The following reflects the personal perspective of Carbon180 co-founder Noah Deich, based on his experience in government and the private sector. Noah offers his read on where the carbon removal field stands – and what it will take to move forward. This blog is cross-posted from Noah’s LinkedIn.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of working with a handful of great teams working to advance carbon removal across sectors and geographies around the world. Here’s what I learned about how the carbon removal field is evolving, what I’m hoping to see in 2026 and beyond for the field to scale.
Carbon removal continues to move forward…
2025 saw a number of significant advancements across the removal field.
- Many high-profile companies continued to raise early-stage equity funding needed to advance commercialization. Heirloom, Carba, and Avnos all showed that there is investor appetite for removal startups. In an admittedly more challenging US venture capital environment, startups have been resourceful by turning to investors overseas, partnering with large strategic investors from the energy, aviation, and shipping industries, and leveraging catalytic finance from philanthropy (e.g. what the folks at Terraset are working on).
- Companies are not just raising investment for research and development, but are building real projects that are delivering real tons of carbon removal. The XPRIZE announced their winners, including $50M grand prize winner Mati, showing that progress is happening globally (even if the bulk of the investment and purchasing is happening in North America and Europe). These projects help show what carbon removal is (and can be at larger scale) in ways that are hard to capture with pitch decks, artist renderings, or even small-scale prototypes, giving investors, purchasers, policymakers, and local stakeholders more clarity and enthusiasm about the prospects for the field.
- Many large US companies have continued to purchase voluntary removal credits. This market has been extremely catalytic (and not even that hyperbolic to postulate “world saving” if policymakers quickly scale up what corporates have started…). As energy emissions for large tech companies rise due to AI investments, removal are steadily growing in importance for companies to meet their net-zero commitments. Banks like JP Morgan and Barclays have also stepped up their purchasing of voluntary credits, seeing both an opportunity to get ahead of compliance and serve as a future profit center (i.e. through the supply of removals credits to their customers as a broker, direct investments in projects/companies, etc.). Funds like Frontier continue to deploy catalytic offtakes in new areas, like the offtake with Planetary to scale ocean alkalinity enhancement innovation. And civil society continues to collaborate with industry via efforts like the Beyond Alliance to ensure carbon accounting standards are workable for industry and achieve higher integrity as the field scales and science advances.
- Governments around the world continue to advance policy frameworks that will be needed to scale removal in the long run. The European Commission announced their intent to create a carbon removal buyers club using their Carbon Removal Certification Standard (aka “CRCF”), which will also be the basis for any future EU ETS integration efforts. Canada and Germany also advanced their own CDR purchasing efforts, and the UK advanced their “GGR Business Models” contract-for-difference scheme, alongside a broader independent review of their overall GGR (or “greenhouse gas removal”) program. Others continued to push the ball forward with innovation funding, including Japan’s $60M+ investment in enhanced rock weathering field trials. Multilateral efforts continued to gain steam as well, with the Group of Negative Emitters increasing membership and UNFCCC COP meetings featuring removal in an official capacity for the first time.
- The narrative on removal is also continuing to evolve in helpful directions. On the one hand, the scientific consensus on the need for removal is solidifying even further, with this COP marking the first official acknowledgement that we are going to need to minimize the length and magnitude of temporary carbon budget overshoot of the 1.5C target. At the same time, removal developers and policy efforts are shifting to more salient near-term messages about how removal can be the co-benefit of other industrial/agricultural efficiency and climate adaptation projects (not the other way around). This grounding in near-term benefits opens new policy avenues, as groups like the Carbon Removal Alliance, the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative, and RMI all explored in publications this year.
…but the removal field is facing many significant headwinds.
- Entrepreneurs are raising investment capital… but they are reporting that this is the most challenging venture finance environment they have faced in their careers. Venture money is shifting more heavily towards AI, and within the climate space to energy generation technologies. At a cleantech investor summit earlier in 2025 an audience poll (admittedly, highly unscientific) listed DAC as the second most overhyped climate VC investment (behind only nuclear fusion…). While a contraction in the number of DAC startups would be healthy even in an expansionary VC moment for removal, this lack of capital might precipitate promising solutions with poorly timed cash flow management to fail to advance (or prevent “leapfrog” technologies from finding the early capital needed for scale).
- Companies are learning firsthand that financing and building large projects — while simultaneously building durable long-term policy demand for removal — is very hard. Not that anyone thought this would be particularly easy, but early projects are likely to come in late and/or over budget (if, in some cases, not at all), and will thus present risks of negative press coverage that further slow investment, purchasing, etc.
- The hoped-for wave of fast-following corporate purchasers has only been a trickle to date. High costs of removal relative to other carbon credits coupled with a lack of clear near-term regulatory compliance threat is the biggest factor holding back voluntary purchases. And independent market monitors like the Science Based Targets Initiative have yet to clear and consistent guidance on near-term voluntary removal purchasing.
