Carbon Removal After Microsoft

What does an industry do when it’s lost 80% of its annual demand?

The carbon removal business is trying to figure that out.

For the past few years, Microsoft has been the buyer of first and last resort for any company that sought to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In order to achieve an aggressive internal climate goal, the software company purchased more than 70 million metric tons of carbon removal credits, 40 times more than anyone else.

Now, it’s pulling back. Microsoft has informed suppliers and partners that it is pausing carbon removal buying, Heatmap reported last week. Bloomberg and Carbon Herald soon followed. The news has rippled through the nascent industry, convincing executives and investors that lean years may be on the way after a period of rapid growth.

“For a lot of these companies, their business model was, ‘And then Microsoft buys,’” said Julio Friedmann, the chief scientist at Carbon Direct, a company that advises and consults with companies — including, yes, Microsoft — on their carbon management projects, in an interview. “It changes their business model significantly if Microsoft does not buy.”

Microsoft told me this week that it has not ended the purchasing program. It still aims to become carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it must remove more climate pollution from the atmosphere than it produces in that year, according to its website. Its ultimate goal is to eliminate all 45 years of its historic carbon emissions from electricity use by 2050.

“At times, we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals,” Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, said in a statement. “Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach — not a change in ambition.”

Yet even a partial pullback will alter the industry. Over the past five years, carbon removal companies have raised more than $3.6 billion, according to the independent data tracker CDR.fyi. Startups have invested that money into research and equipment, expecting that voluntary corporate buyers — and, eventually, governments — will pay to clean up carbon dioxide in the air.

Although many companies have implicitly promised to buy carbon removal credits — they’re all but implied in any commitment to “net zero” — nobody bought more than Microsoft. The software company purchased 45 million tons of carbon removal last year alone, according to its own data.

The next biggest buyer of carbon removal credits — Frontier, a coalition of large companies led by the payments processing firm Stripe — has bought 1.8 million tons total since launching in 2022.

With such an outsize footprint, Microsoft’s carbon removal team became the de facto regulator for the early industry — setting prices, analyzing projects, and publishing in-house standards for public consumption.

It bought from virtually every kind of carbon removal company, purchasing from large-scale, factory-style facilities that use industrial equipment to suck carbon from the air, as well as smaller and more natural solutions that rely on photosynthesis. One of its largest deals was with the city-owned utility for Stockholm, Sweden, which is building a facility to capture the carbon released when plant matter is burned for energy.

That it would some day stop buying shouldn’t be seen as a surprise, Hannah Bebbington, the head of deployment at the carbon-removal purchasing coalition Frontier, told me. “It will be inevitable for any corporate buyer in the space,” she said. “Corporate budgets are finite.”

Frontier’s members include Google, McKinsey, and Shopify. The coalition remains “open for business,” she said. “We are always open to new buyers joining Frontier.”

But Frontier — and, certainly, Microsoft — understands that the real point of voluntary purchasing programs is to prime the pump for government policy. That’s both because governments play a central role in spurring along new technologies — and because, when you get down to it, governments already handle disposal for a number of different kinds of waste, and carbon dioxide in the air is just another kind of waste. (On a per ton basis, carbon removal may already be price-competitive with municipal trash pickup.)

“The end game here is government support in the long-term period,” Bebbington said. “We will need a robust set of policies around the world that provide permanent demand for high-quality, durable CDR funds.”

“The voluntary market plays a critical role right now, but it won’t scale, and we don’t expect it will scale to the size of the problem,” she added.

Only a handful of companies had the size and scale to sell carbon credits to Microsoft, which tended to place orders in the millions of tons, Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, a researcher at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told me on a recent episode of Heatmap’s podcast, Shift Key. Those companies will now be competing with fledgling firms for a market that’s 80% smaller than it used to be.

“Fundamentally, what it will mean is just an acceleration of something that was going to happen anyway, which is consolidation and bankruptcies or dissolutions,” Cavanaugh told me. “This was always going to happen at this moment because we don’t have supportive policy.”

Friedmann agreed with the dour outlook. “We will see the best companies and the best projects make it. But a lot of companies will fail, and a lot of projects will fail,” he told me.

