This violin plot sorts every pure-play CDR company in the Directory by its pathway (columns) and its headcount (vertical axis, log scale from 1 to 100+). Each dot is one company, coloured by its current liveliness tier — Active, Moderate, Suspect, or Likely Dead. The grey shape behind each column is the size distribution: where it bulges, that’s where most companies in that pathway sit.
The value here is comparative. A raw company list tells you who exists; this view tells you where the weight sits. Pathways with most dots stacked at the bottom are dominated by sub-10-employee firms — many small entrants, few that have grown. Pathways with dots reaching up the column have produced operators that scaled past the founder-and-a-few-engineers phase. Colour (not vertical position) is what tells you the health story: red dots high up the column mean a sizeable operator went quiet; red dots on the floor are the long tail churning as it always has.
Read it as a snapshot of signal strength, not a verdict on the science. “Likely Dead” means we have stopped seeing credible activity, not that the underlying method failed. Older pathways accumulate more suspect entries mechanically, so do not confuse age with weakness.
What the chart shows today
377 biochar entries dominate the directory, but on this chart the biochar column is the clearest cautionary tale: its violin bulges hard between 1 and 10 employees, and the red dots sit almost entirely in that sub-10 band rather than spreading up the axis. DAC and BECCS look structurally different - fewer dots overall (125 and 84), but the mass of the violin sits higher, around 10-50, with red dots scattered more evenly across sizes. Enhanced Weathering and Biomass Burial are the thinnest columns on the page (33 and 31 pure-plays) and read as genuinely fragile pathways rather than noisy ones. The so-what: averaging “CDR company health” across pathways hides that biochar’s fragility is a long tail of microfirms, while weathering’s fragility is just not enough firms to have a tail at all.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.