Carbon Removal: what is actually working now?
In our CCUS market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Carbon removal is already working now, but the strongest evidence comes from biochar, biomass storage and mineralization rather than the technologies attracting the biggest future-capacity headlines.
The biggest divide in carbon removal today is between tonnes sold and tonnes actually delivered. CDR.fyi tracks roughly 49.46 million tonnes of durable removal sold and only about 1.67 million tonnes delivered, meaning barely 3.4% of purchased volume has made it through to delivery.
Biochar currently has the clearest commercial record among newer durable methods. Several suppliers have delivered six-figure volumes, and Exomad Green alone has passed roughly 400,000 tonnes.
That lead says something about how carbon removal is scaling. Methods that let biology capture the CO₂ first, then focus engineering on stabilizing or storing the carbon, are currently delivering far more tonnes than direct air capture.
Direct air capture does physically work. Climeworks' Mammoth has produced verified net removal and improved output sharply, but hundreds of tonnes from a flagship plant remain a long way from the hundreds of thousands of tonnes promised by the next generation of DAC facilities.
BECCS has almost the opposite profile. Large projects such as Stockholm Exergi look increasingly credible because financing, construction, existing biomass infrastructure and major buyers are already in place, yet most of the spectacular BECCS volumes still sit in future contracts.
Enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity have crossed an important line: independently verified credits now exist. Their next constraint may be less about whether the underlying chemistry works and more about whether measurement can remain credible and affordable across far larger areas.
Forests still dominate total human-influenced carbon removal by an enormous margin, at roughly 2 billion tonnes per year. Their weakness is that permanence, additionality and counterfactual measurement are much harder to establish than for carbon injected underground or converted into stable minerals.
Cost is already separating the pathways. Biochar, BECCS and some mineralization approaches can plausibly operate at hundreds of dollars per tonne or less, while DAC still starts from a much harder energy and equipment problem because atmospheric CO₂ is so dilute.
The durable CDR market is also unusually concentrated on the demand side. Microsoft has accounted for a huge share of contracted future volume, even though actual delivered and retired tonnes are spread across a broader set of buyers.
The clearest lesson is that carbon removal should now be judged by delivery rather than ambition. Biochar already looks like a functioning industry, biomass storage and mineralization are building real operating records, enhanced weathering is entering commercial verification, while DAC, large BECCS plants and ocean removal still have their largest scaling tests ahead.
This market map, featured in our CCUS market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the CCUS market
What does it mean for carbon removal to actually “work”?
Carbon removal works today when CO₂ really leaves the atmosphere, the net amount can be measured credibly, the carbon stays stored for long enough, and the same process can be repeated outside a laboratory.
That sounds obvious, but it changes which companies and technologies deserve credit.
A future contract is useful evidence of demand. A plant's nameplate capacity tells us what engineers hope it can eventually process. Neither tells us how much carbon has already been removed.
CDR.fyi currently tracks about 49.46 million tonnes of durable carbon removal sold and only 1.67 million tonnes delivered. In other words, roughly 3.4% of purchased volume has reached delivery.
That gap explains much of the confusion around the sector. Some carbon removal methods are already producing hundreds of thousands of verified tonnes. Others have raised far more money, signed much larger contracts and received much more media attention while delivering very little so far.
Durability changes the comparison too. A forest can hold carbon for decades or centuries, though fire, disease or harvesting can reverse some of that storage. Mineralized CO₂ or carbon injected deep underground can remain isolated for much longer.
For this article, “working” therefore means actual net removal first. We then ask how durable it is, how expensive it is and whether the process looks capable of becoming much larger.
| What we test | What counts as working |
|---|---|
| Actual removal | CO₂ has physically left the atmosphere |
| Net impact | Process emissions have been deducted |
| Measurement | The removed amount can be credibly verified |
| Storage | Carbon stays out of the atmosphere for a meaningful period |
| Repeatability | The process works beyond a one-off demonstration |
| Scale | There is enough operating evidence to judge expansion |
How much carbon removal is actually happening now?
