Keep Calm and Remove On - CDR.fyi 2024 Year in Review

Highlights

Durable CDR in 2024 was predominantly a story of North American companies purchasing from European suppliers. Order volume grew strongly, but purchaser concentration was high, and purchaser growth was low. Without significant growth in purchasers, future durable CDR market growth will not be sustained, and 2050 targets will not be met.

Growth: The CDR market grew 78% in 2024 with the total purchased volume reaching almost 8 million tonnes. However, it is still highly concentrated, with over 75% of purchases coming from Microsoft, Google, and Frontier buyers.
Delivery: 318.6K tonnes of durable CDR were delivered, a 120% increase from 2023. The delivery-to-booking ratio remains low at 4.4%, though this is unsurprising at this early stage of the industry’s development.
Investment: $836M of equity capital was invested into durable CDR companies in 2024, a 30% decline from 2023. However, the number of investments and average size of the investments both increase when we exclude outlier transactions in 2022 and 2023.
Warning Signs: The number of unique purchasers grew only 7% and first-time buyers declined 18%. Repeat buyer volume grew 95% and accounted for 91% of purchased volume; new buy volume remained essentially flat compared to 2023, and represented only 9% of purchased volume.
Challenges: The number of suppliers increased 16%, but consolidation is likely without an influx of new buyers. The sector is at risk of premature price-driven competition, potentially harming high-cost but innovative methods. More voluntary buyers and favorable policies are required for the market to continue growing to meet 2050 targets.

CDR.fyi Analysis

2024 was a year of higher-volume buying by a more concentrated set of purchasers. The sector mainly grew on the back of existing buyers fulfilling their stated commitments but awaits the next wave of buyers. Encouragingly, 2024 saw significant new 100K+ tonne entrants in the market: purchasers Equinor and SkiesFifty, and suppliers Terradot, CO280 and Gigablue. However, the influx of new large buyers is limited, with roughly 80% of 2024 purchase volume coming from Microsoft, Google, and Frontier buyers.

We expect the CDR market to continue to grow in 2025. However, demand is currently insufficient to accommodate the number of CDR suppliers seeking to scale. Only 36% of the CDR suppliers listed on CDR.fyi have a registered sale.

Venture investors are exercising caution, with year-on-year investment funds falling 30% in 2024. Many investors are likely waiting to see which suppliers can secure sales before committing to follow-on funding.

We anticipate suppliers without meaningful sales in 2025-6 or a highly innovative and proprietary approach will have difficulties raising money and will start running out of funds. We predict consolidation and bankruptcies - a natural development in any sector, but a jarring and concerning experience nonetheless. Ultimately, the durable CDR market remains constrained by both demand and deliverable supply, with the former the more pressing issue.

What would be detrimental to the long-term development of the industry would be if startups with innovative but immature approaches fold because of temporarily uncompetitive prices while they iterate on their technology. Despite the significant mismatch identified in purchaser and supplier pricing expectations, it is too early for market participants to compete on cost. Many companies are still in their early stages of development and commercialization; it is too early to determine which approaches should be scaled. Many presently high-cost methods are years away from being able to compete on price, though they may ultimately have price, scale, or environmental advantages.

In a buyer-constrained market, cost competition may be what we get, especially when there are limited incentives for buyers to purchase durable removal credits and there are cheaper alternative credits on the VCM and limited differentiation - from the perspective of buyers dipping their toes in the market - between durable credit types. As highlighted in the CDR.fyi and OPIS (a Dow Jones Company) pricing survey, the next wave of buyers is likely to be more price-sensitive. The pool of buyers willing to pay premium prices to help the sector is not growing significantly - a challenge for high-cost CDR methods without a steep learning curve to quickly rescue their costs. The long-term success of the industry requires dependable support for promising ideas and the retention of motivated and talented people.

