Today’s three stories point the same way: the binding constraint on CDR is shifting from capture to everything downstream of it. Where does the CO2 go, who is actually paying for it, and who does the work. Austria is writing a law for the first question, CDR.fyi’s market data answers the second, and a headcount of 12,351 people across the 12 largest CDR companies gives a first rough answer to the third. None of the three is about a new machine.
Austria’s draft CO2 Storage Act tests whether landlocked countries should store at home
Austria has no coastline and no offshore saline aquifers to lean on, so the default assumption has been that any Austrian CO2, captured or removed, would travel by pipe or rail to the North Sea. The draft CO2 Storage Act covered in Captain Drawdown’s daily CDR Log #272 challenges that assumption by creating a legal route for geological storage inside the country.
The case for storing at home is mostly about cost and control. Cross-border transport adds a per-tonne fee, a dependency on another country’s port capacity, and a permitting chain that runs through several jurisdictions. Domestic storage cuts all three, if suitable formations exist and if the public accepts them. The draft is a framework, not a site list, and the geology and the social licence still have to be proven separately. So the law removes one blocker, not all of them.
For CDR specifically, this matters more than it might look. Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) only count as removal once the CO2 is durably locked away. A landlocked country that cannot store has to import its removal credits or export its molecules. Either way, the value chain leaves the country. Austria is betting it does not have to.
The residual-only caveat applies here as it does everywhere. Storage capacity built for removals is only a climate asset if it is not also used as an excuse to keep fossil combustion running past its shutdown date. The draft law does not settle that question, and it should be watched for whether it draws a line between removal storage and point-source capture from fossil plants.
CDR.fyi’s data still shows a market that signs faster than it delivers
CDR.fyi tracks purchase agreements and deliveries for durable CDR, and the pattern in its latest data is the one that has held for several quarters: contracted tonnes run far ahead of delivered tonnes, and a small number of buyers account for most of the volume. The exact figures are in today’s post, and I will not restate them from memory.
Two readings are possible. The generous one is that long-dated offtake agreements are the normal shape of an infrastructure market in its first decade, and deliveries will catch up as plants come online. The skeptical one is that a market carried by a handful of corporate buyers is fragile, and that the delivery gap is a measure of how much of the announced volume is still a promise.
The data cannot distinguish these on its own. What it can do is give a delivery rate that can be checked quarter over quarter. If deliveries as a share of contracted volume rise steadily, the generous reading wins. If the share stays flat while new contracts pile up, the skeptics have a point. That ratio is the number to track.
12,351 people is a real industry, and a very small one
The 12 largest CDR companies employ 12,351 people across pathways, which is roughly 1,000 per company on average, though the distribution is almost certainly lopsided toward the DAC and BECCS players with plants to run. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW), which spreads crushed silicate rock on farmland, and the ocean pathways run leaner because much of the labour is contracted out to farmers, quarries, and vessels.
Put the number in perspective. A single mid-sized cement plant employs a few hundred people. The world’s dozen biggest removal companies together employ fewer people than one large automaker’s engineering division. So the headcount confirms two things at once: CDR has moved past the pilot-and-PhD stage, and it has nowhere near the labour footprint of an industry removing gigatonnes.
The useful follow-up is tonnes delivered per employee, by pathway. That would show which approaches are labour-heavy and which are capital-heavy, and which have a credible path to scaling without hiring at the same rate. Nobody has published that table yet. It would be worth building.
What’s next
Watch how Austria’s parliament handles the draft, and specifically whether the final text distinguishes storage for removals from storage for captured fossil emissions. That distinction decides whether the law is a CDR enabler or a general carbon capture and storage law with CDR attached.
And watch CDR.fyi’s next quarterly delivery-to-contract ratio. Delivered tonnes, not signed tonnes, are the metric that makes the 12,351 people count.