Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The consensus is that durable carbon removal is demand-limited. Buyers, advocates, and most market commentary repeat it. Kevin Lee Caster (@kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky) puts it in one line: “Millions of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide Removal are being purchased. Millions more tonnes of CDR need to be purchased in order to help the industry grow to the scale necessary.” More tonnes bought, more plants built. That is the model.
The steel-man: contracts are what lenders finance
The case is not stupid. A first-of-a-kind plant does not reach a final investment decision on a pitch deck. It needs contracted revenue a bank can underwrite, which means a signed offtake from a creditworthy buyer. Before 2022 those offtakes barely existed, and the projects that survived were the ones that found them. So purchase volume looks like the lever, because for a while it was.
The break: 13 of 400 biochar projects passed one buyer’s vetting
Supercritical, a buyer platform, reports evaluating more than 400 biochar projects and passing 13, a pass rate near 3% (Happy Ground on LinkedIn, citing Supercritical). Biochar is the pathway people call the most mature durable-ish option. If a buyer with money screens 400 projects and can contract 13, the scarce input in that transaction is not the buyer. And this is one platform, one pathway, so the exact number is not the point. The ratio is.
Three more facts the demand story skips
First, demand already grew by orders of magnitude. Caster’s own figure (@kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky) is that “Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft went from 14,200 permanent-removal carbon credits in 2022 to 68.4 million in 2025.” A several-thousand-fold increase in three years is not a market starved of appetite.
Second, operators describe the deal-killer as time in diligence, not absence of interest. The Carbon Herald piece Death By Data Room puts it plainly: “Buyers are not short of documents. Projects are short of time.” Developers run out of runway inside the vetting cycle. Buyers are now building tools for that cycle: Residual’s Buyer Portal launched with 25 major buyers signed up to screen and price supply (Residual Buyer Portal, 25 buyers). That is demand organising itself to hunt for credible tonnes.
Third, look at what actually delivers. Gevo and ClimeFi completed a sale and delivery of 10,000 CDR credits from an operating North Dakota ethanol plant with bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS (Gevo and ClimeFi complete carbon removal transaction). Gevo says the site has stored about 700,000 tonnes of CO2 since BECCS began under its former owner. Years of measured injection history is what clears a data room. Meanwhile Supercritical signed an exclusive deal with Ground Up to scale biochar in Maharashtra’s sugarcane belt, and intermediaries are publishing the questions they ask first (The Carbon Lowdown). Buyers locking up specific developers is what you do when pre-vetted supply is the contested resource. I made the same point when CUR8 and Isometric launched their 2030 portfolio: the cost is in finding, vetting, and verifying projects.
Where the consensus is partially right
Offtakes still unlock financing, and a 3% pass rate partly reflects buyers being strict on carbon accounting and permanence, which is the point of diligence. The 68.4 million figure counts credits contracted, not tonnes delivered, and a lot of those are multi-year forward purchases. And Gevo inherited its operating history with an existing ethanol asset; a greenfield DAC developer cannot copy that. None of this is a license to slow fossil phase-out; these tonnes exist for residual emissions that cannot be cut otherwise.
What changes if the read is right
For developers, the asset to build is a diligence-ready project, ideally with operating data, not a longer buyer list. For buyers and policymakers, a bigger purchase pledge matters less than a shorter, standardised vetting process that fewer projects time out of. The test is simple: Residual’s portal and platforms like it should publish their funnels, projects reviewed against projects contracted, across every pathway. If the biochar ratio holds elsewhere, the industry has been pushing on the wrong lever.
Citations
- Bluesky — @kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- LinkedIn — Happy Ground on LinkedIn, citing Supercritical — LinkedIn post
- Bluesky — @kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Carbon Herald — Death By Data Room
- Europa — Residual Buyer Portal, 25 buyers
- Gevo — Gevo and ClimeFi complete carbon removal transaction
- Substack (thecarbonlowdown) — The Carbon Lowdown — Substack post