Carbon removal already happens at billion-tonne scale through forests and land management, while today's durable engineered market still sits around the million-tonne level.
The difference is enormous.
The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal assessment estimated that humans already remove roughly 2 billion tonnes of CO₂ per year through conventional methods, overwhelmingly forests, reforestation and other land-based activities.
Novel methods were around 1.3 million tonnes per year in the assessment's global accounting. Since then, the commercial durable-removal market has grown quickly. CDR.fyi now records about 1.67 million durable tonnes delivered cumulatively, 43% more than a year earlier.
Those numbers belong in very different columns. Conventional land removal is measured in billions of tonnes. New durable CDR is still measured in millions.
Climate scenarios make the gap harder to ignore. The State of CDR estimates that total carbon removal may eventually need to reach roughly 7–9 billion tonnes per year around mid-century if the world follows pathways consistent with the Paris temperature goals.
So carbon removal already works at huge scale in biological systems. What we still haven't demonstrated is whether highly durable removal can expand from today's tiny base into something measured in billions of tonnes without becoming impossibly expensive or running into energy, biomass, land and measurement constraints.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our CCUS market deck, search interest in carbon credits has grown significantly
Is biochar the carbon removal method that is working best today?
Biochar currently has the strongest real-world record among newer durable carbon removal methods.
The reason is simple: tonnes are actually being delivered.
CDR.fyi's current supplier leaderboard shows Exomad Green at about 416,600 tonnes delivered, Varaha at 181,300, Carboneers at 180,700 and Aperam BioEnergia at 110,800. Those four suppliers alone have delivered close to 890,000 tonnes.
For perspective, one biochar supplier has already delivered hundreds of times more carbon removal than many celebrated engineered CDR plants.
The model also looks less dependent on one giant facility succeeding. Biochar plants can sit near forestry waste, agricultural residues and other biomass streams. That allows the industry to grow through many projects instead of waiting for one enormous plant to work perfectly.
The customer base is unusually broad too. Google has signed 100,000-tonne agreements with both Varaha and Charm, while companies including Bain, BCG, IMC and The Economist have bought and retired smaller volumes through suppliers such as NetZero and Carboneers.
Current supplier data gives another interesting clue. Carboneers has already delivered about 80% of the volume it has sold. NetZero's delivery ratio is around 72%. Those numbers look very different from parts of the CDR market where contracts run years ahead of production.
Biochar still faces a real ceiling. Sustainable biomass is finite, and quality varies by feedstock, production process and end use. If the industry becomes hundreds of times larger, competition for clean biomass will become much tougher.
For now, biochar has the best combination of delivered volume, repeat suppliers and operating experience.
| Supplier | Durable CDR delivered |
|---|---|
| Exomad Green | ~416,600 t |
| Varaha | ~181,300 t |
| Carboneers | ~180,700 t |
| Aperam BioEnergia | ~110,800 t |
| Combined | ~889,400 t |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Does direct air capture actually work today?
Direct air capture genuinely removes CO₂ today, though DAC still produces tiny volumes compared with the scale promised by its biggest plants.
Climeworks gives us the cleanest example because the company has published real operating data from Mammoth rather than relying only on design capacity.
During the first half of 2026, Mammoth produced 675 tonnes of net carbon removal. During the same period a year earlier, it produced 119 tonnes. Output therefore increased more than fivefold.
That is good progress. The absolute number is still only 675 tonnes.
Climeworks says the upgraded collector containers at Mammoth are now reaching capacity factors around 40–50%. The company has spent much of the past 18 months improving reliability, sorbents and mechanical performance instead of pushing the plant for maximum short-term output.
That tells us where DAC actually stands. The chemistry works, the plant works and engineers are improving it. Evidence that these facilities can run cheaply and reliably at hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year remains thin.
Heirloom has reached a similar stage from a different technical route. Its first California commercial plant is designed for around 1,000 tonnes annually, while a Louisiana project is planned at roughly 17,000 tonnes before later phases move toward much larger capacity.
