After a Slow 2025, Where Does Carbon Removal Go From Here?

It’s been a quiet year for carbon dioxide removal, the nascent industry trying to lower the concentration of carbon already trapped in the atmosphere.

After a stretch as the hottest thing in climate tech, the CDR hype cycle has died down. 2025 saw fewer investments and fewer big projects or new companies announced.

This story isn’t immediately apparent if you look at the sales data for carbon removal credits, which paints 2025 as a year of breakout growth. CDR companies sold nearly 30 million tons of carbon removal, according to the leading industry database, CDR.fyi — more than three times the amount sold in 2024. But that topline number hides a more troubling reality — about 90% of those credits were bought by a single company: Microsoft.

If you exclude Microsoft, the total volume of carbon removal purchased this year actually declined by about 100,000 tons. This buyer concentration is the continuation of a trend CDR.fyi observed in its 2024 Year In Review report, although non-Microsoft sales had grown a bit that year compared to 2023.

Trump’s crusade against climate action has likely played a role in the market stasis of this year. Under the Biden administration, federal investment in carbon removal research, development, and deployment grew to new heights. Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission was also getting ready to require large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate targets, a move that many expected to increase demand for carbon credits. But Trump’s SEC scrapped the rule, and his agency heads have canceled most of the planned investments. (At the time of publication, the two direct air capture projects that Biden’s Department of Energy selected to receive up to $1.2 billion have not yet had their contracts officially terminated, despite both showing up on a leaked list of DOE grant cancellations in October.)

Trump’s overall posture on climate change reduced pressure on companies to act, which probably contributed to there being fewer new buyers entering the carbon removal market, Robert Hoglund, a carbon removal advisor who co-founded CDR.fyi, told me. “I heard several companies say that, yeah, we wouldn't have been able to do this commitment this year. We're glad that we made it several years ago,” he told me.

Kyle Harrison, a carbon markets analyst at BloombergNEF, told me he didn’t view Microsoft’s dominance in the market as a bad sign. In the early days of corporate wind and solar energy contracts, he said, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon were the only ones signing deals, which raised similar questions about the sustainability of the market. “But what it did is it created a blueprint for how you sign these deals and make these nascent technologies more financeable, and then it brings down the cost, and then all of a sudden, you start to get a second generation of companies that start to sign these deals.”

Harrison expects the market to see slower growth in the coming years until either carbon removal companies are able to bring down costs or a more reliable regulatory signal puts pressure on buyers.

Governments in Europe and the United Kingdom introduced a few weak-ish signals this year. The European Union continued to advance a government certification program for carbon removal and expects to finalize methodologies for several CDR methods in 2026. That government stamp of approval may give potential buyers more confidence in the market.

The EU also announced plans to set up a carbon removal “buyers’ club” next year to spur more demand for CDR by pooling and coordinating procurement, although the proposal is light on detail. There were similar developments in the United Kingdom, which announced a new “contract for differences” policy through which the government would finance early-stage direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture projects.

A stronger signal, though, could eventually come from places with mandatory emissions cap and trade policies, such as California, Japan, China, the European Union, or the United Kingdom. California already allows companies to use carbon removal credits for compliance with its cap and invest program. The U.K. plans to begin integrating CDR into its scheme in 2029, and the EU and Japan are considering when and how to do the same.

Giana Amador, the executive director of the U.S.-based Carbon Removal Alliance, told me these demand pulls were extremely important. “It tells investors, if you invest in this today, in 10 years, companies will be able to access those markets,” she said.

At the same time, carbon removal companies are not going to be competitive in any of these markets until carbon trades at a substantially higher price, or until companies can make carbon removal less expensive. “We need to both figure out how we can drive down the cost of carbon removal and how to make these carbon removal solutions more effective, and really kind of hone the technology. Those are what is going to unlock demand in the future,” she said.

There’s certainly some progress being made on that front. This year saw more real-world deployments and field tests. Whereas a few years ago, the state of knowledge about various carbon removal methods was based on academic studies of modeling exercises or lab experiments, now there’s starting to be a lot more real-world data. “For me, that is the most important thing that we have seen — continued learning,” Hoglund said.

There’s also been a lot more international interest in the sector. “It feels like there’s this global competition building about what country will be the leader in the industry,” Ben Rubin, the executive director of the Carbon Business Council, told me.

There’s another somewhat deceptive trend in the year’s carbon removal data: The market also appeared to be highly concentrated within one carbon removal method — 75% of Microsoft’s purchases, and 70% of the total sales tracked by CDR.fyi, were credits for bioenergy with carbon capture, where biomass is burned for energy and the resulting emissions are captured and stored. Despite making up the largest volume of credits, however, these were actually just a rare few deals. “It’s the least common method,” Hoglund said.

Companies reported delivering about 450,000 tons of carbon removal this year, according to CDR.fyi’s data, bringing the cumulative total to over 1 million tons to date. Some 80% of the total came from biochar projects, but the remaining deliveries run the gamut of carbon removal methods, including ocean-based techniques and enhanced rock weathering.

Amador predicted that in the near-term, we may see increased buying from the tech sector, as the growth of artificial intelligence and power-hungry data centers sets those companies’ further back on their climate commitments. She’s also optimistic about a growing trend of exploring “industrial integrations” — basically incorporating carbon removal into existing industrial processes such as municipal waste management, agricultural operations, wastewater treatment, mining, and pulp and paper factories. “I think that's something that we'll see a spotlight on next year,” she said.

Another place that may help unlock demand is the Science Based Targets initiative, a nonprofit that develops voluntary standards for corporate climate action. The group has been in the process of revising its Net-Zero Standard, which will give companies more direction about what role carbon removal should play in their sustainability strategies.

The question is whether any of these policy developments will come soon enough or be significant enough to sustain this capital-intensive, immature industry long enough for it to prove its utility. Investment in the industry has been predicated on the idea that demand for carbon removal will grow, Hoglund told me. If growth continues at the pace we saw this year, it’s going to get a lot harder for startups to raise their series B or C.

“When you can't raise that, and you haven't sold enough to keep yourself afloat, then you go out of business,” he said. “I would expect quite a few companies to go out of business in 2026.”

Hoglund was quick to qualify his dire prediction, however, adding that these were normal growing pains for any industry and shouldn’t be viewed as a sign of failure. “It could be interpreted that way, and the vibe may shift, especially if you see a lot of the prolific companies come down,” he said. “But it’s natural. I think that’s something we should be prepared for and not panic about.”