CDR.fyi

February 05, 2025

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

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Highlights

  • 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 80% of purchases coming from Microsoft, Google, Stripe, 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%, but this is expected at this stage​.
  • 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 increased 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 policy are required for the market to continue growing.

CDR.fyi Analysis

2024 was a year of deeper buying among a more concentrated set of purchasers. The sector mainly grew on the back of existing buyers fulfilling their commitments but awaits the next wave of buyers to take off. Encouragingly, 2024 saw significant new 100K+ tonne entrants in the market: Equinor and SkiesFifty as purchasers, and Terradot, CO280 and Gigablue as suppliers. However, the influx of new large buyers is limited, with roughly 80% of 2024 purchase volume coming from Microsoft, Google, Stripe and other 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 their offerings. Only 36% of the CDR suppliers listed on CDR.fyi have a registered sale.

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

As a result, we anticipate the suppliers that don’t make meaningful sales in 2025 and 2026 will have difficulties raising more money and will start running out of funds, likely leading to consolidation and bankruptcies. This is a natural development in any sector, but since the CDR sector is new, it may be a jarring experience for many this first time around.

What would be detrimental to the long-term development of the industry would be if startups with innovative approaches fold because they cannot achieve lower pricing than more established suppliers. Despite the significant mismatch identified in purchaser and supplier pricing expectations, it is too early for the sector to compete on cost. Many durable removal approaches are still in their early stages of development and commercialization, and there is more testing to be done to determine which approaches should be scaled. Many high-cost methods are also years away from being able to compete on price.

However, cost competition may be what we get, especially when there are limited incentives for buyers to purchase durable removal credits, with cheaper alternative credit types on the VCM and too little differentiation between 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 at this time, a situation that will be very challenging for high-cost CDR methods that cannot reduce their costs quickly. The long-term success of the industry requires that promising ideas don’t get buried in this shakeout and that the sector doesn’t lose 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 price. Governments can both make direct purchases and employ subsidies and other support mechanisms that take a long-term view. The US 45Q tax credit, for example, has been a lifesaver for Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS). Likewise, Denmark and Sweden’s Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) subsidies get the large capex-heavy facilities built in the first place. For this to continue to be effective, policymakers need a good understanding 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 be intentional and complement other market actors by filling gaps, such as purchasing from underdeveloped methods.

A very important moment in 2025 for unlocking demand will be the anticipated release of the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) Net Zero Standard 2.0 for public consultation. Strong, mandatory milestone targets for CDR purchasing would make a huge difference and bring in many new buyers. Similarly, initiatives like Switzerland’s Net Zero mandate with corporate roadmaps incorporating milestone targets for CDR are encouraging signals.

For CDR suppliers, the focus must be on driving down costs: both to drive down prices to secure buyers and across overall operations to conserve cash and stay afloat until demand picks up. Those that can generate additional revenue streams based on co-products from carbon-removing activities would be well-advised to consider doing so. Financial sustainability and competitiveness 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 3.5 million tonnes (78%) increase over 2023. An exceptionally strong Q2 of 4.8 million tonnes represented 60% of the year’s volume, 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, a cautionary alarm is to be sounded given the heavy concentration of purchases – with one company (Microsoft) singlehandedly accounting for 5.1 million tonnes, or 63% of total purchased volume in 2024. Surprisingly, this figure represents a slight decrease from its 70% share of the 2023 volume.

It’s fair to question the sustainability of the market’s growth with such a high degree of concentration. It also begs the question as to which companies will follow in the footsteps of trailblazers such as Frontier, Milkywire, and now Microsoft. Microsoft, together with Google, Meta and salesforce.com, are founding members of the Symbiosis Coalition, which offers an advance market commitment pledging to purchase 20 million tonnes of nature-based CDR by 2030. With technology being the sector that has purchased the predominant share of Durable CDR, the appeal of lower-priced (albeit for lower permanence) nature-based solutions could dampen the Durable CDR market.

Excluding Microsoft, the market still grew at a healthy pace. In fact, 2024 growth over 2023 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

Microsoft and Frontier account for 10 of the top 20 purchases in 2024; including Stripe (a Frontier member) brings it to 12 of the top 20.

Google has made numerous purchases through 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.

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.

(Frontier offers advance market commitments for long-term carbon removal.)

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 (reduced if excluding Microsoft, but still growing).
  • There has been a similar 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 that has been seeded and nurtured by a few hard-core buyers who have continued to increase their commitment while struggling to “cross the chasm” to the next stage of buyers who will further scale the market. The decline in first-time purchasers is particularly concerning. The total annual booking volume in 2024 was roughly 0.1% (one thousandth) of what has widely been quoted as the required delivery volume in 2050. This 1,000x+ expansion will occur only if a steady influx of forward-thinking new buyers step forward voluntarily while the world awaits firmer policy guidance for Durable CDR.

Pricing

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

Breaking these high-level figures down further, most methods saw prices decrease from 2023 to 2024, with the exception of Biochar, which increased 18%, and Mineralization, which increased 123% based on 7 publicly disclosed price points in 2024 and 2 in 2023. Price decreases are a step in the right direction for narrowing the gap between purchaser and supplier expectations. Likely causes include technologies coming down the cost curve, higher volume purchases (true in all cases shown above other than Mineralization and Enhanced Weathering), forward-pricing as in the Google purchase from Holocene, or increased supplier competition to secure sales.

Diving deeper into pricing per method, ranges give a clearer view of market-clearing prices. Biochar, which has the greatest number of orders, has settled into a relatively narrow band as has Enhanced Weathering. Conversely, DACCS and mCDR have very wide bands. Generally, the width of the band correlates with the potential for economies of scale and the current level of technological maturity of the method. We foresee these bands contracting as the technology within methods matures.