We no longer need a laboratory experiment to show that DAC can capture atmospheric CO₂. The hard question today is whether those tonnes can become cheap and abundant enough to matter.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates yearly VC funding for CCUS startups
Is STRATOS finally making direct air capture industrial?
STRATOS could become the first DAC plant that changes the scale of the industry, but its 500,000-tonne capacity still needs to be proven through sustained operation.
1PointFive's West Texas facility is designed to capture up to 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year once fully operational.
Compare that with Mammoth's current production and the jump becomes obvious. STRATOS aims to operate on a scale hundreds of times larger than the annual output demonstrated so far by leading commercial DAC facilities.
Buyers are already betting on that jump. Microsoft agreed to purchase 500,000 tonnes over six years. JPMorganChase signed for 50,000 tonnes over ten years, while other buyers including Palo Alto Networks and Bain have signed smaller multi-year deals.
The latest wording from 1PointFive remains important. The company still describes 500,000 tonnes as the amount STRATOS is “designed to capture” once fully operational. Earlier timelines expected operations sooner, while more recent updates have described the plant moving through start-up activities.
So the number worth watching now is sustained production.
A STRATOS plant removing several hundred thousand net tonnes every year would change the evidence around DAC almost overnight. Until those operating numbers arrive, STRATOS remains the industry's biggest scale-up experiment.
Is BECCS already removing carbon at serious scale?
BECCS has become a serious industrial pipeline, though its biggest carbon removal numbers still come from future deliveries.
Microsoft's purchasing portfolio makes this especially clear. According to CDR.fyi's recent analysis, around 76% of Microsoft's contracted durable removal volume sits in BECCS. Yet those giant commitments are largely attached to projects that still have to begin commercial delivery.
Stockholm Exergi is the best example.
The Swedish energy company has committed roughly SEK 13 billion to a BECCS facility connected to its existing biomass combined heat-and-power plant. Construction is under way, operations are targeted for 2028 and planned removal capacity is around 800,000 tonnes per year.
Microsoft first agreed to purchase 3.33 million tonnes from the project and later expanded the agreement to 5.08 million tonnes.
This project deserves more weight than an early startup announcement. Stockholm Exergi already operates the underlying energy plant, financing has been committed, construction has started and long-term customers exist.
Those millions of tonnes still cannot be counted as current removal.
If Stockholm Exergi reaches its planned output, one BECCS facility could produce roughly as much annual durable removal as a large share of today's entire market. BECCS could move up the rankings very quickly once the first major projects start operating.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, shows why CarbonCure stands out in CCUS
Are biomass storage companies already beating DAC on actual tonnes?
Biomass storage is quietly delivering far more carbon removal than DAC today, even though the category receives much less attention.
The basic advantage comes from photosynthesis. Plants have already pulled CO₂ out of the air, so these companies focus on keeping the carbon from returning.
Vaulted Deep processes organic wastes such as biosolids and paper sludge into a slurry and injects the material into deep geological formations. CDR.fyi currently places the company's delivered volume in the tens of thousands of tonnes, while contracts already run into several million tonnes.
Charm Industrial uses another route. It converts waste biomass into a carbon-rich liquid and injects that material underground. Charm's public ledger shows repeated deliveries across customers including Stripe, Shopify and JPMorganChase.
The broader market data backs up those individual examples. CDR.fyi found that biomass carbon removal and storage methods accounted for 91% of durable CDR delivered during 2025. Biochar provided most of that volume, with other biomass-storage approaches adding a growing share.
The near-term scaling advantage is fairly clear. Letting biology capture the CO₂ first can make the engineering easier than extracting dilute CO₂ directly from ambient air.
Biomass creates its own constraints. There is only so much sustainable feedstock, and lifecycle emissions, transport distances and alternative uses of the waste all affect the true net removal.
Even with those limits, the actual-tonnes comparison is currently clear: biomass-based durable removal is well ahead of DAC.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Has enhanced rock weathering become a real carbon removal business?
Enhanced rock weathering has moved into real verified delivery, although we still don't know how smoothly the measurement system will work at million-tonne scale.
