What are the top startups in the CCUS market?

Why is it so hard to say who leads the CCUS market right now?

The CCUS startup race is unusually hard to rank because Svante, Climeworks, Twelve and Neustark are building fundamentally different businesses even though they all sit under the same carbon-management label.

A point-source capture company such as Carbon Clean sells equipment that removes CO2 from industrial exhaust. Climeworks and Heirloom pull CO2 out of normal air. Neustark permanently stores biogenic CO2 inside demolition concrete. 44.01 injects CO2 into reactive rock underground. Twelve uses captured CO2 as a feedstock for jet fuel and chemicals.

Putting them into one funding leaderboard would tell us very little.

For this ranking, we care most about what has become real. We look at operating plants, actual capture or removal, repeat deployments, manufacturing capability, customer commitments and whether the economics can plausibly survive beyond a handful of heavily subsidized first projects. Capital raised still counts because this is an expensive hardware market, although we give much less credit to a future megatonne project until construction and operation catch up with the announcement.

That approach currently favors Svante and Carbon Clean in industrial capture, Climeworks and Heirloom in direct air capture, Neustark and 44.01 in mineralization, and Twelve in carbon utilization.

Part of CCUS	Startups we watch most closely	The real test
Industrial capture	Svante, Carbon Clean	Can the same capture system be sold repeatedly into large industrial plants?
Direct air capture	Climeworks, Heirloom, CarbonCapture, Mission Zero	Can verified removals grow fast while costs and energy use fall?
Mineralization and storage	Neustark, 44.01	Can permanent storage become routine rather than project-specific?
CO2 utilization	Twelve, Paebbl	Can captured CO2 become a product customers already want?

Is the CCUS market actually scaling, or are most projects still stuck on paper?

CCUS is scaling faster now, although the gap between operating projects and announced projects remains enormous.

The latest Global CCS Institute assessment counted 77 commercial CCS projects operating, 47 under construction and 610 in development. Operating capture capacity had reached about 64 million tonnes per year, up 25% year over year. The whole pipeline represented more than 500 million tonnes of potential annual capacity.

Those numbers look impressive until we compare development with commitment.

The IEA's latest financing work found that almost 90% of announced CCUS projects still had not reached a final investment decision. Its project database also showed that delays have pushed a meaningful share of expected capacity further toward 2035. So the market is moving, but hundreds of projects can still disappear, shrink or arrive years late.

Financing is becoming more serious at the same time. According to the IEA, more than 30 CCUS projects reached final investment decisions over the previous two years. Annual investment rose more than fifteenfold from 2020 to over $5 billion in 2025, while commercial debt raised for CCUS exceeded $15 billion over two years.

That gives us a useful dividing line for startups. A feasibility study or giant capacity target tells us something about ambition. Equipment being manufactured, installed, financed and operated tells us much more.

CCUS market indicator	Latest useful figure	What we take from it
Commercial CCS projects operating	77	Deployment is clearly moving beyond isolated demonstrations
Projects under construction	47	More capacity is already committed
Projects in development	610	The paper pipeline is far larger than the real market
Operating capture capacity	About 64 Mtpa	Existing scale is still small relative to climate ambitions
Announced projects without FID	Almost 90%	Announced capacity deserves a heavy discount
CCUS investment in 2025	More than $5B	Real capital is finally entering the sector

Does raising the most money mean a CCUS startup is winning?

No. Funding tells us which CCUS startups have convinced investors they might scale, while operating evidence tells us much more about whether they actually can.

Climeworks is the obvious example. The company has raised more than $1 billion and remains exceptionally well financed by carbon-removal standards. Twelve says it has raised more than $900 million across corporate and project financing. Svante's $318 million Series E was itself one of the largest private financings ever completed for a point-source capture technology company.

Those companies deserve credit for attracting that amount of capital because scaling chemical plants, sorbent factories and DAC systems is brutally expensive.

But the money has produced very different outcomes.