Aside from the handful of catalytic, price-insensitive buyers – whose impact is very beneficial but limited by their committed funding – policymaker action can counteract the risk of excessive focus on near-term prices. Governments can purchase directly, enact subsidies and implement other support mechanisms with a long-term view. The US 45Q tax credit, for example, has been fundamental for the Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) sector. Likewise, Denmark and Sweden’s Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) subsidies enabled large capex-heavy facilities to be built. For continued efficacy, policymakers need to understand the sector’s needs to best deploy funds and design policies. Subsidies can misorient the market if they are not well designed. When the government acts as a buyer (like the US DOE purchase prize), it needs to complement other buyers by filling gaps, such as purchasing from underdeveloped methods. Underwriting scale is also important, with some facilities requiring large scale for viability.

A very important moment for the industry in 2025 will be the anticipated release of the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) Net Zero Standard 2.0 for public consultation. Based on current SBTi guidelines, corporations pledging to SBTi targets “get no credit” for purchasing CDR. Strong, mandatory milestone targets for CDR purchasing would unlock demand and bring in many new buyers. There are other encouraging initiatives, such as Switzerland’s Net Zero mandate with corporate roadmaps incorporating milestone targets for CDR. More are needed.

Until such tailwinds emerge, CDR suppliers’ focus must be on reducing costs, both to drive down prices to secure buyers and conserve cash. Where possible, it is to suppliers’ benefit to generate additional revenue streams based on co-products, such as agricultural yield improvement from enhanced rock weathering (ERW) or biochar. Financial sustainability and differentiation will be key to surviving this transitional phase and capitalizing on future demand when it arrives.

Key Market Trends

Purchases

Total CDR tonnes purchased continued to show strong growth in 2024, at almost 8M tonnes. This was a 3.5M tonne (78%) increase over 2023. An exceptionally strong Q2 of 4.8 million tonnes represented 60% of the year’s total, while Q3 and Q4 averaged a respectable volume of 1.35m tonnes.

The number of unique purchasing companies grew much slower, only 7%, from 202 to 216. Furthermore, while 2024's high growth rate of contracted tonnage is to be celebrated, the heavy concentration of purchases is alarming – with Microsoft singlehandedly accounting for 5.1M tonnes, or 64% of total purchased volume in 2024. However, this is a slight decrease from Microsoft’s 70% share in 2023.

Excluding Microsoft, the market still grew at a healthy pace: 2024 percentage growth was higher when excluding Microsoft, albeit off a smaller base. Q4 2024 was 100% non-Microsoft, though more buyers are still required to build the base for the durable CDR market going forward.

Top Purchases
A table of the Top 20 Purchases in 2024 is telling. Microsoft and Frontier account for 12 of the top 20 purchases in 2024. (Frontier is an advance market commitment (AMC) for long-term carbon removal. Its members include Stripe, Google, Shopify, McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Workday, Salesforce and Watershed and their customers.)

Google has long purchased under the umbrella of Frontier but in 2024, increasingly put its name forward as the purchaser of four deals in the top 20, totalling 500,000 tonnes. This was predictable: in March 2024, in response to the US Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Removal Program, Google pledged to purchase at least $35M in carbon credits within 12 months.

Purchaser Concentration
Such extreme concentration at the top threatens market sustainability. Which companies will follow in the footsteps of trailblazers such as Frontier and Milkywire, and early adopters such as Microsoft and Google? Microsoft’s pledge to be net zero by 2030 is one of the most ambitious of any corporation; that said, they, along with Google, Meta, and salesforce.com, are founding members of the Symbiosis Coalition, which offers an advance market commitment pledging to purchase 20M tonnes of nature-based CDR by 2030. With technology firms responsible for the lion's share of durable CDR, it is unclear if purchases of lower-priced albeit less durable nature-based solutions will affect their continued purchases of durable CDR.

Where else might future purchases come from? In October 2024, Meta pledged to purchase at least $35M in carbon removal credits over the next year. It is unclear, however, how much will be durable (vs nature-based) since Meta expressed interest in nature-based solutions in June 2024 and departed from Frontier in August 2024.

As outlined in Purchasing Sectors below, technology, financial services and professional services are amongst the most prominent sectors. Companies in these sectors have high profit-to-emissions ratios and added motivations for purchasing CDR:

Technology: Progressive employee bases with a high concern for climate change. Examples include Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, Google, and Autodesk.
Financial Services: Vested interest in understanding and participating in the market opportunity for CDR. Examples include JP Morgan Chase, TD Securities, and Morgan Stanley.
Professional Services: Vested interest in developing their practice areas and thought leadership, as well as leading their clients by example. Examples include BCG and McKinsey.