This category has changed quickly.
InPlanet received the first independently verified enhanced-weathering credits from Isometric after field deployment in Brazil. Alt Carbon has since moved well beyond a tiny first issuance. Isometric records one issuance of about 2,765 certificates and another of roughly 6,580, putting individual verified batches into the thousands of tonnes.
Lithos has also delivered credits to buyers including Stripe and McKinsey.
The basic commercial question has therefore changed. Companies can spread crushed reactive rock on agricultural land, monitor what happens and pass an independent verification process that converts the measured outcome into durable carbon removal credits.
Measurement remains the hard part.
Weathering rates depend on the rock, particle size, rainfall, soil chemistry, crops and local conditions. Researchers then have to work out how much atmospheric CO₂ was actually consumed and how much remains durably stored after chemical reactions continue through soils and waterways.
A recent global meta-analysis covering 74 publications found substantial variation in soil responses across climates and conditions. That reinforces why one project's removal rate cannot simply be copied onto millions of hectares elsewhere.
ERW has therefore passed an important threshold. The next test is whether companies can verify hundreds of thousands or millions of tonnes without measurement becoming too slow, expensive or uncertain.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates yearly funding for CCUS startups
Is carbon mineralization already working commercially?
Carbon mineralization is already a commercial carbon removal method, with repeated operations and tens of thousands of delivered tonnes.
O.C.O. Technology currently sits among the largest suppliers on CDR.fyi's entire leaderboard, with roughly 75,300 tonnes delivered and about 128,300 tonnes sold.
That puts a mineralization supplier ahead of almost every DAC company in actual delivered removal.
Neustark provides another useful example. The company captures biogenic CO₂ and injects it into demolished concrete and other mineral waste, where the CO₂ reacts with minerals and becomes solid carbonate.
Neustark says it now operates dozens of capture-and-storage sites across Europe. Instead of betting everything on one giant project, it installs the process around existing waste streams and concrete-recycling infrastructure.
The permanence is attractive. Once carbon has been converted into stable carbonate minerals, reversal becomes extremely unlikely under normal conditions.
Scale is where the limitation appears. Concrete waste, steel slag and other alkaline materials are large industrial streams, but they are finite. A system that depends on waste material cannot grow forever at the same rate.
Mineralization still deserves more attention than its small media footprint suggests. It already works, it is highly durable, and some operators have accumulated more delivered tonnes than better-known technologies.
Is ocean carbon removal real yet?
Ocean carbon removal has produced real independently verified tonnes, but commercial deployment is still at a very early stage.
Planetary crossed an important line when Isometric issued the first independently verified ocean alkalinity enhancement credits from its Halifax operations.
The programme has since gone beyond that first batch. Isometric recorded another issuance of 1,530.33 certificates for Planetary from activity between December 2025 and March 2026.
CarbonRun has also received verified credits for river alkalinity enhancement, giving the wider alkalinity-removal category more than one operating example.
The absolute numbers remain tiny. Thousands of tonnes tell us very little about whether marine CDR can eventually handle millions.
What they do prove is more specific and still useful: an operator can add alkalinity under a monitoring programme, model the resulting carbon chemistry, pass third-party verification and issue removal credits.
The ocean offers huge theoretical capacity because it naturally exchanges vast amounts of CO₂ with the atmosphere. It also creates an unusually hard measurement problem. Water moves, chemical reactions continue after discharge and scientists have to separate the project's effect from what the ocean would have done anyway.
Ecological monitoring matters just as much. A pathway with huge theoretical capacity loses much of its appeal if scaling it changes marine ecosystems in ways we cannot control.
For now, ocean CDR belongs in the “real but early” category.
| Example | Verified removal evidence |
|---|---|
| Planetary later issuance | 1,530.33 certificates |
| CarbonRun | First independently verified river-alkalinity credits |
| Current stage | Early verified deployment |
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, compares the main business model options for carbon capture project developers
Are forests still doing most of the world's carbon removal?