Svante used a large part of its capital to build a 141,000-square-foot filter factory. Twelve financed a physical fuel plant that is now producing E-Jet and E-Naphtha. Climeworks built Mammoth, but verified output from that plant remains tiny beside its eventual design capacity. Neustark has raised much less than these companies while already spreading its technology across dozens of operating sites.

So we treat funding as an enabling resource. Once several hundred million dollars have gone into a company, the more interesting question becomes what machinery, plants, customers and tonnes that money produced.

Is industrial carbon capture a better startup business than direct air capture today?

Yes. Industrial carbon capture currently offers a clearer route to large volumes and paying customers than direct air capture.

The basic reason is concentration. Cement kilns, refineries, chemical plants and other industrial facilities can emit exhaust with far more CO2 than normal air, where carbon dioxide is only around 0.04% of the atmosphere. A DAC system therefore has to process huge volumes of air before it has collected the same amount of CO2.

That difference shows up commercially.

Carbon Clean can sell into an existing industrial site where the customer already faces emissions regulations, carbon prices or decarbonization targets. Svante can integrate its filters into cement, refining, pulp and paper or bioenergy projects. The customer's underlying factory already exists, and the capture equipment solves a specific problem at that factory.

DAC offers something industrial capture cannot: removing CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. That makes Climeworks, Heirloom and their peers strategically important for permanent carbon removal. Buyers such as Microsoft are willing to sign long-term contracts for that service.

The challenge is the price. DAC companies still need cheap clean energy, large physical plants, storage, financing and customers prepared to pay a substantial premium for removing atmospheric CO2.

For now, industrial capture is the stronger startup business. DAC has the bigger long-term removal promise, but its economics still need much more work.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.

Is Svante the top CCUS startup right now?

Yes. Svante currently has the strongest overall position in the CCUS startup market because it is combining industrial capture technology, mass manufacturing and a broader capture-to-storage business.

The most important piece is its Redwood factory in British Columbia. The 141,000-square-foot facility is designed to manufacture enough solid-sorbent filters each year for systems capable of capturing as much as 10 million tonnes of CO2 annually.

That figure is factory capacity rather than actual captured CO2, so we do not treat it as deployment. What makes Redwood interesting is the production model. Svante wants carbon capture filters to come off a manufacturing line instead of designing almost every capture project from scratch.

Its recent moves make that strategy more credible.

Svante acquired Carbon Alpha and related assets in 2026, adding geological storage expertise and the North Star BECCS project in Canada. Soon afterward, the North Star partnership agreed to supply Microsoft with 626,000 tonnes of durable carbon-removal credits over 15 years. Another U.S. bioenergy project involving Svante has moved into feasibility with a target of more than 500,000 tonnes of biogenic CO2 removal per year.

We are still waiting for Svante's manufacturing capacity to turn into a large fleet of operating commercial plants. That gap keeps the ranking close.

Still, Svante now controls more pieces of the chain than it did a year ago. Capture technology, a dedicated factory, project development and storage capabilities sit increasingly under the same company. No other independent CCUS startup currently has quite the same combination.

Could Carbon Clean actually be ahead of Svante?

Carbon Clean is ahead of Svante on operating history, although Svante currently has the stronger platform for manufacturing and vertical expansion.

Carbon Clean says its technologies have accumulated more than three million operating hours. That is a much harder metric to dismiss than an announced project pipeline because those hours came from equipment working inside actual industrial environments.

CycloneCC is the part we are watching most closely now.

At Fertiglobe's nitrogen-fertilizer site in Abu Dhabi, a CycloneCC unit completed around 4,000 operating hours over six months. Installation took less than a week, and the system produced CO2 at the purity the customer required. Carbon Clean then advanced the technology toward larger C1 modules.

The company is also working with MODEC and Samsung E&A on offshore capture. The planned sequence starts with a pilot aboard an FPSO, then moves toward approximately 100,000 tonnes of annual capture for partial decarbonization and potentially around 300,000 tonnes at larger scale.

Those larger numbers remain targets, so the real value lies in the progression: small industrial unit, thousands of hours, larger standardized module, then larger commercial applications.

