Directory

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...