The carbon removal industry is supposed to scale to gigatonnes. But how many people actually work in it today?
I went looking for the answer. And as far as I can tell, nobody has published one before.
The major CDR reports — the State of CDR, CDR.fyi, ClimeFi’s market analyses — track tonnes removed, credits sold, dollars invested, companies founded. IRENA and the ILO track renewable energy employment (16.6 million jobs globally as of 2025). But carbon removal isn’t broken out as a category in any of these. Nobody, it seems, has tried to systematically count the people who actually do this work.
So I did.
A note on how this was made: This analysis was largely unsupervised AI work. I queried APIs, scraped data, cross-referenced sources, and crunched the numbers over hours of automated research. As with any AI-generated analysis, there may be errors — a mismatched company here, a stale LinkedIn profile there. But after combing through 819 companies using Coresignal’s database of 80M+ firms, I believe the results are solid enough to publish. I’ll flag the caveats clearly. If you spot something wrong, I want to know.
The Number
6,321 people work at pure-play carbon removal companies.
That’s the entire dedicated CDR workforce visible on LinkedIn. 297 companies. Every continent. Every method.
To feel how small that is:
- About 700 people have ever been to space — across all of human history. The CDR workforce is already 9× larger than the total history of spaceflight. That sounds impressive until you consider the next comparisons.
- FIFA counts ~130,000 professional footballers worldwide. CDR is about 5% of professional football.
- IRENA reports 16.6 million renewable energy jobs globally. CDR represents roughly 0.04% of that — a rounding error in renewables employment.
- The entire CDR workforce is smaller than the staff of a single large university.
The industry that’s supposed to remove billions of tonnes of CO₂ per year by mid-century currently employs fewer people than a mid-sized hospital.
Using my more conservative estimate — adjusting for inflated LinkedIn counts and deduplication — the number is closer to ~4,100. Either way, the story is the same: this industry is embryonic.
How I Got This Data
I queried Coresignal’s company database, which aggregates LinkedIn profile data across 80M+ companies. For each of the 819 companies in our CDR Company Directory, I matched by website domain and extracted employee counts, historical headcount, and growth rates.
Here’s what came back:
- 341 companies returned usable LinkedIn data
- 478 companies (58%) returned nothing — typically very early-stage startups, pre-launch projects, or companies in regions with low LinkedIn adoption
- Of the 341 with data, 297 are pure-play CDR companies (carbon removal is their primary business)
- 44 are “CDR Divisions” — conglomerates like Airbus, Chevron, and Aramco that have CDR projects but whose 400,000+ total employees obviously aren’t CDR workers. These are excluded from all aggregates.
This is a lower bound. Not everyone has a LinkedIn profile, especially lab technicians, field operators, and workers outside the Anglosphere. The real number is higher. But 6,321 is the best documented figure anyone has published — because, well, it’s the first.
If someone has done this count before, I’d genuinely love to know. I couldn’t find it.
Where Do CDR Workers Work?
DAC leads in headcount: 1,927 workers across 63 companies — about 30% of the entire workforce. DAC companies tend to be better-funded and larger. Climeworks alone (410 people) accounts for 6.5% of the whole industry.
Biochar leads in company count: 133 companies, employing 1,664 workers. Most are tiny, but there are a lot of them. Biochar is simpler to deploy, requires less capital, and has more diverse revenue streams — soil amendment, water filtration, construction materials — than pure carbon credit plays.
The rest of the workforce spreads across BECCS, mineralization, ocean-based CDR, enhanced rock weathering, and other BiCRS methods.
Explore the full interactive data — filter by method, country, status, and sort by employee count — in our CDR Company Directory.
The Growth Story
Here’s the good news: the CDR workforce is growing 22.7% year-over-year (weighted average across all pure-play companies with data).
- 133 companies are growing their teams
- 74 are shrinking
- That’s a roughly 2:1 growth-to-shrinkage ratio
The fastest growers are mostly biochar and early-stage ventures scaling up from small teams. Equilibrium grew 454%, Green Carbon 288%, InPlanet 92%. Biochar companies dominate the growth charts — the method is easier to deploy and capital-light compared to hardware-heavy approaches like DAC.
Explore the full interactive data — filter by method, country, status, and sort by employee count — in our CDR Company Directory.
The Shrinking Side
Not every CDR company is growing. Several high-profile DAC companies are reducing headcount:
- Climeworks (410 people, -21% YoY) — the industry’s single largest employer, shrinking significantly
- Heirloom (175 people, -12% YoY)
- CarbonCapture Inc. (51 people, -26% YoY)
This likely reflects a mix of factors: the transition from R&D-heavy expansion to operational efficiency, cost discipline after a wave of venture funding, and the hard reality that DAC’s unit economics remain challenging. It’s worth watching whether this is a healthy correction or a warning sign.
The Shape of the Industry
The size distribution tells its own story:
| Company Size | Count | Total Workers |
|---|---|---|
| 1–5 employees | 142 | 421 |
| 6–10 | 43 | 332 |
| 11–25 | 54 | 905 |
| 26–50 | 29 | 1,049 |
| 51–100 | 17 | 1,135 |
| 101–200 | 6 | 860 |
| 201–500 | 6 | 1,619 |
48% of CDR companies have 5 or fewer employees. This is a long tail of micro-startups with a thin layer of scale-ups at the top. Only 12 companies have more than 100 employees. The entire upper tier — every CDR company with 100+ workers — would fit in a single office floor.
This is what a pre-industrial industry looks like.
What This Means
The CDR industry is real, it’s growing fast, and it’s still tiny. A 23% year-over-year growth rate is strong — faster than most clean energy sectors at a comparable stage. But starting from 6,000 people, even rapid growth takes years to build the workforce needed for megatonnes, let alone gigatonnes.
The biggest risk isn’t technology. It’s whether CDR can attract and retain enough talent — engineers, geochemists, project managers, field operators — to hit the scale the climate models demand. Every IPCC pathway that limits warming to 1.5°C or 2°C requires billions of tonnes of CDR per year by mid-century. Today’s workforce would need to grow 100× or more.
At 0.04% of renewable energy employment, carbon removal is barely a blip on the global workforce map. But every industry that matters was this small once. Solar employed a few thousand people in the early 2000s. Wind power was a curiosity in the 1990s. The question isn’t whether CDR is small — it obviously is. The question is whether it’s growing fast enough.
At 23% per year, compounding, 6,300 becomes 64,000 in a decade. That’s still only 0.4% of today’s renewables workforce. The math is daunting. But it starts with knowing the number.
Now we know it.
Explore the full data: Every company’s headcount, growth trend, and 12-month sparkline is now live in our CDR Company Directory. Filter by method, country, or status. Sort by employee count. See who’s growing and who’s shrinking.
Methodology: Employee data sourced from LinkedIn profiles via Coresignal (March 2026). “Pure-play” companies are those where carbon dioxide removal is the primary business. 44 companies where CDR is a division or project within a larger entity (energy majors, industrial conglomerates, utilities) are excluded from workforce aggregates. 478 of 819 directory companies returned no LinkedIn data. The conservative estimate of ~4,100 adjusts for LinkedIn profile inflation and deduplication. All figures represent a lower bound. Full data available at captaindrawdown.com/directory.