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Only 59 percent of CDR workers actually build carbon removal

This chart is a stacked horizontal bar showing CDR-attributable headcount across pathways on the vertical axis, with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play companies whose entire reason for existing is CDR, divisions inside larger firms where CDR is one line of business, and ecosystem players who sell tools, verification, brokerage, or software into the space. Bar length is total attributed workers; the color split is where those workers actually sit. ...

Pathway 101: BECCS

What BECCS is, and why it’s in the durable-CDR conversation Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is the simple-sounding idea of growing plants (which pull CO₂ out of the air via photosynthesis), using that biomass to produce energy or fuel, capturing the CO₂ released when the biomass is processed, and putting that CO₂ somewhere it won’t come back out — almost always a deep saline aquifer or depleted hydrocarbon reservoir. The net result, if the accounting holds, is atmospheric CO₂ removed and geologically stored on the order of 10,000+ years. ...

Take: Is carbon removal a fantasy? | Living Planet Podcast

Take on a YouTube video from DW Podcasts, originally posted 2026-06-15. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r79u6fuxdo TL;DR DW podcast revisits Climeworks: Mammoth (36 kt/yr nameplate) has captured “just a couple thousand tons” total since 2024 opening. Useful public airing of numbers practitioners already knew. Climeworks CTO Helen Cox attributes underperformance to humidity, temperature, and geothermal sulfur degrading sorbent in the field — not lab conditions. Honest mechanism, rarely articulated this plainly to a general audience. The 1 Mt by 2030 target is treated as effectively dead. Overdue framing for the mainstream press. Reporter cites the 2 million m³ of air per ton CO2 thermodynamic floor — solid, non-sensational. Verdict: useful as a talking-points refresher and as something to send to non-CDR colleagues. Limited new signal for practitioners. DW’s Living Planet (episode link) revisits direct air capture (DAC) six years after reporter Sam Baker first covered Climeworks, and the framing is “what happened to the hype?” The substantive claim is that Climeworks’ Orca (4 kt/yr nameplate) and Mammoth (36 kt/yr nameplate) plants in Iceland have collectively captured only a few thousand tons since Mammoth came online in 2024, putting the company’s stated 1 million tons by 2030 target out of reach. CTO Helen Cox, on the job about a year, is the on-record voice walking the reporter through what went wrong. ...

Mapping 969 CDR companies across the world's top 15 countries

This chart is a horizontal bar ranking of the fifteen countries hosting the most carbon removal companies in the directory, with country on the vertical axis and company count on the horizontal axis. Each bar is a simple headcount of firms whose primary registration or operational base sits in that country, regardless of size, funding stage, or tons delivered. The value here is structural. A raw spreadsheet of companies tells you who exists; this view tells you where the industry has actually taken root, which jurisdictions are exporting CDR capacity, and how concentrated or dispersed the sector is. Shifts in this ranking over time are one of the cleaner signals of where policy, capital, and talent are clustering. ...

Week in CDR — 2026-W24

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 13 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. The week’s signal is a widening gap between announced capacity and what’s actually getting built or bought. A 1Mt ARR deal and the largest-ever SAF certificate purchase show corporates still willing to write big checks for the lower-permanence end of the stack, while a new UK DAC consortium and fresh analyses of the EU Buyers’ Club and marine CDR rulebook underline how much policy scaffolding is still missing for the durable end. A German broadsheet hammering the “huge gap” framing rounds out the mood. ...

