The nascent carbon dioxide removal industry expects to hit a milestone this year: 1 million tonnes of planet-warming CO2 removed from the atmosphere. That certainly is progress, but things aren’t moving anywhere near quickly enough to remove the billions of tonnes of carbon researchers say we need to capture annually in coming decades.
“It’s not scaling up as fast as it would need to if we are going to reach multiple gigatonnes by 2050,” says at Marginal Carbon, a climate consultancy based in Sweden. Keeping the rise in global average temperatures below 1.5°C – or undoing any overshoot of that climate target – will require billions of tonnes of removals each year by the middle of the century.
The slow progress comes amid growing alarm in the industry that a lack of corporate climate action and a concerted retreat from climate efforts under the Trump administration won’t speed things up anytime soon. “Where is the demand going to come from and when?” says at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The US policy changes in the past couple months add to that concern.”
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The size of the problem was laid out in 2018 with the release of a special by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In it, the IPCC estimated that between 100 and 1000 gigatonnes of CO2 would have to be permanently removed from the atmosphere this century to avoid overshooting a sustained global temperature rise of 1.5°C. A more recent IPCC called CO2 removal “unavoidable”, and estimated between 5 and 16 gigatonnes of removals would be needed per year by mid-century, depending on how quickly we reduce emissions.
In any scenario, removing that much CO2 is a gargantuan undertaking. “This will be the largest thing humanity has ever done,” says at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
The seven years since the IPCC report have given rise to a crowded slate of startups jostling to prove their particular technology is up to the task. The first large direct air capture facilities have come online – these blow air over chemicals to remove CO2. Enhanced rock weathering companies have spread hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rock dust on farms to convert CO2 from the air into mineral form. Large volumes of biomass have been turned into more stable biochar or burned in power plants fitted with carbon capture systems. And other methods abound, from in the ocean to underground. While forest and soil-based carbon removal also has a big role to play, they generally are not counted among the approaches that could remove carbon for hundreds or thousands of years.
CDR.fyi, a US-based firm that tracks the industry, estimates companies have purchased 28 million tonnes of durable CO2 removals from these startups to date, an amount worth about $6.5 billion. Of those, 720,000 tonnes have been reported removed. By the end of 2025, total removals are likely to crack 1 million tonnes, according to at CDR.fyi, who presented the latest data on 20 May during the Carbon Unbound East Coast summit in New York.
“The [carbon dioxide removal] industry has been in the startup phase for the last several years. And it’s increasingly progressing into the delivery phase,” says at the Carbon Business Council, an industry group in Washington DC. “The million tonnes is a proof point for that.”
Yet a million tonnes – or even the full 28 million tonnes that have been purchased to date – is negligible in terms of impact on the climate. At current emissions levels, removing a million tonnes is like undoing 13 minutes out of a full year of emissions, says Ho. Testing out all the different methods might be valuable for informing future projects, but “none of it matters from a climate standpoint”, he says.
Despite some large initial commitments from tech and finance firms, there has also been a persistent lack of demand from companies to buy removals. More than 90 per cent of all removals sold so far this year were purchased by just one company – Microsoft – which has pledged to become carbon negative by 2030. Of the with climate targets tracked by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), just 0.6 per cent have purchased any amount of carbon removals, according to Rink’s presentation. This number didn’t budge even after SBTi released a draft of new net-zero standards the industry had hoped would encourage more companies to buy.
“I have been raising the alarm for about a year and a half,” says at Carbon Gap, a UK carbon dioxide removal advocacy organisation. “If we’re just waiting for the waves of free philanthropic money from corporations to fill a hole on their sustainability report, we’re not really going to solve the problem.”
New policies that incentivise or require removals could help. Mitchell-Larson says more should be done to make carbon dioxide removal mandatory in certain industries where it is feasible alongside regular activity, such as wastewater treatment, agriculture or mining. “It’s not like a lost cause,” says Höglund. “Things can still speed up.”
Some state and federal governments, including Canada and California, are set to directly purchase removals, and companies are finding less expensive ways to remove carbon or produce valuable goods at the same time. But the Trump administration’s push to roll back US climate action has stalled momentum, even if some policies that support carbon dioxide removal look set to stay in place. “The de-emphasis on climate and net zero is not supporting private investment in the area,” says Nemet.
Any slowdown in reducing emissions also adds to the billions of tonnes of CO2 that will need to be removed in the future, making the task facing the carbon dioxide removal industry all the more daunting. “If we don’t do that, we’re screwed,” says Ho.
