Directory

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 Numbers and classifications can be inaccurate, outdated or wrong.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. ...