Podcast take: 403: How to get max value from carbon market consultants—w/ David LaGreca, EcoEn

Take: 403: How to get max value from carbon market consultants—w/ David LaGreca, EcoEngineers

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/403-How-to-get-max-value-from-carbon-market-consultantsw-David-LaGreca--EcoEngineers-e3kkn5k TL;DR When to call a consultant: as soon as you have a concept beyond a napkin sketch — useful framing, mostly self-serving but honest about it. Claim: a 1-6 month consulting engagement often beats hiring a $150-200k FTE for methodology, LCA, registry selection work. Plausible for early-stage developers. EcoEngineers’ workload has shifted from drafting new CDR methodologies (2022-2023 peak) to advising large energy/corporate entrants and operating projects. Useful market-temperature signal. Rule of thumb: AI tooling gets you ~70% of the way on methodology drafting; the last 30% is where expertise compounds. First time I’ve heard it quantified that way. Registry choice (Puro vs. Isometric vs. Rainbow vs. others) is undersold as a strategic decision that determines credit volume, verification cadence, and labeling eligibility. Episode link. Ross Kenyon hosts David LaGreca of EcoEngineers — a sponsor of the show, which Ross discloses repeatedly — for an hour on how durable-CDR developers should actually engage advisory firms. The episode is half practical (hire vs. contract math, when to fire a consultant) and half industry-state observation from someone who’s touched roughly 10 CDR protocols across 7-8 mechanisms. ...

Take: Is carbon removal stronger than the headlines suggest?

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/is-carbon-removal-stronger-than-the TL;DR Three Toronto operators (Amplify, Mangrove, CarbonRun) argue the durable-CDR vibes are worse than the fundamentals — useful corrective if you’ve been doom-scrolling. Venture was the wrong instrument for an infrastructure sector; the “missing middle” between VC and big-bank project finance is the real bottleneck. Accurate diagnosis, no easy fix offered. CarbonRun’s first verified river alkalinity issuances exposed how optimistic pre-audit limestone-to-feedstock ratios were. First time I’ve heard an operator say this out loud. 1,100+ permanent CDR companies counted across public lists — Vlaar predicts consolidation via acqui-hire, not a clean die-off. Plausible. Affordability framing in government budgets is the under-discussed existential risk for compliance demand. Worth taking seriously. Na’im Merchant’s Toronto Climate Week wrap puts Trish Nixon (Amplify Capital), Brandon Vlaar (Mangrove Systems), and Luke Connell (CarbonRun) in one room to take stock of durable CDR a year after the US political shift. It’s a finance/measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)/supplier triangle, recorded live, and unusually candid about what isn’t working. ...

Take: Taking Stock: The State of CDR - Fireside Chat with Oliver Geden

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 08 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/taking-stock-the-state-of-cdr-fireside-chat-with-oliver-gede TL;DR Geden: only 2 countries (Australia, UK) name novel/durable CDR in NDCs through 2035; ~1/3 of long-term strategies for 2050 mention it. Damning baseline. State of CDR report puts CDR at ~16% of global mitigation effort — higher than the 5-10% often cited. Worth understanding why before quoting it. “Hard to abate” is partly politically hard to abate — CDR risks becoming a flexibility valve for politicians dodging transport/buildings decarbonization. Sharp framing. EU’s 5% international credits allowance: officially “no CDM mistakes round two,” but Geden expects criteria to be more lenient than current rhetoric suggests. land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) accounting hides the ball: net targets mask gross emissions (e.g. Germany’s 50 Mt/yr from peatland drainage, stable, now 8% of national total). Sebastian Manhart interviews Oliver Geden (SWP, IPCC WG3 Vice Chair, State of CDR co-author) live at NEP Summit Brussels, recorded the week the third State of CDR report dropped. Thirty minutes covering policy sequencing (foundational → supply → demand), the gap between net zero pledges and actual CDR planning, EU pillar architecture, and how the Iran conflict scrambles climate attention. ...

Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 companies tracked

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. ...

Biochar startups exploded to 377 while only 125 chose DAC

This chart takes the same founding-year history view and splits each yearly bar by CDR pathway, so you can see not just how many companies were founded in a given year but which kinds of companies. The x-axis is the founding year; bar height is the count of companies started that year; the stacked colors in each bar are the pathways, keyed in the legend. The reason this split matters is that the field did not grow as one thing. Direct air capture has an older cohort, with companies appearing well before the recent funding wave. Biochar, enhanced weathering, and marine pathways cluster much later, riding the 2020-2023 surge. A raw founding-year total hides that staggering; the stacked view makes the sequencing legible. ...