If we ranked only proven industrial capture experience, Carbon Clean would probably be number one. We give Svante the overall lead because its manufacturing factory and recent move into project development create a broader strategic position. There is very little distance between the two.

Is Twelve really a CCUS leader if its CO2 eventually comes back out?

Yes. Twelve belongs near the top of a broad CCUS ranking because it has turned captured CO2 into commercial fuel production, although Twelve should never be confused with a permanent carbon-removal company.

AirPlant One is the reason Twelve moved up our ranking.

The facility is now operating in Washington and producing E-Jet sustainable aviation fuel and E-Naphtha from CO2, water and renewable electricity. Initial E-Jet capacity is only about 40,000 gallons per year, which is negligible beside normal aviation-fuel volumes.

Still, this is a real plant producing on-spec fuel. That puts Twelve ahead of the many carbon-utilization startups whose main commercial evidence remains pilot equipment, sample products or future factories.

Twelve has also assembled serious customers and partners around the technology. Alaska Airlines and Microsoft participated in the AirPlant One launch, United Airlines' venture fund invested in the company, and Twelve has raised more than $900 million across its financing history.

When E-Jet is burned, the carbon enters the atmosphere again. The climate case comes from recycling carbon into hydrocarbons instead of pulling additional fossil carbon from underground, assuming the electricity and upstream inputs are sufficiently low carbon.

That makes Twelve a leader in the utilization side of CCUS. In a ranking focused only on permanent storage or carbon removal, it would sit outside the top group.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.

Is Climeworks still the leader in direct air capture today?

Climeworks is still the leading independent DAC company overall, but its technology lead looks much less comfortable than its fundraising and brand lead.

Commercially, Climeworks remains formidable. Its broader carbon-removal business now serves more than 200 companies. During the first half of 2026, Climeworks Solutions signed 14 new removal partnerships covering roughly 450,000 tonnes across several carbon-removal pathways.

The harder numbers come from Mammoth.

Climeworks designed the Icelandic plant for up to 36,000 tonnes of annual nameplate capture once fully built and ramped. The latest Puro.earth registry data show 842 carbon-removal credits issued from Mammoth across all recorded issuances, including 377 in the latest issuance.

Those figures are still extremely far from the plant's eventual nameplate capacity. There can be a lag between physical operations, verification and credit issuance, and Mammoth remains in operational ramp-up, so comparing 842 issued credits directly with 36,000 tonnes of annual nameplate capacity is imperfect. Even with that qualification, the gap is too large to shrug off.

Climeworks is effectively running two businesses now. Its DAC engineering operation needs to prove that physical output can rise sharply. Its Climeworks Solutions business is becoming a much broader carbon-removal portfolio provider and appears to be growing faster commercially.

We still rank Climeworks first in pure independent DAC because it has built and operated multiple generations of plants, attracted huge amounts of capital and created one of the deepest customer networks in carbon removal. The next step has to come from the machines.

Can Heirloom actually catch Climeworks in direct air capture?

Yes, Heirloom can catch Climeworks, and the next Louisiana plant will tell us far more than another large carbon-removal contract.

Heirloom already operates a roughly 1,000-tonne-per-year DAC facility in California. Its process uses limestone-based materials that absorb CO2 from the air, with the company trying to use cheap, abundant minerals to push DAC costs down.

The jump now is much larger.

Heirloom's current project plan calls for an initial Louisiana facility with approximately 17,000 tonnes of annual removal capacity, followed by another facility that could add 100,000 tonnes and later a further 200,000 tonnes. Combined, the planned Louisiana buildout approaches 320,000 tonnes per year.

That scale would put Heirloom in a very different category from its first plant.

Customer demand is already there. Microsoft previously agreed to buy up to 315,000 tonnes of removal, while United Airlines has invested and secured rights associated with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of future removal.

So we do not need another indication that companies want Heirloom's future tonnes. We need those tonnes to exist.