Other potential purchasers, not specific to sectors, include those who are seeking to deepen their understanding of the CDR market:

Energy: Examples include Occidental Petroleum (owners of OnePointFive), Equinor, and Shell Environmental Products.
Aviation: Examples include Airbus, All Nippon Airways, American Airlines, and British Airways.
Japan: Companies engaged with GX-ETS, including NYK.

CDR Purchasing Trends
When considering durable CDR purchasing trends from 2020 to 2024, some clear trends emerge:

There has been exponential growth in total tonnes sold.
Similarly, there has been exponential growth in average order size.
There was an initial rise in the number of orders from 2020 to 2022 before they began to decline in the period from 2022 to 2024.
The number of unique purchasers has grown linearly, albeit at a slower pace, from 2023 to 2024.
There was linear growth in first-time purchasers from 2020 to 2023 and an absolute decline from 2023 to 2024.

These trends paint a clear picture of a market seeded and nurtured by a few proactive buyers who have continued to increase their commitment. New buyers must step forward for the market to scale. The decline in first-time purchasers is particularly concerning. The total annual booking volume (ex-ante) in 2024 was roughly 0.1% (one thousandth) of what has widely been quoted as the required delivery volume (ex-post) in 2050. This thousand-fold expansion will occur only if additional forward-thinking new buyers voluntarily purchase while the world awaits favorable policy guidance.

Pricing

Based on publicly disclosed order pricing, the weighted average price per tonne sold decreased from $490 in 2023 to $320 in 2024.

Most methods saw prices decrease from 2023 to 2024, with the exception of Biochar, which increased 18%, and Mineralization, which increased 123%. Price decreases narrow the gap between purchaser and supplier expectations. Likely causes include both scale and experience curve effects, forward-pricing as in the Google purchase from Holocene (Sep 2024), or increased supplier competition to secure sales.

Biochar, which has the greatest number of orders, has settled into a relatively narrow price range, as has Enhanced Weathering. Conversely, DACCS has a very wide band that we expect will contract as the method scales, while Mineralization and mCDR’s broad ranges relate to the multiple methods represented by each (four for Mineralization, and five for mCDR).

CDR.fyi’s forthcoming 2025 Market Survey report, developed in partnership with Sylvera, will further examine purchaser and supplier expectations for 2025 onwards.

Deliveries

318.6K tonnes of durable CDR were delivered in 2024. This 120% year-over-year increase since 2023 is consistent with the cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2021 to 2024. It is promising that deliveries are growing at this pace, as a CAGR of 45% - 48% will be required from current levels to achieve 5Gt - 10Gt of annual removal by 2050.

The ratio of deliveries to booked volume in 2024 was 4.4%. The relatively low percentage of delivered CO2 is expected at this stage in the industry cycle as companies ramp up their capabilities based on incoming orders. With Biochar representing 86% of delivery volume in 2024 and 83% from 2020 - 2024, we expect to see an increase in the ratio of delivered to purchased tonnes as methods at an earlier stage of development mature and their removal generation capacity expands.

Suppliers

In 2024, there were 137 durable CDR Suppliers with published orders, of which 89 were repeat or “veteran” suppliers (defined as having had at least one sale in any prior year), and 48 were first-timers. Suppliers with at least one order grew 16% from 2023 to 2024, down from 59% and 106% the two years prior. Until the number of purchasers increases significantly, it is not surprising to see supplier numbers begin to plateau.

Leaderboards

Purchasers

Microsoft topped the Purchaser Leaderboard again in 2024, with roughly 10x the purchased volume of Google in the third spot. Microsoft had announced over 90% of its 2024 total by July, while all of Google’s purchases were announced from September onwards, with 80% of it contracted in December.

Frontier continued as a critical buyer underpinning demand with 667.4K tonnes which came from Stripe, Google, Shopify, McKinsey Sustainability, Autodesk, H&M Group, JP Morgan Chase & Co, Workday, Salesforce and Watershed and their customers.