To some degree, Microsoft planned for that eventuality in its purchase scheme. The company signed long-term offtake contracts with companies to “pay on delivery,” meaning that it will only pay once tons are actually shown to be durably dealt with. That arrangement will protect Microsoft’s shareholders if companies or technologies fail, but means that it could conceivably keep paying out carbon removal firms for the next 10 years, Noah Deich, a former Biden administration energy official, told me.

The pause, in other words, spells an end to new dealmaking, but it does not stop the flow of revenue to carbon removal companies that have already signed contracts with Microsoft. “The big question now is not who will the next buyer be in 2026,”’ Deich said. “It is who is actually going to deliver credits and do so at scale, at cost, and on time.”

Deich, who ran the Energy Department’s carbon management programs, added that Microsoft has been as important to building the carbon removal industry as Germany was to creating the modern solar industry. That country’s feed-in tariff, which started in 2000, is credited with driving so much demand for solar panels that it spurred a worldwide wave of factory construction and manufacturing innovation.

“The idea that a software company could single-handedly make the market for a climate technology makes about as much sense as the country of Germany — with the same annual solar insolation as Alaska — making the market for solar photovoltaic panels,” Deich said, referencing the comparatively low amount of sunlight that it receives. “But they did it. Climate policy seems to defy Occam’s razor a lot, and this is a great example of that.”

History also shows what could happen if the government fails to step up. In the 1980s, the U.S. government — which had up to that point been the world’s No. 1 developer of solar panel technology — ended its advance purchase program. Many American solar firms sold their patents and intellectual property to Japanese companies.

Those sales led to something of a lost decade for solar research worldwide and ultimately paved the way for East Asian manufacturing companies — first in Japan, and then in China — to dominate the solar trade, Deich said. If the U.S. government doesn’t step up soon, then the same thing could happen to carbon removal.

The climate math still relied upon by global governments to guide their national emissions targets assumes that carbon removal technology will exist and be able to scale rapidly in the future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that many outcomes where the world holds global temperatures to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century will involve some degree of “overshoot,” where carbon removal is used to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.

By one estimate, the world will need to remove 7 billion to 9 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere by the middle of the century in order to hold to Paris Agreement goals. You could argue that any scenario where the world meets “net zero” will require some amount of carbon removal because the word “net” implies humanity will be cleaning up residual emissions with technology. (Climate analysts sometimes distinguish “net zero” pathways from the even-more-difficult “real zero” pathway for this reason.)

Whether humanity has the technologies that it needs to eliminate emissions then will depend on what governments do now, Deich said. After all, the 2050s are closer to today than the 1980s are.

“It’s up to policymakers whether they want to make the relatively tiny investments in technology that make sure we can have net-zero 2050 and not net-zero 2080,” Deich said.

Congress has historically supported carbon removal more than other climate-critical technologies. The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2022 funded a new network of industrial hubs specializing in direct air capture technology, and previous budget bills created new first-of-a-kind purchasing programs for carbon removal credits. Even the Republican-authored One Big Beautiful Bill Act preserved tax incentives for some carbon removal technologies.

But the Trump administration has been far more equivocal about those programs. The Department of Energy initially declined to spend some funds authorized for carbon removal schemes, and in some cases redirected the funds — potentially illegally — to other purposes. (Carbon removal advocates got good news on Wednesday when the Energy Department reinstated $1.2 billion in grants to the direct air capture hubs.)

Those freezes and reallocations fit into the Trump administration’s broader war on federal climate policy. In part, Trump officials have seemed reluctant to signal that carbon might be a public problem — or something that needs to be “removed” or “managed” — in the first place.

Other countries have started preliminary carbon management programs — Norway, the United Kingdom, and Canada — have launched pilots in recent years. The European carbon market will also soon publish rules guiding how carbon removal credits can be used to offset pollution.

But in the absence of a large-scale federal program in the U.S., lean years are likely coming, observers said.

“I am optimistic that [carbon removal] will continue to scale, but not like it was,” Friedmann said. “Microsoft is a symptom of something that was coming.”

“The need for carbon removal has not changed,” he added.