This chart is a stacked bar count of every company in the CDR Directory, grouped along the x-axis by removal pathway (direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, and so on), with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play producers, brokers and marketplaces, and firms where CDR is a side business bolted onto a different core model.
The total height tells you which pathways are crowded with company formation. The segment mix tells you something a raw count hides: whether a pathway’s apparent size is built on operators actually delivering tonnes, on intermediaries reselling them, or on incumbents whose CDR line is a minor adjunct. Two pathways with identical totals can have very different underlying economies once you see the split.
Read it as a census of entities, not of capacity. A one-person broker counts the same as a plant operator. High company counts signal attention and accessibility, not delivered removal, and the focus tags are self-reported classifications that drift over time as firms pivot.
What the chart shows today
Biochar towers over everything else with 377 companies, three times DAC’s 125 and more than the bottom five pathways combined. Across all 969 visible companies, 569 are dedicated suppliers, but that pure-play majority employs just 9,525 people - roughly 17 per company, which tells you how early this industry still is. The composition split matters too: 211 ecosystem players and 154 side-business entries mean nearly four in ten companies in the directory make their money elsewhere. If you’re screening for serious counterparties, headcount and focus filters will cut your shortlist much faster than pathway alone.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.