Inside the World’s Most Complete CDR Company Database
Grant Faber’s exhaustive map of 700+ carbon removal companies reveals where the industry’s growing fast— and where it’s already running into limits.
This is a summary post of episode 370 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. Listen to it on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy podcasts.
Grant Faber returns to the show to explain his latest project and what he learned from compiling such an enormous list.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
The most complete CDR database yet: Grant Faber’s new list compiles roughly 700 carbon removal companies—an estimated 90% of all durable (and also non-artisanal biochar) CDR ventures worldwide.
Biochar dominates: 295 biochar companies make up 42% of the total. But most operate at small scale; thousands of tons per year versus the hundreds of thousands targeted by DAC and mineralization players.
DAC second, but risky: ~180 direct air capture firms (25%) are chasing capital-intensive, policy-dependent pathways and likely face high attrition in the coming decade.
Startups vs. scale: With global startup failure rates between 70–90%, only 50–200 CDR firms may survive long-term, far fewer than needed for multi-gigaton removal.
Edge-case dilemmas: Grant agonized over where to draw the line between “artisanal” and “industrial” biochar, revealing how hard it is to define credibility in early climate industries.
Lonely innovators: One-of-a-kind approaches (river alkalinity, oceanic bioslurry, etc.) risk isolation without peers, advocacy groups, or research ecosystems to support them.
Transparency and failure: Companies like Alkali Earth are publishing post-mortems to help others learn, a model Ross and Grant wish were more common in CDR.
Fate and fortune: Both Grant and Ross reflect on luck, contingency, and the strange mix of rational planning and chaos that shapes technological history.
New frontiers: They debate whether the next major CDR breakthrough has already been invented, or if the real progress will come from business innovation, not new science.
📝 Mapping the Carbon Removal Frontier
Grant Faber is known for his meticulous tracking of the carbon removal landscape — first with his Direct Air Capture Company List and now with a massive database covering nearly every CDR company in the world. On this episode, Ross Kenyon digs into the numbers, the methodology, and what it all means for the industry’s future.
📊 A Census of Carbon Removal
Grant estimates his list captures at least 90% of durable CDR companies, excluding “artisanal” biochar makers using small open-air kilns. Even so, biochar dwarfs every other category, representing nearly half of all global players. DAC follows, then enhanced rock weathering, ocean-based methods, and mineralization.
Ross marvels at the spread: nearly 300 biochar firms, compared with a handful of river alkalinity or ocean slurry projects, proof of how unevenly distributed innovation can be.
🔥 The Biochar Boom (and Its Limits)
Biochar’s low barriers to entry explain its dominance. People were making it for soil health decades before it was recognized as carbon removal. But scale is the issue: small plants remove modest amounts of CO₂ compared to energy- or capital-intensive DAC projects.
For Grant, the challenge is classification: where does “artisanal” end and “industrial” begin? He admits losing sleep over it. “If I let one artisanal operation in,” he says, “then everyone else will want in too.”
🧊 DAC’s Paradox: Big Hopes, Big Fragility
DAC companies make up about a quarter of the total, but many are tiny teams with uncertain funding. Even among the well-known players, survival hinges on subsidies like 45Q or deep-pocketed acquirers such as Occidental Petroleum. Ross notes that “policy dependence” defines the space. It is both its lifeline and its Achilles’ heel.
⚰️ The Coming Die-Off
Both men acknowledge the brutal math of startups. Out of 700 companies, perhaps 80–90% will dissolve, pivot, or merge over the next decade. That could leave only a few dozen significant survivors to shoulder the gigatons of removal the world needs.
“It’s sobering,” Grant admits. “When you actually look at the numbers, it’s hard not to worry.” But also keep in mind that more startups will also grow the space over time, even if many in the current cohort will not last to industry-defining prominence.
🧪 The Value of Outliers
Ross and Grant discuss the tension between being the only one versus being one of many. Niche pioneers, like the lone river alkalinity company CarbonRun, enjoy early-mover advantage but lack industry coalitions, trade groups, or shared research infrastructure to the same degree that others working on marine alkalinity do, for example. There are still useful crossovers and ability to collaborate on research, but it isn’t as tight a link as other methodological families have.
In contrast, DAC and biochar benefit from visibility and funding networks. “It’s a wonderful pro and a horrible con,” Grant says. “You stand alone—but you also stand alone.”
💀 Learning from Failure
Some companies, like Alkali Earth, have dissolved but left behind valuable transparency. By publishing postmortems, they’re helping others learn from mistakes in regulation, funding, and additionality — something the field desperately needs more of.
Ross and Grant call for more open sharing: “If one person says something, you can bet 15 others are thinking it.”
🎲 Luck, Chaos, and Contingency
From there, the conversation veers philosophical. They reflect on how arbitrary moments like a meeting, a meal, a single decision… can change everything. Ross likens it to history itself: “So much depends on who’s in the room when the decision is made.” Grant agrees but insists that “fortune favors the bold”, and the generous.
His personal rule: connect people freely, give first, and trust that good karma compounds like capital.
🧠 Open-Mindedness vs. Moral Clarity
Grant values radical open-mindedness; Ross counters that it can slide into moral relativism. The key, they agree, is maintaining discernment — to be curious without becoming credulous, empathetic without being naïve.
🚀 What Would You Build?
When asked what kind of CDR company he’d start today, Ross leans toward project development: scaling proven tech through better business models, not new science. Grant’s answer: carbon-negative critical minerals, integrating CO₂ removal with supply chain resilience.
His logic? “If we can make carbon-negative materials profitable in their own right, that’s better than living in the carbon credit paradigm forever.”
🌋 The Edge of Imagination
They end where they began… at the frontier. Have we already invented all viable CDR tech, or is something unimaginable still waiting? Grant argues the fundamentals are already here: biomass, minerals, and energy transformations. Ross jokes about “volcano engineering”, stimulating basaltic eruptions to sequester carbon at scale.
Grant laughs, but admits: “Believing things are impossible is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
🌱 Final Reflection
The CDR List is more than a database; it’s a mirror for a young industry full of ambition, uncertainty, and courage. Behind every name is a handful of people trying to make the impossible real, and many will fail. But those failures, like the android bodies in Westworld, may just build the bridge for those who come after.