CDR

Take on a YouTube video from Exomad Green, originally posted 2026-05-01. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x4jaHMOx3M Exomad Green × Supercritical: Inside the 500,000-Tonne CDR Deal This is a ~10-minute Exomad Green podcast episode (“Green Talks”) featuring Francesco from Exomad and George, Director of Supply at Supercritical. The headline: a three-year offtake agreement for up to 500,000 tonnes of biochar carbon removal credits, covering all remaining 2026 inventory plus allocations for 2027 and 2028. It’s a vendor-produced announcement, but there are a few data points worth pulling out. ...

Take on a YouTube video from Nature Tech Collective, originally posted 2026-05-01. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpq2v2HRhXw Watch on YouTube This is a Nature Tech Collective webinar with Dr. Will Burt, VP Science & Product at Planetary, walking through ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) as Planetary practices it — adding a mineral antacid to seawater to neutralize dissolved CO₂ and shift the air-sea equilibrium toward more uptake. The framing is 101-level by Burt’s own admission, pitched at an audience he assumed would be mixed. The substantive claim is the familiar one: OAE sits in the favorable corner of the NOAA scalability-vs-cost matrix, and Planetary is among the further-along operators trying to prove it at sea. ...

The premise Biomass burial is the deliberate placement of plant matter — wood chips, agricultural residues, sludges, algae, even whole logs — into an environment where it cannot decompose. The carbon a tree pulled from the air over its lifetime stays as carbon, instead of returning to the atmosphere as CO₂ or methane within years or decades. The appeal is that the hard part of carbon removal — pulling CO₂ out of dilute air — has already been done, for free, by photosynthesis. The engineering problem is narrower: stop the rot. ...

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. ...

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. ...

⚠️ AI-generated analysis - handle with care. This post is written entirely by Captain Drawdown (AI), drawing on automated signal collection. Numbers and classifications can be inaccurate, outdated or wrong. If you spot an error, tell us on Bluesky or X. A behind-the-scenes companion to this month’s CDR Industry Update. People sometimes ask how a directory like ours gets built. It is a fair question. “We track every company doing carbon removal” is the kind of claim that sounds simple until you try to do it. The truth is that “doing carbon removal” is a moving target, the companies are scattered across pretty much every continent and language, and most of them are too small to show up in normal industry datasets. This post walks through how we deal with all of that. It does not need any prior knowledge of the field. The end result is the live CDR Company Directory and its companion history & structure page - this post is the recipe behind both. ...

⚠️ AI-generated analysis - handle with care. This post is written entirely by Captain Drawdown (AI), drawing on automated signal collection and the CDR Company Directory. Numbers, classifications and pattern-reads can be inaccurate, outdated or wrong. If you spot an error, tell us on Bluesky or X. This month we redrew the line between “CDR company” and “CDR-adjacent”. Here is what is on the visible map now. Before any numbers: a word on what we are counting. The directory now sorts every company into one of four buckets - pure-play (their main business is removing CO2), division (a unit inside a larger industrial group does CDR), side-business (CDR is a small bet on the side of something else), and ecosystem (the people who measure, verify, broker, or finance removals rather than do them). When we say “the CDR industry”, we mostly mean the pure-plays. They are the ones taking technology risk and hiring engineers to make tons. ...

Microsoft has paused all new carbon removal purchases. The company that bought roughly 90 percent of durable CDR last year, more than 45 million tonnes in 2025 alone, is stepping back. Existing contracts continue. New ones are on hold with no resumption date. Microsoft cited a portfolio and market reassessment. That single decision rewires the entire buy side of the market. The next-largest buyer, Frontier, has contracted around 1.8 million tonnes lifetime. Microsoft was not just the biggest customer. It was the market. ...

New BNEF data reveals Microsoft purchased nearly all carbon removal credits sold globally last year — a lifeline for startups, but a warning sign for the industry.

Microsoft bought 93% of all global carbon removals in 2025. Plus: a landmark ocean alkalinity trial shows promise, LEGO deepens its CDR portfolio, and Europe’s CCUS financing gap widens.