CDR

Direct air capture is publishing at nearly double last year’s rate. By early July 2026 the CDR Researcher Census had already logged 379 DAC papers - almost the entire 2025 total of 422, in half a year. The run is a clean doubling roughly every two years: 157 papers in 2022, 214 in 2023, 350 in 2024, 422 in 2025. 2026 is indexed only through early July, so the last bar is a floor; annualised it points to about 730 papers, and indexing lag will push the real figure higher. Of the seven census pathways, DAC’s absolute output is mid-pack, but its acceleration is among the steepest - and it is the count most trusted externally. Lück and colleagues’ 2025 map of global CDR research in Nature Communications put 108 DAC papers in 2021 against the census’s 109 - a near-exact match, the tightest of any pathway. ...

Direct air capture gets the magazine covers - the giant fans, the billion-dollar plants, the tech-founder energy. Enhanced rock weathering gets a grinder, a truck, and a field of crushed basalt. Yet in the CDR Researcher Census it is one of the fastest-growing research fronts in the entire field, and almost nobody outside it is watching. Counting papers the census surfaced from OpenAlex and classified as carbon-removal-relevant, enhanced weathering runs 136 papers in 2022, 175 in 2023, 264 in 2024, and 401 in 2025 - a near-tripling in three years (a factor of 2.9), and a plus-52-percent jump from 2024 to 2025 alone. Every year is bigger than the last, and the curve is steepening. ...

The CDR Researcher Census counts 88,708 people. In 2025, 32,047 of them published a carbon-removal paper. The other 56,661 - nearly two-thirds - did not. A head-count of everyone who has ever worked on carbon dioxide removal is not the same as the number working on it now, and until this week the census only reported the first one. So I built the second one. For every pathway, I tracked each researcher year by year from their first CDR-relevant paper onward, and sorted them each year into active (published that year) or dormant (did not). Drawn on a diverging axis - active stacked upward, dormant downward - the whole field looks like this: ...

The carbon-removal industry does not recruit its scientists where the science is biggest. It recruits where the technology is a product. In the CDR Researcher Census, 6.9% of direct air capture researchers work in the corporate sector - the highest share of any pathway. Soil carbon, the largest field with 41,118 researchers, sits at the bottom: 1.7%. The order down the chart is a map of how far each pathway has crossed from science into business. Direct air capture (6.9%) and enhanced weathering (4.4%) lead - both are engineered, measurable, and defensible as products, the kind of thing a company can own. The agronomy-adjacent fields trail: biochar at 2.1%, soil carbon at 1.7%. Where the removal is a machine or a measured mineral reaction, industry shows up. Where it is a farming practice, it mostly stays in the university and the extension service. ...

Biochar research is a Chinese enterprise. Of the 21,978 researchers whose primary pathway is biochar in the CDR Researcher Census, 9,185 - 42% - are in China. The United States has 1,276. That is a ratio of more than seven to one, the most lopsided national concentration of any carbon-removal pathway. No other pathway comes close to this. India is a distant second with 1,766 biochar researchers; the US, so dominant in direct air capture, is third here and barely visible on the chart. Biochar is the one CDR field where a single country holds a near-plurality of the entire global research workforce. ...

Soil carbon is the largest research field in carbon removal, and the one with the least industry behind it. The CDR Researcher Census counts 41,118 researchers whose primary pathway is soil carbon - nearly double the next-largest pathway, biochar, and ten times the size of direct air capture. Yet only 1.7% of them work in the corporate sector, the lowest share of any pathway. Most researchers, least commercialization. That is the paradox. ...

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 split cleanly along the industry’s two workstreams: cleaning up how credits are defined and issued, and grinding out the operational evidence for the removal pathways themselves. Verra’s cookstove overhaul and a new Nature framework both attack the classification chaos that keeps burning buyers, while on the deployment side, DAC and BECCS projects in Europe put actual cost and tonnage numbers on the table. Enhanced rock weathering, meanwhile, is quietly assembling the field-data record it will need when scrutiny inevitably shifts its way. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Thu, 16 Ap. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/Avantium-Engineering-Sorbents-for-DAC---Wessels-e3i16mo TL;DR Avantium sells high-throughput sorbent testing rigs (€350k–€1M) to DAC developers including Climeworks and Shell; 150+ units deployed, mostly for catalysis. Central claim: no standardized DAC sorbent test protocol exists — labs routinely publish one or two adsorption/desorption cycles as “results.” Plausible and underdiscussed. Wessels says early cycles show large variation, so single-cycle data is essentially noise. Real deployment means thousands of cycles. Avantium just joined the NIST Carbon Dioxide Removal consortium to push standardized breakthrough-curve protocols. Worth tracking. Claimed 4x reduction in sorbent time-to-market via 16-channel parallel testing. Vendor number, but customer-testimonial-backed. Andrew from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering interviews Rudolf Wessels, Director of Technology and Innovation at Avantium R&D Solutions, the Amsterdam-based Shell spin-out (founded 2000, publicly listed) better known for its plant-based PEF polymer. The DAC-relevant part: Avantium’s R&D Solutions unit builds parallel testing hardware that lets sorbent developers run identical adsorption/desorption experiments across multiple channels simultaneously. Episode here. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 25 Ju. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/carbon-removal-is-not-one-thing TL;DR Counteract has screened 1,000+ CDR companies, invested in 27 — one of the widest dealflow vantage points in the sector. That alone justifies the listen. Core thesis: carbon removal is a category, not a pathway, so no single financing model fits — CREW’s small-ticket wastewater units vs. big DAC infrastructure need entirely different capital. Most striking claim: e-SAF costs $1,000+/t CO2 abated vs. $200–300/t durable removal, so aviation mandates should accommodate a removal share. Useful framing for policy fights. “Policy is expectation management” — the landfill tax analogy for how compliance signals unlock private capital. Not new, but well argued. Counteract is pivoting from early-stage venture to a “delivery fund” for first commercial projects. Worth watching who they raise it with. Na’im Merchant hosts Richard Barker, partner at Counteract, the 2021-vintage early-stage fund dedicated to carbon removal, on The Carbon Curve. The episode is an investor’s-eye tour of how capital actually flows into CDR (carbon dioxide removal) right now — pathway by pathway, with biomethane as the cautionary historical parallel. ...