Equinor and SkiesFifty entered in fourth and fifth, respectively, both by virtue of single, large-volume purchases, while BCG, NextGen CDR, and Morgan Stanley rounded out the Top 10.

Suppliers - Sales

The 2024 Supplier Leaderboard included various methods. Stockholm Exergi’s 3.3M tonne sale to Microsoft topped the 2023 Ørsted 2.67M tonne sale, also to Microsoft, as the largest durable CDR deal ever. Ørsted expanded its relationship with Microsoft by another 1M tonnes in 2024, and added 330K tonnes in its sale to Equinor. Canadian BECCS provider CO280 announced its first sales, good for sixth position in the 2024 leaderboard.

1PointFive is the sole DACCS company on the 2024 list in third position, due largely to its 500K tonne sale to Microsoft.

Terradot and Gigablue announced their first sales in 2024, for 290K tonnes and 200K tonnes respectively. These were also the largest deals to date in Enhanced Weathering and mCDR, respectively.

Bolivia-based Exomad Green topped the list in Biochar Carbon Removal (BCR), while Vaulted Deep earned eighth position on the 2024 leaderboard with 162K tonnes, adjacent to its Other BiCRS (and BCR) compatriot, Charm Industrial, at 140K tonnes. Indian BCR provider Varaha, rounded out the list at 119K, taking that position with a 100K tonne sale to Google in December.

Suppliers - Deliveries

Biochar continues to lead deliveries in durable CDR. Except for CarbonCure (Mineralization), Red Trail Energy (BECCS), and Vaulted Deep (Other BiCRS), all of the remaining seven of the Top 10 positions on the Delivery leaderboard were held by Biochar (BCR) companies. Of note, the Global South plays a prominent role in BCR production and delivery, with Exomad Green and Aperam Bioenergia (South America), Carboneers and Planboo (Africa), and Varaha (India). Wakefield Biochar and Pacific Biochar are based in the United States.

Service Providers

Service Providers assist in the purchase or sale of durable CDR. Due to unclear category definitions and shifts in providers’ approaches, we will not be publishing a leaderboard here. However, a list of the highest volume providers includes:

Registries: Puro, Isometric, Carbon Standards International
Marketplaces, Buying Groups and Agents, Reseller and Brokers: Frontier, Carbonfuture, First Climate, Supercritical, Patch, Senken, ClimeFi, Accend, NextGen, Watershed, CUR8, Klimate, SQUAKE, ACT, Numerco, South Pole, and Ceezer

In future, we will examine service providers and the unique and important role they play in helping purchasers and suppliers navigate the market.

Geographies

Purchasers by Method
The United States figures prominently on all purchaser geography leaderboards. Of the seven major categories, the United States leads six, with mCDR being the exception due solely to the UK location of purchaser SkiesFifty in the Gigablue deal. The position of the United States as the leader in the other six groupings can be attributed largely to the impact of Microsoft, Frontier and Google’s positions atop the purchasing leaderboard.

Suppliers by Method
There is greater diversity in the supplier geography leaderboard:

The US leads four of seven categories, most noticeably DACCS due in large part to the Inflation Reduction Act and 45Q tax credit.
Sweden leads BECCS supplier countries in 2024 for the Microsoft purchase (though fellow Nordic country Denmark is first in all-time BECCS volume when considering Ørsted’s sales to Microsoft in 2023 and subsequent expansion in 2024).
Bolivia leads Biochar supply, driven by market-leader Exomad Green.
Switzerland is the leader in Mineralization, albeit with much lower volumes than the other categories.

Purchaser Volume
The United States dominated with 80% of total purchased volume in 2024. Continuing with the theme of purchaser concentration, Microsoft, Frontier and Google accounted for 98% of the US total, and 78% of total global purchase volume in 2024. Similarly, the Equinor purchase from Ørsted accounted for 99.8% of Norway’s total, and the SkiesFifty purchase from Gigablue accounted for 73% of the UK’s total.

