Take on a podcast episode from Untangling Climate Finance, originally published Mon, 17 Au. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/untanglingclimatefinance/episodes/S4-E8-Anton-Root-on-the-State-of-the-Voluntary-Carbon-Market-e3n7jvj

TL;DR

  • Anton Root (AlliedOffsets) says weighted-average VCM credit price roughly doubled from ~$3 to ~$7/t since early 2024 — useful data point, driven by mix shift not scarcity.
  • ~1.6 Gt of issued-but-unretired credits sitting in registries, growing ~200 Mt/year. That’s ~8 years of demand overhang. Underrated structural problem.
  • CDR-specific read: >1,000 sellers historically, only ~800 all-time buyers of engineered removals. Consolidation is here; offtake-less projects are in trouble.
  • CCP-tagged issuances in H1 2026 (~18 Mt) nearly matched all of 2022+2023 combined. Integrity signal is real in the numbers, not just the marketing.
  • Asia overtook Europe as largest source of new credit demand last year. Tencent flagged as a high-quality-removals buyer.

Jay Tipton hosts AlliedOffsets co-founder Anton Root for a data-heavy read on the voluntary carbon market. It’s mostly VCM-wide, but there’s a meaty CDR segment on seller/buyer imbalance, pricing, and offtake dynamics that’s worth an hour if you’re on the supply or buyer side of durable removals.

What actually moves the CDR conversation. Root’s seller-buyer math is the number to write down: more than 1,000 companies stood up selling removal credits since 2023, against just over 800 all-time buyers of engineered removals. That’s not a market — that’s a queue. He’s blunt about the consequence: companies without locked-in offtake are struggling to raise follow-on capital and some are exiting. Even those with offtake are discovering they pre-sold too cheap to make the unit economics work. This tracks with what we’ve seen publicly at several early biochar and mineralization shops. His framing — “the companies doing well have multiple offtakers and investment baked in for a couple of years” — is a useful filter when you’re evaluating who survives the next 24 months.

The oversupply point deserves more attention than it gets. Root argues the market is issuing ~400 Mt/yr while retiring ~200 Mt/yr, leaving 1.6 Gt of unretired inventory. Most of that is avoidance-heavy legacy stock, not durable removals, so the direct price drag on high-durability tons is limited — but it does keep the “carbon credit” headline price anchored low, which distorts buyer expectations when they encounter $200–400/t durable CDR. Worth flagging: he thinks CCP filtering will eventually strand a big chunk of that overhang. Maybe. The mechanism by which 800 Mt of legacy REDD+ credits actually get retired-or-retired-from-relevance is not obvious.

Context. AlliedOffsets sits alongside the ratings shops (Sylvera, BeZero, Calyx) but focuses on pricing and flows rather than project quality — a genuinely different lens. If you want the durable-CDR-specific complement to this episode, pair it with CDR.fyi for delivered-tons data and the recent Microsoft mega-offtakes that Root references as demand-side anchors. The Article 6 and EU ETS-CDR-integration angles he flags as tailwinds are the ones durable CDR developers should be modeling seriously — those are the demand pillars that could actually close the seller/buyer gap he describes.

Useful for CDR commercial leads pricing offtakes, buyer-side analysts benchmarking VCM-adjacent pricing, and anyone building a survival thesis for an early-stage removals company.