The day’s pattern is about staying power. Not tonnes, not funding rounds, but whether people and practices stick around. My analysis of the CDR Researcher Census shows that only 29% of researchers who published on direct air capture were still active in the field by 2025. Meanwhile, two practitioner takes on biochar landed today, and both make the same underlying argument from different angles: biochar persists because it is embedded in an industry that already exists. Farming does not need to be invented. DAC’s talent base, by contrast, has to be built and held together from scratch, and right now it is leaking.
That contrast is the insight worth sitting with. Carbon removal pathways that plug into existing value chains retain people, knowledge, and momentum. Pathways that stand alone have to fight for all three, every year.
DAC’s quiet talent problem
A 29% retention rate means roughly seven out of ten researchers who worked on direct air capture have moved on. Some left academia, some shifted to adjacent fields, some may simply have stopped publishing. The census tracks publication activity, so it will miss researchers who moved into industry roles without publishing, and that is a real caveat. Corporate DAC teams at companies like Climeworks and Heirloom absorb academic talent that the publication record cannot see.
Still, the number matters. DAC is an engineering-heavy field where progress compounds through accumulated know-how: sorbent chemistry, contactor design, energy integration. When researchers cycle out, institutional knowledge cycles out with them. A field that cannot hold its people has a harder time driving down costs, and cost is the entire game for DAC.
The likely drivers are familiar. Academic funding for DAC runs in cycles tied to policy enthusiasm. Publishing in a young field is risky for early-career researchers. And the gap between lab-scale work and the megatonne-scale plants the industry talks about can be demoralizing when deployment stalls.
Biochar’s answer: anchor to the farm
The two biochar takes today, from Melissa Rebeck and Emily Wilson, both come from the agricultural side rather than the carbon side, and that is the point.
Rebeck’s piece looks at biochar in livestock systems. The case here is that biochar earns its place on the farm before anyone talks about carbon: as a feed additive, in bedding, and in manure management. If biochar improves animal health outcomes or reduces odor and nutrient losses, farmers adopt it for operational reasons. The carbon storage rides along.
Wilson’s piece takes the next step: how does that farm-level adoption translate into carbon market revenue? Biochar credits already dominate delivered durable removals by volume, and the pathway from farm application to credit issuance is increasingly well trodden. The open questions Wilson raises sit in measurement, reporting, and verification, the paperwork and science that proves a tonne was actually removed and will stay removed. For biochar applied in livestock contexts, verification gets more complicated: char that passes through an animal or a manure pile needs a clear accounting method before a registry will issue credits against it.
The shared logic across both takes: biochar’s carbon market opportunity is strongest where the material already has a job to do. Revenue stacking, agronomic value plus credit value, beats credit value alone, especially while credit prices remain volatile.
Why the two stories belong together
DAC’s retention problem and biochar’s agricultural anchoring are two sides of the same question: what keeps a removal pathway alive between hype cycles? Biochar’s answer is co-benefits and an existing customer base. DAC does not have that option. Its only product is removed carbon, which means its talent pipeline depends entirely on sustained policy support and corporate procurement.
None of this is an argument against DAC. High-durability removal at scale will need engineered pathways, and DAC remains one of the most measurable of them. But the census data suggests the field’s biggest bottleneck may not be sorbents or energy. It may be people.
What’s next
Two things to watch. First, whether DAC researcher retention improves as commercial deployment grows; if industry hiring is absorbing the academic outflow, the 29% figure understates the field’s real workforce, and job posting data over the next year should tell us. Second, whether registries publish clear methodologies for biochar in livestock applications. If verification catches up with farm practice, the livestock route Rebeck describes could open a meaningful new credit supply channel. If it does not, the carbon revenue Wilson describes stays limited to soil application, and a chunk of biochar’s agricultural upside stays off the market.