Posts

Biochar dominates with 377 of 969 CDR companies tracked

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. ...

Tencent Awards $30M to 16 CarbonX 2.0 Winners

Carbon Herald just published 16 Winners Will Share The Nearly $30M Award From Tencent’s CarbonX 2.0 Program. Carbon Herald reports that Tencent has announced the 16 recipients selected to share an award pool of close to $30 million under its CarbonX 2.0 program. The initiative is part of Tencent’s broader effort to back carbon removal and climate technology development. The selected projects will divide the funding as part of the program’s second round, which expands on the original CarbonX initiative launched earlier. Details on individual award sizes, project categories, and selection criteria are covered in the full article. ...

Pathway 101: Afforestation (comparison)

Afforestation, reforestation and the wider “land sink” bucket Afforestation — planting trees where there were none in recent history — and its close cousin reforestation (replanting where forest was recently cleared) remain the largest single category of carbon removal sold today, by both tonnes issued and dollars transacted. The pitch is straightforward: trees pull CO₂ out of the air through photosynthesis and lock a fraction of it into wood, roots and soil organic matter for as long as the forest stands. The complications are equally straightforward: forests burn, get cut, get sick, and the carbon goes back. For a senior buyer comparing pathways, the central question is not whether trees sequester carbon — they obviously do — but how durable, additional and well-measured a given project actually is, and how that compares to engineered alternatives at 10–100× the price per tonne. ...

Isometric Lands $40M to Scale AI Certification Beyond Carbon Markets

Carbon Herald just published Isometric Secures $40M To Bring AI Certification Beyond Carbon Markets. Carbon Herald reports that Isometric, a London-based firm known as the largest certifier of carbon removal by contracted volume, has closed a $40M funding round. The capital is intended to scale the use of AI in its certification platform and to apply that approach to verification needs outside carbon markets. The piece frames the raise as a step toward broader environmental and industrial certification applications, building on the company’s existing role in issuing carbon removal credits under its protocols. Specific investors, valuation, and the timeline for new product categories are detailed in the full article. ...

Anthropic joins Frontier as buyer club tops $900M in CDR commitments

Heatmap News just published Transcript: Anthropic and the Future of the Buzzy Carbon Removal Buyer’s Club. Heatmap News published a transcript of its Shift Key podcast with Frontier head Hannah Bebbington Valori. Frontier, the Advanced Market Commitment coalition that includes Stripe, Google, McKinsey, H&M, JPMorgan Chase, and Salesforce, announced a new round of more than $900 million, roughly doubling its available capital for carbon removal purchases. The coalition is branding this a growth AMC and says it will concentrate the next phase of buying on a small set of companies it believes can scale to billions of tons of removal. Anthropic is joining Frontier as a new member. The episode also addresses Microsoft pausing its purchases after buying about 70 million tons historically, and what that shift means for demand. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-06-23

Today’s four stories point at one uncomfortable question: is the CDR field measuring its way out of actually removing carbon? A new paper argues carbon accounting itself may be crowding out real decarbonization. Microsoft has paused buying, forcing durable suppliers to prove execution rather than promise tonnes. Biochar dominates the company count but not the durability conversation. And at the CDR Symposium 2026, Lucilla Boito asked a pointed question about enhanced rock weathering: where are the weathered cations actually ending up? Each story is about the gap between what we count and what we remove. That gap is now the central problem of the field. ...

Microsoft pause tests durable CDR market as growth shifts to execution phase

CDR.fyi just published Durable CDR Market Update: From Ambition to Execution. In a market update presented at Carbon Unbound East Coast in May 2026, CDR.fyi reports that durable CDR purchases reached 30.4 million tonnes in 2025, a 324% CAGR from 2021. Stripping out Microsoft and Frontier, purchases still grew at 151% CAGR and deliveries at 131%. Those non-anchor buyers represented only 17% of contracted tonnes but 90% of delivered and 94% of retired tonnes. Biomass-based methods dominated 2025, with BiCRS accounting for 96% of purchase volume and 91% of deliveries, led by BECCS on contracts and biochar on delivery. The piece frames the next phase as execution-led, with method-specific pricing and tighter financing. ...

Carbon Accounting May Be Crowding Out Real Decarbonization, Paper Argues

Heatmap News just published Are We Too Obsessed With Carbon Accounting?. Heatmap News reports on a Searchlight Institute paper by Jane Flegal, a former Frontier Climate market development lead, that critiques the dominant corporate climate paradigm built around carbon accounting and net zero targets. Flegal argues the system pushes companies to optimize their individual footprints while ignoring more impactful systems-level work, like easing transmission constraints or interconnection backlogs on the grid. She points to the data center boom as a case where corporate power purchase agreements satisfy clean energy claims without fixing structural barriers. The paper suggests alternative metrics, including whether company investments cause additional clean infrastructure to get built and how firms engage in policy proceedings. ...

Take: CDR Symposium 2026: Where are the weathered cations?, Lucilla Boito

Take on a YouTube video from Dirk Paessler, originally posted 2026-06-22. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE7n4WhDXH8 TL;DR Lucilla Boito (likely Hamburg/UHH group based on the feedstock list) ran sequential chemical extractions on enhanced weathering soil samples to track where cations actually end up. Four operationally-defined pools tested: exchangeable, carbonate, oxide/hydroxide, clay. Useful framing for anyone modeling residence time. Steel slag (40 t/ha) drove calcium up across nearly all pools; dunite drove magnesium across all pools; diabase showed up in three of four for Ca. Results track feedstock XRF composition. Caveat flagged by speaker: only n=2 per treatment, no statistics. Treat as directional. Sodium and potassium showed up in carbonate pools where they shouldn’t chemically exist — a useful reminder that sequential extractions dissolve primary minerals too, not just the named pool. Video here. This is a CDR Symposium 2026 talk by Lucilla Boito on sequential extraction results from a multi-feedstock, multi-soil enhanced rock weathering (ERW) experiment. The core question: when basalt, diabase, dunite, steel slag, or bassanite (“Eifelgold”) weather in soil, which operationally-defined pool do the released cations end up in — exchangeable, carbonate, oxide, or clay — and does the answer depend on soil type? ...

Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 companies tracked

Each dot on this scatter is a single CDR pathway - direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, mineralization, and the rest. The horizontal axis counts how many companies are working that pathway; the vertical axis sums the employees across those companies. Linear scales on both, so distance on the page matches distance in the numbers. What this view reveals that a headcount table cannot is the shape of the industry. A pathway sitting high and to the right is crowded with firms and staffed deeply. One sitting high but to the left is a pathway dominated by a few large companies. Low and to the right means many small teams chasing the same idea. The spread between these corners is the story of where capital and talent have actually landed, versus where the field is still a cottage. ...