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Let’s take stock of the state of the carbon dioxide removal (#CDR) industry halfway into 2023. CDR.fyi - the leading database monitoring the high-durability (100+ years) CDR market - has just released its first ever mid-year report.
So much good stuff in here. A few things that really stood out to me:
👏Purchases catapulted from 609k tons in all of 2022 to 3.4m tons in the first half of 2023, with an expected 7m tons by year-end (11.5x YoY increase). Impressive growth!
🔎Deliveries are not growing at the same rate and stand at 33.6k tons, compared to 45.5k for the entire year of 2022. This highlights a pressing challenge in the operational scaling of the CDR sector.
💼Buyers of CDR are still too few: just 14 companies (only 3 more than last year) making purchases over 10k tonnes. Arguably the biggest challenge the market faces.
🌳 Biomass-based methods dominate both purchases (95%) and deliveries (97%). A trend I expect to continue for years to come.
✔️Biochar carbon removal (#BCR) might only be accounting for only 5% of purchases, yet is responsible for almost all deliveries (92%). As I´ve said many times before: BCR is the most shovel ready quality CDR technology out there.
🤝Carbonfuture has now clearly established itself as the leading marketplace for high-quality CDR with 38% of purchases and 35% of deliveries so far in 2023.
Overall, this is a fascinating report on where the sector is at. It highlights A) the need for more buyers, B) the exponential growth of purchases, and C) why we have to keep our focus on deliveries.
Huge shout out to Robert Höglund, Kevin Niparko, Alexander Rink, Kohzy Koh, Quentin Servais Laval, Tank Chen, and Jamie Wong for putting this data together. Also, if you are not contributing to this dataset yet, please start doing so. In case you missed it previously, you can check out my write-up on the 2022 market report here.
What are your thoughts? Do you have similar takeaways?
🔗Here is the link to the full report.