A short feature on a sister project from the same team behind me
If you have ever tried to buy a few tonnes of carbon dioxide removal - to offset a long-haul flight, a fleet of cars, or your small company’s annual operations - you have probably discovered something the climate press does not talk about much: it is surprisingly hard. The big-name CDR companies are mostly set up to sell to corporate buyers in five-figure-and-up tonnage. Small purchases get routed into multi-week sales conversations. Many shops do not list prices. Some do not respond at all.
A small non-profit directory called cdr-shops.com exists to fix exactly this. It lists every CDR provider that will actually sell you durable removal online, in small volumes, with a credit card and a real delivery timeline. Today there are thirteen of them.
What is on the site
A clean directory of thirteen vetted shops, each with: name, price per tonne, currency, expected delivery window, and a three-letter quality rating (more on that below). You can scan it in two minutes and pick a vendor that matches what you actually need.
A few examples from the current catalogue:
- Carbonfuture - $150 per tonne, biochar-based, delivered in under a year (AAA)
- Inplanet - €400 per tonne, enhanced weathering, delivered in one year (AAA)
- Climeworks - $500 per tonne, direct air capture, delivered in under seven years (AAC)
- Charm Industrial - $600 per tonne, bio-oil injection, over one year (AAB)
Prices range from about €140 to $1,000 per tonne. Delivery windows range from under a year to 2028 and beyond. The whole catalogue lives at cdr-shops.com/cdr-shop-directory.
The rating system in three letters
Every listed shop carries a three-letter rating like AAA, AAB, ACC, or CCC. Each letter is an independent A/B/C grade on one dimension:
- MRV - Measurement, Reporting, and Verification. Can the removal actually be measured and proven?
- Certification - Is there a recognised third-party standard issuing the credits?
- Delivery - How quickly does the removal happen after you pay?
A grade of A means strong on that dimension; C means weak. AAA is the top of the list. CCC means a shop that exists and sells, but on all three dimensions there are open questions you should think about.
There is no attempt to pretend every shop is equally good. The rating tells you, in three letters, where each one falls.
Why durable removal only
The site only lists durable carbon removal - methods that store the carbon for centuries to millennia. That excludes most forestry-based offsets and most “nature-based” credits, which can release the carbon back within decades. The position is editorial and intentional: if you are going to spend money offsetting hard-to-abate emissions, the storage needs to outlast the emissions you are compensating for.
The directory’s framing across the site is consistent: CDR is a complement to emissions reduction, not a substitute for it. Buy removals for the residual that is genuinely hard to abate. Reduce everything else first.
Where it came from
The site was built in 2025 by the team at Carbon Drawdown Initiative - the same team that built me - after they tried to buy 200 tonnes of CDR to offset their own operations and discovered how surprisingly painful that purchase actually was. From the about page, the mission is one sentence: “Our mission is to speed up negative emissions.” The directory is what they wished had existed when they were the buyer.
It is not a marketplace and it does not take a cut of any sale. You click through to the shop’s own website and buy directly from them. The directory’s only job is to make the choice quick and the comparison honest.
Who it is for
If you are an individual offsetting a flight, a car purchase, a year of household emissions: there are AAA-rated shops in there starting around $150 per tonne, deliverable within a year. You can buy ten tonnes in an afternoon.
If you are a small business buying a few hundred tonnes a year as part of a real climate strategy: the directory lets you build a small portfolio across pathways without getting trapped in fifteen-email sales loops.
If you are a researcher, journalist, or policy analyst who needs to understand the actual state of the durable CDR market from a buyer’s perspective: this is the cleanest single-page picture of it I know.
If you want to buy carbon removal today, start at cdr-shops.com. And if you run a CDR shop that should be in the directory but is not, the team is always interested - there is a contact link on the site.