Forests and other land-based methods still provide almost all human-influenced carbon removal today.
The roughly 2 billion tonnes per year estimated in the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal assessment dwarf the current engineered durable-removal market.
That scale deserves more respect than it sometimes receives in discussions focused on startups. Forest growth, reforestation and improved land management already move carbon from the atmosphere into biological stocks at a level engineered methods may need decades to approach.
The weakness is certainty.
A tonne stored in a tree faces fire, drought, disease, harvesting and future land-use changes. Project developers also have to estimate what would have happened without the project, which makes additionality harder to establish than measuring CO₂ injected into a geological formation.
Recent evidence shows how large those accounting errors can become. A Nature Communications synthesis covering 44 first-generation REDD+ projects found that the projects collectively claimed roughly 10.7 times more avoided deforestation than independent evaluations supported.
Avoided deforestation and carbon removal are different activities, though the result still illustrates how difficult credible forest counterfactuals can be.
Forests remain indispensable to today's removal total. Geological storage and mineralization give buyers something forests struggle to match: very long durability combined with a much more tightly measured quantity.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
Can we actually trust carbon removal credits now?
High-quality carbon removal credits are becoming much easier to trust, although the answer still depends heavily on how the carbon was removed.
Some pathways leave a remarkably clear measurement trail.
With DAC plus geological storage, operators can measure captured CO₂, account for energy and construction emissions, meter injection volumes and monitor the storage reservoir. 1PointFive plans to use an EPA-approved monitoring, reporting and verification framework for sequestration associated with its DAC projects.
Enhanced weathering is harder. Verifiers need to account for the rock source, crushing, transport, application rates, soil chemistry, weathering, downstream effects and uncertainty. Alt Carbon's recent Isometric issuances show that this can now be done at thousand-tonne scale.
Ocean alkalinity adds another layer because the verification system has to model moving water and changes in carbonate chemistry.
Biochar requires good data on feedstock, pyrolysis conditions, stable-carbon content, lifecycle emissions and eventual use.
This variation is exactly why the generic phrase “one carbon credit” tells us so little.
Buyers are also paying more attention to those differences. In the latest CDR.fyi and OPIS pricing survey, durability above 100 years, transparency and supplier track record ranked among the attributes buyers and suppliers cared about most.
The market has become much better at separating a highly measurable permanent tonne from a much more uncertain claim. We still need to look under the hood before treating two credits as equivalent.
This chart, featured in our CCUS market deck, illustrates revenue distribution by customer segment in the CCUS market
Is carbon removal getting cheap enough to use at large scale?
Durable carbon removal is getting cheaper in some pathways, but today's market still sits far above the price needed for routine use across most emissions.
The cost gap between technologies is huge.
Biochar can combine carbon revenue with existing biomass-processing economics. BECCS can capture concentrated biogenic CO₂ from facilities that already handle large volumes of biomass. Mineralization can use industrial waste streams.
DAC has a tougher starting point because atmospheric CO₂ is extremely dilute. Huge amounts of air have to move through equipment before a tonne of CO₂ can be captured.
A recent comparative techno-economic study using common assumptions estimated indicative costs around $140 per tonne for biochar, $150 for BECCS, $190 for enhanced weathering, $240 for mineralization and roughly $640 for DAC. Those numbers vary enormously between projects, but the gap between methods is more useful than pretending there is one universal CDR price.
The latest CDR.fyi and OPIS survey points in the same direction. The average difference between what buyers wanted to pay and what suppliers said they needed was still about $98 per tonne. Respondents expected that gap to shrink by 2030, while broad $100-per-tonne durable CDR still looked unlikely by then.
That price level matters. At $600 per tonne, removing one million tonnes costs $600 million. At $150, the same job costs $150 million. Once we start talking about hundreds of millions or billions of tonnes, seemingly modest differences in the per-tonne price become enormous.
