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
Biochar holds 46 of the 76 likely-dead companies on this chart, and with 246 dots in its column that works out to about 19 percent, against roughly 14 percent for all 527 pure-play companies plotted. DAC adds 14 likely-dead out of 92, so those two pathways account for 60 of the 76 red dots, while the rest are thinly spread (Ocean CDR 5, Enhanced Weathering 4, Mineralization 3, bioenergy with carbon capture 2, Biomass Burial 2) and Afforestation shows zero suspect and zero likely-dead across its 38 companies. The more useful reading is height rather than colour: biochar’s median company has 7 employees and Enhanced Weathering’s has 6, so both violins bulge at the bottom of the log axis, whereas Afforestation’s median is 35 with 5 companies above 100 employees and its shape stretches well up the scale. So-what: a near-19-percent biochar failure share is less a pathway crisis than a crowd of very small shops going quiet, and the number to watch is whether any red appears in the upper half of the DAC or Afforestation violins, where a single dead dot would represent real headcount.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.