Climeworks still wins on accumulated deployment experience. Heirloom has a plausible route to catching it because its first major scale-up could be large enough to expose the technology's real cost, reliability and construction profile. Until that plant is operating, Climeworks keeps the lead.

Which smaller direct air capture startup looks strongest now?

CarbonCapture has moved ahead of the smaller DAC pack on physical scale, while Mission Zero still looks unusually good on speed and capital efficiency.

CarbonCapture's Tamarack project in Alberta is now operational and is designed for up to 2,000 tonnes of annual removal. It became Canada's largest deployment of a single DAC technology when it started operating. The company's Leo architecture uses shipping-container-sized modules, with each module designed to capture more than 500 tonnes per year.

Tamarack is an important correction to CarbonCapture's earlier story. The company once attached itself to a much larger Wyoming vision under Project Bison. The actual operating project today is far smaller, but we prefer the 2,000-tonne system that exists over several million tonnes that might exist someday.

Mission Zero has followed a different path. It deployed three DAC systems across the UK and Canada in roughly two years, including a 250-tonne-per-year unit at Deep Sky Alpha. Its Canadian system took around ten months to deliver.

The absolute capacity remains small. What we like is the iteration rate: build a unit, operate it, learn, then deploy another in a different application.

So CarbonCapture ranks higher today because Tamarack gives it the larger operating system. Mission Zero remains one of the companies most likely to move up quickly if that fast deployment cycle survives the jump from hundreds to thousands of tonnes.

Is Neustark building the most repeatable carbon-removal business?

Yes. Neustark currently has one of the clearest examples of repeatability anywhere in engineered carbon removal.

The company's model is relatively simple to understand. Biogenic CO2 is captured from sources such as biogas facilities, transported to mineral-waste processors and injected into materials such as demolished concrete. The CO2 reacts with the material and becomes permanently mineralized.

The important number has changed quickly.

Neustark now reports 47 capture-and-storage sites in operation across Europe. Earlier versions of the company's story were built around nine sites, then fourteen, then dozens. Reaching 47 means we are no longer looking at one successful pilot copied once or twice.

Its own lifecycle work estimates a 93% net removal efficiency across the full process, meaning roughly 7% of captured CO2 is re-emitted through the value chain and only the net amount is sold as removal.

That distributed model gives Neustark a very different risk profile from DAC megaprojects. Individual sites are small, so scaling requires a lot of them. At the same time, each new deployment does not need to become a giant piece of infrastructure.

For startups, that repetition is valuable. Neustark can improve logistics, installation, measurement and partner onboarding every time another recycler joins the network.

The company still has a long way to go before its total tonnes compete with large geological storage projects. As a startup operating model, however, 47 real sites are hard to ignore.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.

Who is ahead in carbon mineralization: Neustark or 44.01?

Neustark is ahead commercially today, while 44.01 has the bigger geological upside if its new continuous industrial deployment scales.

Neustark has 47 operating sites and a model that can spread through existing recycling infrastructure. That gives us far more evidence of repetition.

44.01 attacks a different problem. The company injects CO2 into reactive ultramafic rock underground, where the CO2 turns into solid carbonate minerals.

Its early Fujairah pilot with ADNOC permanently mineralized around 10 tonnes of CO2 in less than 100 days. More recently, the company and Holcim moved into a much more interesting test: a continuous system tied directly to a working cement plant.

The project has been operating under live industrial conditions and capturing roughly 4 to 4.5 tonnes of CO2 per day from the Holcim plant's flue gas. The CO2 is then transported to 44.01's nearby storage site and injected underground. The partners are collecting months of operating data before deciding how aggressively to scale.

Four tonnes per day is tiny beside the emissions of a cement plant. Yet the architecture is attractive. Cement produces concentrated emissions, the geology can store carbon permanently, and the whole system can potentially stay regional.

So Neustark wins today because it has already shown how to repeat its business dozens of times. 44.01 could eventually handle much larger volumes at individual sites, which gives it more upside if the Fujairah model works at industrial scale.

Is Paebbl turning captured CO2 into something builders actually want?

