CDR

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 16 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 connecting thread is infrastructure and institutions catching up to the pitch decks: Canada committing real money to a west-coast CO2 pipeline, the Netherlands naming a CRCF supervisor, Germany opening its largest DAC unit, and a fresh arXiv paper reminding us that enhanced weathering timelines depend on soil chemistry the marketing rarely mentions. Meanwhile the buyer base for durable CDR keeps broadening even as the EU ETS review slips — small delay, but the calendar around 2040 targets is tightening. ...

Last week we published a long write-up of the first CDI Symposium, where a room of soil scientists picked apart the world’s most-measured enhanced-rock-weathering experiment and landed on an uncomfortable conclusion: the rock dissolves, but the expected carbon-removal signal often doesn’t show up — and whether it does depends heavily on the specific soil. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the symposium suggested, is not a universal climate fix but a context-dependent one, and measuring it honestly is the whole ballgame. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Land & Climate Podcast, originally published Fri, 26 Ju. Listen: https://www.landclimate.org/podcast/ TL;DR David Ho (Hawaiʻi, IPCC lead author) argues marine CDR isn’t ready — most techniques carry too many known unknowns to deploy. Fair and specific. Enthusiasm has cooled since ~2023 across CDR broadly, not just ocean. Matches what practitioners are seeing. Ocean iron fertilization: nutrient robbing effect only visible at scales we’ll never test. Models flag it, deployers dismiss it. Useful framing of the epistemic trap. Direct ocean removal is being added to IPCC methodology as a “political decision” despite research gaps. First time I’ve seen it stated this bluntly by a lead author. Governance gap: equilibration happens outside the deploying country’s EEZ — nobody’s worked out who claims the credit. Underrated issue. Bertie Harson-Bredinsky hosts David Ho of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, fresh off the 4th International Conference on Carbon Dioxide Removal in Milan and now a lead author on the IPCC methodology report covering CDR and CCUS. The conversation is a sober tour of marine CDR — iron fertilization, ocean alkalinity enhancement, direct ocean removal, and blue carbon — from someone who’s moved from cautiously curious to openly skeptical. Listen here: landclimate.org/podcast. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 30 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/iso-sbti-and-the-lcaw-verdict-on-corporate-net-zero-with-kay TL;DR ISO Net Zero draft + SBTi v2 launched same day at London Climate Action Week 2026; Axelsson worked on both, argues they’re complementary not competing. Big CDR concern: SBTi doesn’t require removals purchases before 2035 — Axelsson calls this a cost-based decision, not a science-based one. ISO does require 5-year removals milestones, which is stricter on near-term CDR procurement than SBTi. Useful distinction that hasn’t been widely surfaced. Alleged SBTi communication flaw: merged short + long-term standards may let companies claim “net zero aligned” with only a short-term target. Worth watching. Next fight: governance of commodity certificates (green steel, SAF, cement) — mass-balance and additionality risks echoing prior voluntary market failures. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme host Kaya Axelsson of Oxford Net Zero one week after the simultaneous 22 June launch of the ISO Net Zero draft standard and SBTi Corporate Net Zero Standard v2. Axelsson worked inside both processes for three years, and the episode is essentially her post-mortem: what converged, what didn’t, and where the corporate demand signal for durable removals actually lands. ...

Near the end of the first-ever Carbon Drawdown Initiative (CDI) Symposium, the man who paid for the whole thing stood up to thank everyone and said something you almost never hear from a project’s funder: “It’s now five years ago since we literally spread the first ton of rock on the field… and I still cannot tell if we’ve done CDR since then. That drives me nuts. And it’s just one field.” ...

This chart plots every pure-play CDR company in the Directory as a single dot. The horizontal axis is the company’s founding year (estimated from its primary domain registration), the vertical axis is its current headcount on a log scale, and the colour codes the company’s pathway. The shaded blue background traces overall company density — darker patches mark where the crowd of pure-plays sits. The value here is shape, not ranking. A bar chart would tell you how many companies exist in each pathway; this view tells you the entire industry’s growth contour at one glance — when did the wave of small startups hit, where are the rare big older operators, what cluster sits on the floor of “still under five people”. Outlier dots near the top of the chart are the names everyone already knows; the dense low band is where most of the industry actually lives. ...

Mineralization is the family of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) approaches that convert CO₂ into solid carbonate minerals — the same calcium and magnesium carbonates that make up limestone and dolomite. Once CO₂ is bonded into a carbonate lattice, it is thermodynamically stable on geological timescales, which is why mineralization sits at the durable end of the CDR spectrum alongside geologic injection. The pathway matters because it offers storage that does not depend on monitored plumes, biological uptake, or intact ecosystems — and because the reactive feedstocks (basalt, peridotite, olivine, steel slag, cement kiln dust, mine tailings, alkaline ash) are already abundant, often as waste streams. ...