Cheap CDR already exists in relative terms, especially around biochar and some biomass pathways. Cheap, highly durable and nearly unlimited CDR has yet to show up.
| Pathway | Indicative study cost |
|---|---|
| Biochar | ~$140/tCO₂ |
| BECCS | ~$150/tCO₂ |
| Enhanced weathering | ~$190/tCO₂ |
| Mineralization | ~$240/tCO₂ |
| DAC | ~$640/tCO₂ |
Would the carbon removal market survive without Microsoft?
The carbon removal market would survive without Microsoft, but losing Microsoft would still remove an extraordinary share of today's large forward demand.
CDR.fyi calculated earlier this year that Microsoft represented about 78.5% of disclosed durable CDR tonnes contracted at the time.
That concentration is hard to dismiss.
The picture becomes more reassuring when we look at actual deliveries. Buyers outside Microsoft and Frontier accounted for roughly 90% of delivered tonnes and 94% of retired tonnes in the same CDR.fyi analysis.
Demand outside the two biggest procurement programmes has also been growing. Excluding Microsoft and Frontier, purchases increased at an estimated 151% compound annual rate from 2021 through 2025.
The first quarter of 2026 gave the market another useful test. Around 2.3 million tonnes were contracted, the strongest opening quarter in CDR.fyi's records. Microsoft represented roughly one million tonnes, leaving around 1.3 million purchased by everybody else.
Since then, new contracting has become much choppier. CDR.fyi recorded roughly 1.49 million tonnes in May, 362,000 in June and only about 22,000 in July.
That July number deserves attention. One weak month does not tell us the market is collapsing, though it does show how immature demand still is and how easily enormous forward volumes can arrive in bursts around a handful of transactions.
A gigaton-scale CDR industry will eventually need far more than corporate climate budgets: hundreds or thousands of repeat buyers, public procurement and probably compliance markets.
Microsoft helped prove that companies will sign enormous long-term deals. The next test is whether the rest of the market becomes deep enough that one buyer no longer shapes the whole curve.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, shows how carbon removal marketplace technology has evolved over time
Which carbon removal methods can actually reach millions of tonnes?
Biochar and other biomass-based methods have the clearest near-term path to millions of tonnes, while BECCS could add huge volumes quickly once several large plants begin operating.
Biochar already has the broad operating base. Exomad, Varaha, Carboneers, Aperam and many smaller suppliers can grow independently, so one technical failure does not stop the whole category.
BECCS scales differently. A handful of giant facilities could transform annual volumes. Stockholm Exergi alone targets around 800,000 tonnes per year.
Biomass geological storage also looks capable of moving into seven-figure annual volumes if companies such as Vaulted Deep can repeat today's projects across additional waste streams and storage basins.
Enhanced weathering potentially has an enormous resource base. Rock is abundant and agricultural land is vast. Its bottleneck may increasingly be how cheaply companies can measure genuine removal across thousands of fields.
DAC offers almost the opposite trade-off. Geological storage capacity is huge and the technology does not need agricultural land or biomass, but today's energy and equipment requirements keep the cost high.
Ocean alkalinity could eventually have the largest physical canvas of all. We currently have only tiny verified deployments to judge it by.
The likely outcome is a mix rather than a single winning machine. Biochar can scale first, BECCS can arrive in large chunks, rock weathering can spread across land, and DAC or ocean methods may become more important later if costs and verification improve.
So what carbon removal is actually working now?
Carbon removal is clearly working today, but only a few newer methods have progressed far enough that we can call them meaningful commercial operations.
Biochar is the strongest current example. Multiple suppliers have delivered six-figure volumes, and Exomad Green alone is above 400,000 tonnes. Biomass geological storage and mineralization have also moved into repeat commercial delivery at tens-of-thousands-of-tonnes scale.
Enhanced rock weathering has crossed into verified commercial deployment. The latest independent issuances now reach thousands of tonnes rather than experimental handfuls.
DAC works physically and is improving, though today's actual production still looks tiny beside the capacity advertised for the next generation of plants. STRATOS will give us a much better test once sustained operating data becomes available.
Large-scale BECCS could jump ahead rapidly when projects such as Stockholm Exergi begin delivering. Today, most of the spectacular BECCS numbers still describe future purchases.