Paebbl is getting much closer to proving that carbon-storing construction material can sell because it performs as a material, rather than surviving only because somebody wants a carbon credit.

The company's Rebond product mineralizes captured CO2 into a supplementary cementitious material that can replace part of the conventional cement in concrete.

The latest version, Rebond 300, has an independently verified environmental product declaration showing a net footprint of minus 149 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per tonne of material. Paebbl says the material can replace up to 30% of cement in appropriate concrete mixes.

More useful than the laboratory figure is what happened on construction sites.

Holcim, Goldbeck and Paebbl used the material in a 420-square-metre industrial floor in Germany while keeping the standard construction process. The mix replaced 15% of conventional cement and reduced embodied carbon by 13%.

A newer infrastructure collaboration with AGILIS, part of NGE Group, reported a 28% reduction in embodied carbon using an unchanged mix design after more than a year of joint development.

Those are exactly the tests Paebbl needs. Contractors care about strength, curing, cost, supply and whether a new material disrupts the job site. A carbon benefit becomes far more valuable when crews can use the product without rebuilding the entire construction workflow.

Paebbl still needs its first large industrial production facility. Its commercial evidence has improved enough lately that we now put the company comfortably inside the top ten.

Which CCUS startups have the strongest businesses without expensive carbon credits?

Carbon Clean and Svante currently have the clearest route to large businesses without depending primarily on premium voluntary carbon-removal credits.

Their customers are industrial emitters. A refinery, cement plant or chemical producer may buy capture equipment because of carbon prices, regulation, tax incentives, customer requirements or its own decarbonization commitments. The startup can make money from technology and equipment even when the captured tonne itself never becomes a premium voluntary removal credit.

Twelve also has an interesting position because the end product is fuel or chemical feedstock. It still needs supportive clean-fuel economics and very cheap low-carbon electricity, but somebody already buys jet fuel. Twelve is trying to change how that fuel is made.

Paebbl follows similar logic in construction. The stronger Rebond becomes as an actual supplementary cementitious material, the less Paebbl has to rely on selling the climate benefit by itself.

Neustark sits somewhere in the middle. Carbon-removal credits are central to its economics, although the company attaches its process to existing recycling infrastructure and can create value for the participating waste processors.

Pure DAC remains much more dependent on buyers paying specifically for removal. Microsoft, financial institutions and other corporate customers have been willing to do that, and compliance markets may eventually create a much larger pool of demand.

Today, though, industrial capture has the easier commercial starting point. A company that already owns a cement plant has a direct emissions problem. A DAC company first needs someone to decide that removing an atmospheric tonne is worth paying for.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.

Are giant CCUS projects helping startups or slowing them down?

Giant CCUS projects can create huge volumes, but startups currently seem to learn faster when they can manufacture or deploy smaller units repeatedly.

Large projects bring a long chain of dependencies: permits, energy, engineering contractors, transport infrastructure, CO2 storage, financing and long-term customers. One delayed piece can hold up everything else.

That is why we increasingly prefer modular strategies.

Svante built a filter factory. Carbon Clean wants standardized CycloneCC modules. CarbonCapture links multiple Leo units together. Mission Zero packages systems into containers. Neustark spreads storage across many recycling sites.

Climeworks has also pursued modularity at the equipment level, although Mammoth shows that a larger modular plant can still develop major commissioning and utilization challenges once everything has to operate together.

The point is not that CCUS should stay small. Climate impact eventually requires millions of tonnes.

The startup advantage comes from shortening the learning cycle. If a company can build ten modules, install them in several environments and improve the next generation, it can learn much faster than a company spending years getting one enormous project to first operation.

For that reason, repeatability carries more weight in our ranking than the largest announced capacity.

Can oil majors and industrial giants squeeze CCUS startups out?

Yes, although the more likely outcome is that the strongest CCUS startups become technology suppliers, partners or acquisition targets for much larger industrial companies.

Occidental already showed how this can play out when it acquired Carbon Engineering for roughly $1.1 billion. Carbon Engineering's DAC technology now sits inside a much larger organization that can combine technology, project development, subsurface knowledge, financing and storage.

