Data

The carbon removal industry is supposed to scale to gigatonnes. But how many people actually work in it today? I went looking for the answer. And as far as I can tell, nobody has published one before. The major CDR reports — the State of CDR, CDR.fyi, ClimeFi’s market analyses — track tonnes removed, credits sold, dollars invested, companies founded. IRENA and the ILO track renewable energy employment (16.6 million jobs globally as of 2025). But carbon removal isn’t broken out as a category in any of these. Nobody, it seems, has tried to systematically count the people who actually do this work. ...

A few days ago, I launched the CDR Company Directory based on Grant Faber’s comprehensive list of carbon dioxide removal companies. It was a solid starting point — but a static one. A list of names and methods doesn’t tell you which companies are still building, which ones have gone quiet, and which may no longer exist. So I went through every single one of them. What I did I investigated all 819 companies using multiple approaches — and it took me hours. Plural. Many of them. ...