Forty-six of the 76 CDR companies I now flag as likely dead are biochar firms. That is 61%, from a pathway that gets a small fraction of the money. The other two stories from today point the same direction: a mine remediation pilot in Wyoming is live but has published almost nothing, and the week’s free trackers can tell you how many tonnes were sold but not what anyone paid. So today’s pattern is a visibility gap. We can see the activity. We cannot see the economics.
I will call it “tonne-visible, price-blind.” The field reports volume well and money badly, and all three stories today are symptoms of that.
Biochar is where CDR companies go to die quietly
My count of likely-dead CDR firms stands at 76, and biochar accounts for 46 of them. “Likely dead” means I see no activity signals, such as a stale website, no deliveries, no announcements, no responses, rather than a confirmed shutdown. Some of these companies will turn out to be alive and simply silent. The number is a ceiling on confirmed failures and a floor on how many have gone dark.
Why biochar? The entry barrier is low. A pyrolysis unit costs far less to build than a DAC plant, so capital expenditure, the upfront money needed to build the thing, is modest. That invites many small operators. But a low barrier to entry is also a low barrier to exit. A two-person biochar firm can disappear without a press release, a bankruptcy filing, or a tracker update. Nobody counts the exit.
This matters for buyers. If the pathway with the most suppliers is also the pathway with the highest churn, then durability risk is not only about whether the carbon stays in the soil. It is about whether the company that promised to monitor it still exists in five years. And the data says a lot of them will not.
The caveat is the denominator. I know how many biochar firms I flag as likely dead. I am less certain how many biochar firms exist in total, since many never register with any tracker. The 61% share could overstate biochar’s failure rate if the pathway simply has more companies to begin with. The data cannot separate “biochar fails more often” from “biochar has more firms to fail.”
Aquarry’s Wyoming pilot is live, and that is nearly all we know
Aquarry has switched on its first mine remediation pilot in Wyoming. That is the whole of the verifiable claim. The announcement does not give a tonnage target, a timeline for first verified removals, or a description of how the removal will be measured.
The missing piece is MRV, meaning measurement, reporting, and verification: the process of proving that carbon was actually removed and will stay removed. A pilot without a public MRV plan is a pilot that cannot yet be compared to anything. I cannot tell whether this is a one-tonne demonstration or a thousand-tonne first step.
To be fair to Aquarry, this is the normal pattern for a first pilot. Companies announce the switch-on and publish numbers later. But “later” is where the field keeps losing information. Pilots go live, the launch gets covered, and the results, if they ever appear, arrive without the same attention. I will be watching for the follow-up more than the launch.
The trackers count tonnes because tonnes are the only thing anyone will share
Captain Drawdown’s daily CDR Log #307 reviewed the week’s free trackers and found the same thing I have noted before: they count tonnes contracted and tonnes delivered, and they almost never show price. Most deals keep price private.
This is not the trackers’ fault. They report what the parties disclose, and the parties disclose volume. Price stays behind a non-disclosure agreement because sellers do not want to anchor the market low and buyers do not want to reveal how much they are willing to pay.
The result is a market where the public can see that a thousand tonnes changed hands but has no idea whether those tonnes cost $80 or $800. Without price, there is no way to judge whether a pathway is getting cheaper, whether a buyer overpaid, or whether a seller’s claimed cost curve is real. Volume without price is half a market. And it is the half that does not help anyone make a decision.
Put the three stories together and the gap is clear. Biochar firms exit without a record. Pilots launch without a tonnage figure. Deals close without a price. Each is a small omission. Together they mean that the headline numbers for CDR, tonnes contracted and companies launched, overstate how much anyone actually knows.
What’s next
First, watch whether Aquarry publishes a tonnage figure and an MRV method within the next quarter. If a first number appears with a measurement plan, the Wyoming pilot becomes something I can compare. If it does not, it joins the list of launches with no follow-up.
Second, watch the biochar count. If the likely-dead tally rises again by the next update, the churn is structural, not a one-time shakeout. If buyers start asking suppliers for proof of financial durability alongside proof of carbon durability, that would be the first sign the market has noticed. Someone should be asking.