CDR

Biochar: the pathway Biochar is what you get when you cook biomass — crop residues, forestry waste, sewage sludge — in a low-oxygen environment at several hundred degrees Celsius. The carbon that the plant pulled out of the atmosphere ends up locked in a stable, ring-structured solid that resists microbial decay for centuries when applied to soil or used as a filler in concrete and asphalt. It is, by volume, the largest delivered carbon dioxide removal (CDR) pathway today: biochar accounts for the majority of tonnes actually issued on registries like Puro.earth and the European Biochar Certificate (EBC), even as direct air capture attracts more capital per tonne announced. ...

This chart takes the same founding-year history view and splits each yearly bar by CDR pathway, so you can see not just how many companies were founded in a given year but which kinds of companies. The x-axis is the founding year; bar height is the count of companies started that year; the stacked colors in each bar are the pathways, keyed in the legend. The reason this split matters is that the field did not grow as one thing. Direct air capture has an older cohort, with companies appearing well before the recent funding wave. Biochar, enhanced weathering, and marine pathways cluster much later, riding the 2020-2023 surge. A raw founding-year total hides that staggering; the stacked view makes the sequencing legible. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 18 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 throughline: capital and policy scaffolding for CDR is wobbling at the same time the workforce and demand-side data show how thin the actual production base is. BP is exiting UK CCS, Microsoft is reportedly pulling back, EU banks want carbon credit use curtailed — and meanwhile only ~9,500 people work at pure-play CDR firms globally. The picks below trace where the supports are buckling and where buyers and regulators are still moving. ...

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. ...

Most CDR efficiency claims are framed as a ratio. They should be framed as a balance. A ratio of 1.1 — 100 tonnes emitted across the lifecycle to capture 110 tonnes — is a vanity metric. The number that matters is the net balance: gross capture minus embodied plus operational emissions. That is what we mean when we say a pathway is “85% net.” For every 100 tonnes of CO2 pulled out of the air or fixed in stable form, 85 tonnes survive after you subtract everything the project emitted to make those 100 tonnes happen. The 15 tonnes you are losing went into making steel, running compressors, trucking rock dust, or heating a sorbent. That is what credible buyers should pay for: the 85, not the 100. The credible registries already refuse to issue credits for anything else. ...

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. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 30 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/carbon-removal-is-stuck-in-low-earth Naim Merchant hosts Julio Friedmann, Chief Scientist at Carbon Direct, to unpack the firm’s new “CDR 2.0” report. The thesis: durable carbon removal has reached “low Earth orbit” — markets, registries, raters, a buyers coalition all exist — but the next stage requires a different operating model. Friedmann lays out five pillars: technical readiness, project assurance, standardization, bankability, and transactional ease. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 29 Ap. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/digging-deep-with-gabrielle-walker-a-life-in-climate TL;DR Long-form interview with Gabrielle Walker (CUR8, Rethinking Removals) — part biography, part state-of-the-CDR-market read. Worth it for the second half. Walker’s “pre-compliance” framing for 2026-2035: SBTi draft reportedly requires removals by 2035, ISO net-zero standard (due later this year) will mandate interim removal targets. Useful if accurate. British Airways portfolio anecdote: Sean Doyle reportedly sees CDR as ~30% of BA’s decarbonization solution. First time I’ve seen that number cited publicly. CUR8’s 5-pillar diligence framework (climate integrity, team, future potential, delivery risk, “core benefits” not co-benefits) — practical, steal-able. Honest moment: Walker admits she initially dismissed Global South CDR as virtue-signaling before James Wanjigi (Kenya) changed her mind. Worth hearing. Episode link. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme launch a long-form spinoff of the CDR Policy Scoop with Gabrielle Walker — co-founder of CUR8 and Rethinking Removals, and one of the people who has actually been in rooms with FTSE-100 CSOs trying to convert intent into off-takes. The first 60% is biography (Antarctica, ice cores, science journalism); the back half is the part practitioners want. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 48 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 most useful signal came from a five-year scorecard on whether durable CDR has lived up to its 2021 promises — and the answer, predictably, is “uneven.” Around it, mineralization quietly emerged as the pathway with the most institutional momentum (Frontier, Carbon Direct, Arca, a new Quebec hub), while buyer-side activity continued to broaden beyond DAC into biochar and enhanced rock weathering (ERW) portfolios. Meanwhile Europe is sending mixed signals on carbon markets: Germany retiring allowances, IEEFA pushing back on power-sector CCS, and the EU inching toward letting international removals back in. ...

Take on a YouTube video from AirMiners, originally posted 2026-05-01. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEWnepySw_k AirMiners: What’s Hot in Carbon Dioxide Removal, April 2026 This is the April 2026 edition of AirMiners’ monthly “what’s hot” rundown, hosted by Tito Jankowski. It’s a roughly 10-minute state-of-the-market intro followed by breakout discussions. The framing is blunt: investors are pulling back, government funding is shaky, and Microsoft — the buyer that effectively underwrote the last two years of offtakes — has gone quiet. Tito’s pitch is to stop speculating and look at what’s actually closing. ...