist of CUR8, Supercritical, Climeworks, and the next two that emerge. Your MRV story, meaning measurement, reporting, and verification, has to be readable by an analyst at an intermediary, not just by a sustainability VP.
If you are a buyer, you are accumulating a new form of concentration risk. A handful of intermediaries are becoming the de facto definition of “high-quality CDR.” If their selection methodology has a blind spot, your portfolio inherits it. Quietly. At scale.
And remember the residual-only frame. None of these portfolio products change the basic constraint: removal is for hard-to-abate emissions after deep cuts, not a substitute for them. A thicker intermediary layer makes purchasing easier, which makes the moral hazard worse if buyers treat tonnes as offsets-as-usual.
What to watch. Watch for the first intermediary that publishes its supplier selection methodology in detail. And watch for the first buyer that demands it as a contractual term. The day that happens, the portfolio layer flips from black box to documented tier. Suppliers will know what they are being judged on. Buyers will be able to compare assemblers against each other instead of trusting a logo. The power dynamics shift again, and the next phase of this market starts.
Until then, the basket is the product, and the basket-maker is the gatekeeper.