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
377 biochar companies dominate the directory, more than triple the DAC count of 125 and almost double the next-largest pathway, Enabling Tech at 179. What jumps out today is the composition gap: pure-play suppliers make up 569 of the 969 visible companies, but pathways like Enabling Tech and DAC lean heavier on ecosystem players and side-businesses than biochar does, where the producer base is unusually thick. The long tail is real too, with Enhanced Weathering (33), Biomass Burial (31), and Mineralization (42) each fielding fewer companies than a single mid-sized biochar cohort. If you’re mapping supplier density for a buyer strategy, biochar is a crowded field to pick from and the mineral pathways are still a phonebook you can read in one sitting.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.