Supplier Volume
The United States, Sweden, and Denmark were the countries with the highest volume sold, with Sweden and Denmark being led by Stockholm Exergi and Ørsted, respectively, each with individual orders of over 1 million tons of durable CDR. The United States and Canada, Bolivia, and India all had individual suppliers with single orders of 100K+ tonnes, while all of the tonnage sold from the Netherlands was from one supplier.

Overall, durable CDR in 2024 was predominantly a story of North American companies purchasing from European suppliers, followed by North American suppliers. The North America purchase from Europe accounted for 62% of all volume in 2024, with North America purchasing from North America coming in next at 25%.

Excluding Microsoft, the most prominent trade was North American purchases from North American suppliers at 52%, followed by Europe buying from Europe at 17%, Europe buying from North America at 12%, and Europe buying from South America at 8%.

CDR Investment Landscape

$836M was invested into durable CDR companies in 2024, a decline of 30% from 2023’s $1.2B and 9% from 2022’s $917M. There were 47 funding rounds announced in 2024 (including 5 with undisclosed dollar amounts), up 34% from 35 in 2023 and almost triple the 16 in 2022.

While the totals may seem discouraging, it bears mentioning that 46% of the 2023 total was due to one large funding round in 1PointFive ($550M), and 65% of the 2022 total from Climeworks ($600M). As such, the encouraging news for the sector is that 2024 saw more CDR startups funded. When excluding the aforementioned two outliers, average round sizes increased over the previous two years.

As in 2022 and 2023, DACCS led in 2024 by money raised ($369M) and startups funded at (16). BiCRS increased its proportion of total funding, with $203M distributed to 11 startups. Four Mineralization startups raised $135M, while seven mCDR startups raised $65M, and three EW startups raised almost $64M.

For more information about Durable CDR Financing, be on the lookout for CDR.fyi’s upcoming Investment Landscape Report.

Appendix

*This post, dated Feb 20, 2025, contains minor wording changes and changes to how Frontier Buyers purchases are accounted for in some charts to increase clarity over the original post, dated Feb 5, 2025.

CDR.fyi tracks and reports on durable (multi-centennial permanence) carbon removal across these fifteen methods. We revise the methods from time to time as new information is published.

Data are drawn from public and private disclosures. See Methodology, Considerations & Limitations for additional details.

CDR.fyi sources market-order data from public releases, registries, and directly from market participants. Order data may lack disclosure of volumes or parties and is received at varying intervals. We reconcile all information and occasionally amend the database. Prior to the publication of this report, approximately 170 entries totalling 80K tonnes were removed from the CDR.fyi database due to duplicate entries from multiple reporting sources (e.g. suppliers, marketplaces, registries).

New data may come to light from time to time. As such, the information reported may differ slightly from previous reports.

The Investment Landscape section covers all publicly-announced private-equity funding of CDR suppliers (excluding ecosystem service providers and component providers). Although not comprehensive, it serves as a general representation of private funding of carbon removal firms.

To increase market transparency and trust, we encourage all durable CDR market participants to submit order and project information via a free CDR.fyi Portal account (signup here). Data Partners are eligible for additional insights and benefits. For more information, email us at partners@cdr.fyi.

We would love to hear from you! Email us at team@cdr.fyi with any questions or suggestions.

Acknowledgements

Thank you for exploring the CDR.fyi 2024 Year in Review.

This blog post is an abridged version of the comprehensive edition exclusive to our Data Partners and Platform Subscribers. For more information, email us at partners@cdr.fyi. For access to the full report or further information, kindly contact us at partners@cdr.fyi.

Key contributors to the CDR.fyi 2024 Year in Review include Tank Chen, Ifeoluwa Daranijo, Jason Grillo, Mark Hogan, Robert Höglund, Ekaterina Larina, Kevin Niparko, Alex Rink, Roden Sherpa, Matt Soens, Nadine Walsh.

We are grateful for the external review and feedback of Andrew Lockley, Lisa Street, and Sebastian Manhart.

CDR.fyi Portal

✅ Join over 800 companies and sign up for the CDR.fyi Portal to gain durable CDR market insights, showcase your company’s profile and progress, and list your HQ and project and facility locations on the CDR.fyi Carbon Removal Map.