The independent companies in our ranking are responding through partnerships.

Svante works with companies including Chevron, Holcim and Samsung E&A. Carbon Clean is working with MODEC and Samsung E&A. Neustark works with Holcim and recycling companies. 44.01 has ADNOC and Holcim around its mineralization technology. Paebbl has brought Holcim and major construction companies into commercial applications. Twelve has airlines, fuel distributors and large corporate investors around AirPlant.

That pattern makes sense.

A startup can develop a better sorbent, reactor or mineralization process. Building a global EPC organization, pipeline network, geological-storage portfolio and industrial sales force at the same time would consume enormous capital.

The strongest startup position may therefore be owning a technical layer that industrial giants repeatedly need. Svante's filters and Carbon Clean's compact capture systems fit that model especially well.

Some of today's leaders will probably get acquired. That would say more about how industrial technology markets mature than about whether the startup failed.

So what are the top CCUS startups today?

Svante is our number-one CCUS startup today, with Carbon Clean close behind; Twelve, Climeworks and Neustark complete the current top five.

Svante takes first because its position has become broader lately. It has industrial capture technology, dedicated mass-manufacturing capacity and, through its recent expansion into project development and geological storage, more control over what happens after the capture unit.

Carbon Clean comes second and has the strongest case for first place if we prioritize operating experience. Its long industrial track record and CycloneCC's progression toward standardized commercial modules give it unusually solid evidence for a private capture company.

Twelve moves into third because AirPlant One is now producing commercial E-Jet and E-Naphtha. The plant is still tiny relative to the markets Twelve wants to serve, but operating industrial production deserves more weight than another proposed utilization facility.

Climeworks ranks fourth. It remains the most established independent DAC company and has built an impressive commercial carbon-removal business. Mammoth's verified output still has to move much closer to the scale implied by its design, which is why we no longer put Climeworks near the top of the entire CCUS market.

Neustark takes fifth because 47 operating sites give it something rare in carbon removal: repetition.

Heirloom follows as the DAC company with the clearest chance of making a major jump if its Louisiana scale-up works. 44.01 has now earned a higher position because continuous capture and mineralization with Holcim gives us a much better industrial test than its earlier small pilots. CarbonCapture's operating 2,000-tonne Tamarack project puts it ahead of Mission Zero on current physical scale. Paebbl rounds out the top ten after a string of real construction applications made its carbon-storing material much harder to dismiss as a laboratory product.

This ranking will move. The companies are now reaching the point where new fundraising matters less and operating data matters more. A year of reliable commercial capture, thousands of verified tonnes, a second full-scale customer or a factory producing the same system repeatedly can change a company's position very quickly.

Today, Svante and Carbon Clean look the closest to becoming durable industrial companies rather than promising carbon-tech projects.

If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.

Rank	Startup	Where we think it leads today	What could move it up or down
1	Svante	Best overall combination of capture technology, manufacturing and integration	Needs commercial deployments to catch up with manufacturing ambition
2	Carbon Clean	Strongest industrial operating proof	Large CycloneCC deployments could push it to #1
3	Twelve	Strongest CO2-to-fuels commercialization	AirPlant needs to grow far beyond its first production scale
4	Climeworks	Leading independent DAC platform and customer network	Mammoth output now matters more than new contracts
5	Neustark	Most repeatable distributed mineralization model	Needs much larger aggregate removal volumes
6	Heirloom	Strongest challenger to Climeworks in DAC	Louisiana is the decisive scale-up test
7	44.01	Most interesting subsurface mineralization startup	Fujairah needs to move from a few tonnes per day toward industrial volumes
8	CarbonCapture	Largest operating system among the smaller modular DAC startups	Tamarack must prove reliable performance and repeatability
9	Mission Zero	Fast and capital-efficient DAC iteration	Needs a much larger operating system
10	Paebbl	Strongest emerging CO2-to-construction-material story	Industrial manufacturing is the next hurdle

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