Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Puro.earth’s annual CORC issuance jumped more than 60% from 2024 to 2025, and its retirement buyer base is now 4.7x what it was in 2020.
That growth curve replaces the prior mental model of durable-CDR registries as pilot-phase venues serving a handful of anchor buyers. Puro.earth was, until recently, essentially a Microsoft-and-friends venue for engineered removals. The 4.7x buyer expansion says the roster has broadened materially, and the 60% issuance jump says supply is keeping pace with demand rather than lagging it.
The numbers come from analyst Kevin Lee Caster, who put them on the record this week: “Puro.earth has had a 4.7-fold increase in credit retirement buyers between 2020 and 2025, while annual issuance of its Carbon Dioxide Removal Certificates (CORCs) jumped more than 60% from 2024 to 2025” (Kevin Lee Caster, @kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky). These are registry-reported figures, not modelled estimates, and Puro publishes issuance and retirement data per project.
Set the Puro curve next to what is happening at the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. With BioCarbon, Cercarbono, and Plan Vivo now added to the Core Carbon Principles roster, CCP-labelled coverage extends past 95% of the voluntary market. The parallel is the point. Puro is scaling by issuing new engineered tonnes to a widening buyer pool. ICVCM is scaling by quality-gating a huge stock of already-issued legacy avoidance credits. Two registries, two logics, one voluntary market that will eventually have to reconcile them on a single ledger.
That reconciliation is coming faster than most buyers assume. ISO and the GHG Protocol are converging on a single global carbon accounting standard, which pushes the registry-level distinction between a durable removal and a CCP-stamped avoidance into the load-bearing position for corporate disclosures. If the accounting framework is unified but the underlying credit types are not fungible, the choice of registry becomes the quality signal.
What the Puro number does not tell us: the price per tonne behind the issuance jump, the concentration of that 4.7x buyer expansion (a jump from 20 to 94 buyers reads very differently from 200 to 940), or how much of 2025 issuance is biochar versus mineralisation versus BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) versus DAC. The buyer-count metric also treats a hyperscaler offtake and a small-corporate retirement identically. Puro’s public dashboards can be interrogated further, and I would want the pathway mix before drawing conclusions about which durable technologies are actually clearing.
The number to watch: whether 2026 issuance holds above a 60% pace once EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework supply starts flowing. If it does, durable procurement has genuinely moved past pilot phase and buyers can plan multi-year offtakes against Puro depth. The second thing to watch is whether any CCP-approved program tries to issue a durable-removal-labelled credit that competes head-on with a CORC. That would collapse the two-logic split described above, and it would tell us the integrity sweep and the durable-issuance curve are heading for the same shelf. For context on how portfolio buyers are already navigating the split, see my earlier note on CUR8 and Isometric’s 2030 offering.
Citations
- Bluesky — @kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Icvcm — CCP-labelled coverage extends past 95% of the voluntary market
- Carbon Herald — ISO and the GHG Protocol are converging on a single global carbon accounting standard