Ocean removal has also crossed the verification line, although its volumes remain so small that we should resist drawing conclusions about industrial scalability.
And forests remain the heavyweight in total tonnes. Conventional land-based removal is still roughly three orders of magnitude larger than the young durable CDR industry, although permanence and measurement are much harder to guarantee.
The most revealing number right now is the gap between buying and doing. CDR.fyi tracks about 49.46 million durable tonnes sold and 1.67 million delivered. As seen above, only around 3.4% of purchased volume has made it through to delivery.
That leaves us with a fairly sharp answer to the title.
Carbon removal has passed the “does this physically work?” stage across several technologies. Biochar has gone further and already looks like a real operating industry. Biomass storage and mineralization are following. Enhanced weathering is becoming credible at early commercial scale. DAC, major BECCS plants and ocean removal still have their biggest scaling tests ahead.
The next decade will be judged much less by announcements of future megatonnes and much more by one simple number: how many tonnes actually get delivered.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest CCUS market report.
In our CCUS market deck, we identify pain points entrepreneurs should prioritize
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests what carbon removal is actually working now by separating evidence of real removal from future contracts, nameplate capacity, laboratory results and theoretical potential. We compare technologies across actual net removal, measurement, durability, repeatability, cost and credible potential to scale.
Delivered tonnes and independently issued credits carry the most weight when judging current execution. Operating data helps us judge whether a process works repeatedly in the field, while construction progress, committed financing and long-term offtake agreements are used to assess how credible the next stage of scale-up has become.
We treat sold carbon removal and future purchase agreements as evidence of demand rather than completed removal. The distinction is especially important in a market where CDR.fyi currently records tens of millions of durable tonnes sold while only a small fraction has been delivered.
We compare the pathways point by point rather than forcing them into a single score. Biochar, DAC, BECCS, enhanced weathering, mineralization, biomass storage, ocean removal and forests have very different strengths, physical limits and measurement problems, so a method can be commercially mature in one dimension and still weak in another.
For technologies where measurement itself is one of the main technical challenges, particularly enhanced weathering, ocean alkalinity and land-based removal, we give additional weight to independent verification, published methodologies and evidence that removals have passed through a formal issuance process.
For scale, we distinguish current operating output from the capacity projects are designed to reach. Mammoth's published production, for example, is treated as operating evidence, while STRATOS' 500,000-tonne figure and Stockholm Exergi's planned 800,000-tonne annual removal are treated as future capacity until sustained delivery data exists.
Cost comparisons are used as directional evidence rather than precise forecasts. Carbon removal costs vary substantially by project, geography, energy source, feedstock, financing and measurement requirements, so the relative gap between pathways is more useful than a single universal cost estimate.
Key sources used for this analysis include The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal for global removal volumes and future requirements, CDR.fyi and its supplier leaderboards for durable CDR sales and deliveries, CDR.fyi's demand-structure analysis for buyer concentration, and the CDR.fyi and OPIS pricing survey for buyer and supplier pricing expectations.
Technology-specific sources include Climeworks' operating update for Mammoth, 1PointFive's STRATOS project information, Stockholm Exergi's BECCS construction information, Google's biochar procurement announcement, Neustark's mineralization documentation, and O.C.O. Technology's process information.
For independently verified emerging pathways, we use Isometric's registry and methodology material, including the first independently verified enhanced-weathering credits, Alt Carbon's enhanced-weathering issuance, Planetary's ocean alkalinity issuance, and CarbonRun's river alkalinity issuance. We also use peer-reviewed research, including the Nature Communications analysis of REDD+ counterfactuals, the global enhanced-weathering meta-analysis, and the comparative techno-economic study behind the pathway cost estimates.
This chart, included in our CCUS market deck, illustrates regional revenue breakdown across Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, and South America in the CCUS market
Related blog posts
- Carbon Removal: what are the biggest unsolved problems?
- What are the latest funding developments in the CCUS market?
- Is the CCUS Market growing now?
- What are the top startups in the CCUS market?
