CDR

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. ...

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’s signal isn’t a single megadeal — it’s the slow consolidation of plumbing. Microsoft re-entered the buyer narrative just as Europe’s Buyers’ Club inched toward operational status and Singapore-plus-World-Bank stood up new Article 6 infrastructure. Meanwhile, a Nature paper put a serious crack in the integrity story underpinning US forest offsets, a reminder that the integrity layer is still load-bearing for everything being built on top. ...

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. ...

The pathway Enhanced weathering (EW) accelerates a chemical reaction that the Earth already runs at geological pace: the dissolution of silicate rocks by carbonic acid in rainwater. When fast-weathering rocks like basalt, olivine, or wollastonite are crushed to fine particles and spread — usually on cropland, sometimes in rivers, forests, or mine pits — the surface area available for reaction increases by orders of magnitude. CO₂ dissolved in soil water reacts with the minerals, producing dissolved bicarbonate ions that drain through soils to groundwater and eventually the ocean, where the carbon is stored on timescales of 10,000 to 100,000+ years. That long-tailed durability is why EW sits alongside direct air capture and mineralization in most “durable CDR” portfolios, even though it borrows infrastructure (quarries, ag spreaders) from existing industries. ...

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. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 20 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 connective tissue is infrastructure quietly being rebuilt around CDR — Frontier and Cascade Climate setting de facto methodology standards, Canada and the EU bolting compliance scaffolding into place, and the AI-data-center narrative hardening from talking point into actual capital allocation logic. Underneath that, a bankruptcy and a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) warning paper offer useful counterweights to the build-out story. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 07 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/398-Scientists-vs--Engineers---the-Commercial-Pressure-on-Carbon-Dioxide-Removalw-Erica-Dorr--Samara-Vantil--Rainbow-e3j0jq0 TL;DR Rainbow’s head of science Erica Dorr and certification engineer Samara Vantil reframe the science-vs-engineering split as a false binary; both do applied work daily. The real gap is technical-vs-commercial. Useful framing for anyone who’s watched a salesperson promise a methodology change on a call. Concrete example: biochar lab samples cost ~€600 to ship Africa→Europe. That’s the kind of number that should anchor measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) requirement-setting. Defense of Charm’s “cut scope” posture as courage, not laziness — diminishing returns on the last sample are real and worth saying out loud. When project developers can’t deliver a data point, Rainbow’s default is a conservative discount factor, not rejection. Worth knowing if you’re a buyer reading their credits. Ross Kenyon hosts Erica Dorr (head of science) and Samara Vantil (environmental engineer, certification) of Rainbow, the carbon removal standard and registry. The episode is a follow-up to two essays Kenyon wrote for Rainbow on whether durable CDR needs more field engineers or more scientists, and lands somewhere more interesting than either piece: the science/engineering line is fuzzy, and the harder boundary is between technical teams and commercial. ...

Take on a podcast episode from REEF Roundup: 🪸Coral Reefs🐠 and 🐙Marine Conservation🦈, originally published Wed, 15 Ap. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reefroundup/episodes/Dr--Sambuddha-Misra-Drinking-Tea-to-Save-Coral-Reefs--The-Mechanics-of-Enhanced-Rock-Weathering-in-Darjeeling--S5E5-e3hsh58 TL;DR Alt Carbon’s chief scientist explains why Darjeeling’s foothills are a rare “supply-limited” weathering regime — solid mechanistic justification for site selection. 2025 Isometric-verified delivery claimed as Asia’s first enhanced rock weathering (ERW) credits; guest says next tranche is ~10x larger. Useful datapoint on Asian ERW supply. Current deployment ~80,000 acres, roadmap to 250k then 1M acres across Bengal and Assam. Ambition is real but measurement is the bottleneck. Honest admission: a million-acre deployment implies ~3M samples/year, more than all geochemistry has measured historically. New measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) methods required. Reported 25–100% crop yield uplift on degraded tea-estate soils from basalt micronutrients. Eye-catching, but no controls described — take with caution. Reef Roundup (a marine conservation show) hosts Dr. Sambuddha Misra, IISc earth scientist and chief scientist at Alt Carbon, for a surprisingly substantive walk through the geochemistry, MRV, and scaling math of enhanced rock weathering in the Himalayan foothills. The framing is coral-reef alkalinity, but the meat is durable CDR: basalt sourcing, supply-limited weathering regimes, Isometric verification, and the brick wall of sample-scale measurement. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 03 Ma. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/fixing-permanence-insurance-and-the-permanence-trust-with-na TL;DR Natalia Dorfman (Kita CEO) argues buffer pools were a useful bootstrap but not built for perpetual liability — a defensible position, gaining traction with standards themselves. Frames permanence as two distinct problems: short-term liability (handle via insurance on the developer) vs long-term/perpetual (needs a fund mechanism). Useful clean split. The Permanence Trust: an endowment-style, fully capitalized fund where per-credit fees are invested so the corpus always exceeds expected reversal costs. AFF-led feasibility study, report due ~June 2026, pilot to follow. Expects multiple Permanence Trusts (per-jurisdiction, per-standard), not one global fund. Realistic, though fragmentation risk goes unaddressed. Interim move: insurance-wrapped buffers so standards stop “holding the bag.” Practical bridge, but no costs disclosed on-air. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Natalia Dorfman of Kita for a 30-minute walk through where carbon insurance has landed in 2026 and, more substantively, the Permanence Trust concept being developed by the American Forest Foundation with Kita as modeling partner. If you’ve been hearing “permanence trust” in conference hallways and wondering what’s actually under the hood, this is the cleanest public explanation so far. ...

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. ...