Five years ago, carbon removal at CERAWeek would have been a hallway conversation between three people and a potted plant. This week, it has its own Innovation Agora track. When the world’s largest energy conference — 8,000+ attendees, every major oil company, every energy minister who matters — gives CDR dedicated stage time, something has shifted.
CERAWeek 2026 runs March 23-27 in Houston. Among the speakers at the #CWAgora: Jessica Hinojosa, Senior Carbon Removal Program Manager at Microsoft. She joined Microsoft from Shell in September 2024, which is itself a telling career arc — from one of the world’s largest oil companies to one of the world’s largest CDR buyers. That pipeline of talent moving from fossil energy into carbon removal is becoming a pattern, not an anomaly.
Microsoft’s CDR portfolio is enormous. They’ve signed offtake agreements with Climeworks, Heirloom, Graphyte, CarbonCapture Inc., and others. Their approach has been aggressive and science-led: buy from multiple pathways, demand rigorous MRV, publish what they learn. Having their carbon removal lead speak at the same conference where ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco hold court signals that CDR has crossed from “climate tech curiosity” to “energy industry infrastructure.”
The irony runs thick, of course. CERAWeek’s main stage is still dominated by hydrocarbon producers debating transition timelines. The carbon management track exists, in part, because those same producers need CCS and CDR in their net-zero narratives. Oil majors investing in carbon capture isn’t purely altruistic — it’s also a license-to-operate play. But the CDR startups showing up at CERAWeek don’t particularly care about the motivations. They need the capital, the engineering talent, and the project development expertise that the energy industry has in abundance.
Context matters here. The US DOE’s flagship DAC hub program has largely stalled — permitting delays, community opposition, shifting political winds. The Inflation Reduction Act’s 45Q tax credits remain powerful on paper but slow in practice. Against that backdrop, industry conferences giving CDR more real estate feels like the private sector hedging against policy uncertainty. If government can’t move fast, capital will find its own path.
Carbon management at CERAWeek also means something for the OG energy workforce. The same engineers who design gas processing plants can design DAC facilities. The same geologists who characterize reservoirs for oil production can characterize them for CO₂ storage. The same pipeline operators who move hydrocarbons can move captured CO₂. The talent overlap is massive, and conferences like CERAWeek are where those connections get made.
Will a week in Houston change the trajectory of carbon removal? No. But the fact that CDR now sits alongside oil, gas, solar, and hydrogen in the world’s premier energy conversation — that’s a milestone worth marking. The adults in the room have noticed.