A year ago, the primary intent in purchasing Durable CDR in the CDR.fyi 2024+ Market Outlook Summary Report was to support the early development of the Durable CDR field. Purchasers are willing to pay to invest in the development of the market: 79% of purchasers were budgeting over $100 per tonne for Durable CDR in 2024. Although purchasers expect prices to decline as efficiency, productivity, and volumes increase, 67% still expect to pay $101 to $500 per tonne in 2050. CDR.fyi’s forthcoming 2025 Market Survey, developed in partnership with Sylvera, will shed new light on purchaser and supplier expectations for 2025 and beyond.

Deliveries

318.6K tonnes of Durable CDR were delivered in 2024, with the 120% increase over 2023 being essentially the same as 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 to be expected at this stage in the industry cycle as companies are ramping up their capabilities based on incoming orders. With Biochar representing 86% of delivery volume in 2024 and 83% over the period 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 prior sale), and 48 were first-timers. The growth rate of total suppliers with at least one order was 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 the growth rate in new suppliers begin to plateau.

Leaderboards

Purchasers

  • As it did in 2023, Microsoft topped the Purchaser Leaderboard in 2024, with roughly 10x the purchases of Google in the second spot. Microsoft had announced over 90% of its yearly total by July, while all of Google’s purchases were announced from September onwards, with 80% of it contracted in December.
  • Frontier Buyers continued as a critical underpinning for promising suppliers with its 667.4K tonnes purchased distributed amongst members Stripe, Shopify, Watershed, and 459.3K tonnes other un-named Frontier members.
  • Equinor and SkiesFifty entered in fourth and fifth respectively, both by virtue of single, large-volume purchases, while Swiss Re, BCG and NextGen rounded out the Top 10.

Suppliers - Sales

The 2024 Supplier Leaderboard saw a variety of different methods represented. Stockholm Exergi’s 3.3M tonne sale to Microsoft topped the 2023 Ørsted 2.67M tonne sale as the largest deal ever, while the latter expanded its relationship with Microsoft by another 1M tonnes in 2024, and added 330K tonnes in its sale to Equinor. Fellow BECCS provider CO280 announced its first sales in 2024, entering the leaderboard in the sixth position for the year.

1PointFive appears the sole DACCS company on the 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.

Bolivia-based Exomad Green topped the list in Biochar Carbon Removal (BCR), while Vaulted Deep vaulted onto the leaderboard in 2024, with 162K tonnes, right next 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 be the source of most deliveries in Durable CDR. With the exception of 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 BCR companies. Of note, the Global South plays a prominent role in BCR production and delivery, with Exomad Green and Aperam Bioenergia being based in South America, Carboneers and Planboo having projects in Africa, and Varaha being based in India. Wakefield Biochar and Pacific Biochar, for their part, are based in the United States.

Service Providers

Service Providers comprise a broad range of companies that assist in the purchase or sale of Durable CDR. Due to the unclear definition of specific categories of some of these services in this early-stage market, not to mention shifts in some of the providers approaches, we will not be publishing a leaderboard in this Year ir Review. However, for the reference of those who are learning about the Durable CDR market, 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 take a closer look at service providers and the unique and important role they play in helping purchasers and suppliers navigate the market.

Geographies

The United States figures prominently on all purchaser geography leaderboards. Of the seven major groupings of methods, the United States surfaces as the top purchasing country for six of them, with mCDR being the exception due solely to the SkiesFifty - 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.

There is greater diversity in the supplier geography leaderboard:

  • The US takes the top spot for four of the seven groupings, most noticeably DACCS due in large part to the Inflation Reduction Act and 45Q tax credit.
  • Sweden is first amongst BECCS supplier countries in 2024 for the Microsoft purchase, though fellow Nordic country Denmark is first all-time with Ørsted’s sales to Microsoft in 2023 and expansion in 2024.
  • Bolivia is the leading provider of Biochar, driven by market-leader Exomad Green.

Switzerland is the leader in Mineralization, albeit with much lower volumes than the other categories.

When looking at overall contracted sales, Canada, in fourth overall, India, the Netherlands and Mexico round out the list of 100K+ tonne-supplying countries.

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%.

When excluding Microsoft’s volume, the most prominent trade was North American purchasers to North American suppliers at 52%, followed by Europe - Europe at 17%, Europe - North America at 12%, and Europe - South America at 8%.

CDR Investment Landscape

There was $836M 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 fundings announced in 2024 (including 5 with undisclosed dollar amounts), compared with 35 in 2023 and 16 in 2022.

While the totals may seem discouraging, it bears mentioning that 42% of the 2023 total was due to one large funding round in Heirloom ($500M), and 65% of the 2022 total was from a mammoth Climeworks $600M financing. As such, the encouraging news for the sector is that 2024 saw more CDR startups funded and, when excluding the aforementioned two financings, larger average round sizes than the previous two years.

As in 2022 and 2023, DACCS once again topped the chart with the most raised and most startups funded at $369M and 16. BiCRS increased on a relative basis, with $203M distributed to 11 startups. Four Mineralization startups raised $135M, while seven mCDR startups raised $65M, and three EW startups raised just a tad shy of $64M.

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

Appendix

CDR.fyi tracks multi-centennial permanence carbon removal purchases & deliveries of these fifteen methods. We revise the methods from time to time.

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

CDR.fyi sources 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 make adjustments to the database. For example, prior to the publication of the Year in Review, approximately 170 entries totalling 80K tonnes were removed from the CDR.fyi database due to duplicate entries from multiple sources.

New data may come to light from time to time. As such, information reported may differ slightly from what is shown in previous reports.

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

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.

Do you have any questions or suggestions? We would love to hear from you! Reach out to us anytime at team@cdr.fyi.


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.

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