- US policy shifts from the current Administration on climate overall have been a huge obstacle to progress domestically and abroad. The US had played a significant role in helping to set ambition on removal at the global stage in year’s past. The current Administration has not only completely dropped this topic as a priority, but is actively thwarting progress on key efforts like the proposed IMO carbon standards (and causing so many other diplomatic fires for our allies to fight that there is little room on the agenda to discuss carbon removal industry scale up). The result is little pressure globally to improve national carbon removal policy pledges that are what the State of CDR Team has called in a recent report “limited and lacking credibility” today.
- Macroeconomic headwinds are constraining public finances; affordability concerns are constraining climate regulations. For carbon removal to succeed, it will need a combination of government (1) spending on subsidies/direct purchases of removal and (2) regulations requiring polluters to pay for removal in some way. Both avenues are increasingly challenging politically around the world, as few governments have strong fiscal capacity and/or macroeconomic need for additional spending and/or political mandate for regulations (e.g. new Canadian PM Carney’s repeal of portions of their national carbon tax).
- Philanthropy is cutting support for removal-focused civil society work, hindering the field’s ability to advance removal policies centered on public – rather than corporate – interests.
We need more action, more targeted to the field’s current near-term commercialization bottlenecks to accelerate progress in 2026 and beyond.
I have no crystal ball on what next year will bring for carbon removal. But one thing that is clear is that we need a lot more action from public, private, and civil society organizations alike to ensure removal can be commercialized as swiftly as is needed to meet our climate goals.
Today, we are on pace for a few dozen commercial-scale removal projects by 2030, with none of the policy frameworks in place to achieve gigaton-scale within a few decades. What we need is dozens of commercial-scale projects globally by 2030, with the policy frameworks to support an order of magnitude more than that level in the following decade with strong carbon accounting and environmental and community safeguards. “Open systems” solutions (like enhanced rock weathering and ocean alkalinity enhancement) need large-scale field trials across geographies to understand both carbon accounting and the broader environmental and economic impacts of these solutions. Only with clear support for projects in the near-term, and long-term commitments to scaling removal will the field be able to make the leap from promising science and innovation project to a future industry at the scale that matters meaningfully to the climate.
As a result, we need policy and market action today focused on both near-term commercialization and long-term market creation. This can involve a suite of actions, including:
- Voluntary corporate carbon removal purchasing: small and growing removal purchases today from any company with a net-zero goal should be the floor, not the ceiling.
- ETS integration: clear signals from leading geographies that removal will be integrated in a bankable way in the near future, with strong guardrails to avoid mitigation deterrence and subsidies to ensure removal can come down the cost curve in the near term. Focusing on market segments like aviation and shipping where removal technologies can provide cost-savings for overall decarbonization efforts helps ensure that early markets for removals have political traction in an environment where affordability is key and opportunities for public spending are limited.
- Government purchasing: scaling up to even 1% of 1% of national government spending would total in the $Bs/year for just the G7 alone, and enable the carbon removal field to have the market it needs to grow over the next five years.
- Subsidies: targeted tax credits and incentives for industrial integration can have catalytic impact on crowding in private capital with relatively low fiscal impact to governments.
- Regulatory frameworks for projects: that enable fast and safe buildout of solutions that do have near-term customers.
- Carbon accounting harmonization: a proliferation of standards for what counts as carbon removal risks delaying development at a minimum, and at worst jurisdiction shopping by developers to the most friendly (but potentially less rigorous) geographies.
For 2026 to really move the carbon removal field to commercial liftoff, policymakers and corporate leaders will need to assess whether their actions are bringing enough new commercial projects to final investment decision, and whether they are sending sufficiently clear signals that removal will be an important and growing piece of the climate policy toolkit over the coming decades.
So what am I most excited about looking forward to 2026?
- More voluntary carbon removal purchases, from familiar and new faces. AI infrastructure creates new demand for removals, and with >12,000(!) companies now committed to science based climate targets, the demand for removals should be significant from new faces.
- Policy action on carbon removal procurement. Canada and Germany are set to operationalize their prior commitments in 2026. The biggest opportunity for scale and influence is the EU, whose CDR Buyers Club has an enormous opportunity to deploy public funding in a highly catalytic way to crowd in voluntary corporate purchases and bring a handful of leading projects to final investment decision. The major wild card is the US, where Congress recently signaled intent for more CDR purchasing funding despite Administration lack of action, and California receiving the Governors word that CDR purchasing could already be in scope for CARB.
- Projects continue to advance. Full-scale commercial demonstrations like the Stratos DAC project in the Permian Basin are set to cut the ribbon this year, and I’m optimistic other commercial-scale projects will reach final investment decision and advance construction. Small pilots across continents continue to deliver early removals credits to show what is possible with more funding.
- “Open systems” projects field trials around the world. Field trials to show the carbon, environmental, and broader economic and social impacts of solutions like enhanced rock weathering and biochar can unlock pay-for-practice funding with a high return on public investment.
- mCDR and coastal communities showing what CDR, adaptation, and economic development can look like done well.
- And lots of surprises….
Edited by Jason Aul. Image by Declan Sun.