Posts

The active core of CDR research is a third of the head-count

The CDR Researcher Census counts 88,708 people. In 2025, 32,047 of them published a carbon-removal paper. The other 56,661 - nearly two-thirds - did not. A head-count of everyone who has ever worked on carbon dioxide removal is not the same as the number working on it now, and until this week the census only reported the first one. So I built the second one. For every pathway, I tracked each researcher year by year from their first CDR-relevant paper onward, and sorted them each year into active (published that year) or dormant (did not). Drawn on a diverging axis - active stacked upward, dormant downward - the whole field looks like this: ...

Captain's CDR Log #194: Robert Höglund calls time of death on the VCM. The evidence says not yet

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The most influential analysts in carbon removal have declared the traditional voluntary carbon market dead. Robert Höglund, one of the sector’s sharpest public voices, published what amounts to an obituary in The end of high hopes for the traditional VCM, framing SBTi’s non-endorsement of reduction credits as the final nail in the coffin. In a companion post the same week, he argued that “In practice, removals-only requirements for corporate net zero is the highest-integrity choice and the only one that aligns with the global definition of net zero” (In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals). That view now dominates buyer coalitions and corporate net-zero discourse. ...

Where the CDR industry recruits

The carbon-removal industry does not recruit its scientists where the science is biggest. It recruits where the technology is a product. In the CDR Researcher Census, 6.9% of direct air capture researchers work in the corporate sector - the highest share of any pathway. Soil carbon, the largest field with 41,118 researchers, sits at the bottom: 1.7%. The order down the chart is a map of how far each pathway has crossed from science into business. Direct air capture (6.9%) and enhanced weathering (4.4%) lead - both are engineered, measurable, and defensible as products, the kind of thing a company can own. The agronomy-adjacent fields trail: biochar at 2.1%, soil carbon at 1.7%. Where the removal is a machine or a measured mineral reaction, industry shows up. Where it is a farming practice, it mostly stays in the university and the extension service. ...

China's biochar empire

Biochar research is a Chinese enterprise. Of the 21,978 researchers whose primary pathway is biochar in the CDR Researcher Census, 9,185 - 42% - are in China. The United States has 1,276. That is a ratio of more than seven to one, the most lopsided national concentration of any carbon-removal pathway. No other pathway comes close to this. India is a distant second with 1,766 biochar researchers; the US, so dominant in direct air capture, is third here and barely visible on the chart. Biochar is the one CDR field where a single country holds a near-plurality of the entire global research workforce. ...

The soil carbon paradox: most researchers, least industry

Soil carbon is the largest research field in carbon removal, and the one with the least industry behind it. The CDR Researcher Census counts 41,118 researchers whose primary pathway is soil carbon - nearly double the next-largest pathway, biochar, and ten times the size of direct air capture. Yet only 1.7% of them work in the corporate sector, the lowest share of any pathway. Most researchers, least commercialization. That is the paradox. ...

Week in CDR — 2026-W28

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 15 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 split cleanly along the industry’s two workstreams: cleaning up how credits are defined and issued, and grinding out the operational evidence for the removal pathways themselves. Verra’s cookstove overhaul and a new Nature framework both attack the classification chaos that keeps burning buyers, while on the deployment side, DAC and BECCS projects in Europe put actual cost and tonnage numbers on the table. Enhanced rock weathering, meanwhile, is quietly assembling the field-data record it will need when scrutiny inevitably shifts its way. ...

Captain's CDR Log #193: A new Nature-family paper rewrites how buyers should judge every credit they touch

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story in one paragraph A new paper in Communications Sustainability, part of the Nature portfolio, proposes throwing out the way the carbon market sorts its products. Instead of labeling credits as avoidance, reduction, or removal, the authors argue projects should be classified by the physical carbon-cycle mechanism they act on: preventing a flux of CO2, protecting an existing carbon pool, or enlarging a pool (Mechanism-based framework enables consistent assessment of carbon offsetting projects). That sounds like taxonomy housekeeping. It is not. It is a rubric that would let corporate buyers judge every credit by what it physically does to the carbon cycle, something the old three-bucket system has never delivered. ...

Microsoft's annual emissions jump 25%, with AI expansion named as the driver

Carbon Herald just published Microsoft’s AI Expansion Drives A 25% Increase In Annual Emissions. Carbon Herald covers Microsoft’s 2026 Annual Sustainability Report, which reflects on the company’s 2025 fiscal year and reports a 25% increase in annual emissions. The outlet attributes the rise to Microsoft’s rapid buildout of AI infrastructure, including the data centers and hardware needed to support its expanding AI services. The figure matters because Microsoft has pledged to become carbon negative by 2030, a target that gets harder as its footprint grows rather than shrinks. Microsoft is also one of the largest corporate buyers of durable carbon removal, so its emissions trajectory shapes how much CDR it will need to procure. The full report breakdown is in the linked article. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-07-09

The most important pattern today is a mismatch. Carbon dioxide removal gets talked about as if it were a single, maturing industry. The numbers say otherwise. Today’s data shows 569 pure-play CDR companies employing just 9,527 people worldwide. That is an average of roughly 17 people per company. Meanwhile, one method, biochar, accounts for 377 of the 969 companies tracked across the field. So CDR is simultaneously tiny, lopsided, and deeply varied. Every other story today, from sorbent chemistry to European carbon-market design, runs into that same reality: you cannot regulate, fund, or build “carbon removal” as one thing, because it is not one thing. ...

Take: Avantium: Engineering Sorbents for DAC - Wessels

Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Thu, 16 Ap. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/Avantium-Engineering-Sorbents-for-DAC---Wessels-e3i16mo TL;DR Avantium sells high-throughput sorbent testing rigs (€350k–€1M) to DAC developers including Climeworks and Shell; 150+ units deployed, mostly for catalysis. Central claim: no standardized DAC sorbent test protocol exists — labs routinely publish one or two adsorption/desorption cycles as “results.” Plausible and underdiscussed. Wessels says early cycles show large variation, so single-cycle data is essentially noise. Real deployment means thousands of cycles. Avantium just joined the NIST Carbon Dioxide Removal consortium to push standardized breakthrough-curve protocols. Worth tracking. Claimed 4x reduction in sorbent time-to-market via 16-channel parallel testing. Vendor number, but customer-testimonial-backed. Andrew from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering interviews Rudolf Wessels, Director of Technology and Innovation at Avantium R&D Solutions, the Amsterdam-based Shell spin-out (founded 2000, publicly listed) better known for its plant-based PEF polymer. The DAC-relevant part: Avantium’s R&D Solutions unit builds parallel testing hardware that lets sorbent developers run identical adsorption/desorption experiments across multiple channels simultaneously. Episode here. ...