Deep dive: Carbon removal procurement & offtakes — the fastest-moving subsegments to watch

Frontier, the advance market commitment launched by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey, has now facilitated more than $1.6 billion in carbon removal purchase agreements since its founding in 2022, with 2025 alone accounting for $680 million in new offtake commitments across 38 suppliers (Frontier, 2026). That acceleration signals a procurement market transitioning from philanthropic experimentation to structured commercial contracting. For sustainability professionals tracking where capital and momentum are concentrated, the carbon removal procurement landscape in early 2026 reveals three subsegments pulling ahead of the pack: direct air capture (DAC) offtakes, enhanced rock weathering (ERW) volume commitments, and biochar-based removal credits backed by durable measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) protocols.

Why It Matters

Carbon removal procurement is the demand-side mechanism that determines which removal pathways reach commercial scale. Without binding purchase commitments, removal companies cannot secure project finance, and technologies remain stranded in the "valley of death" between demonstration and deployment. The voluntary carbon market for removal credits reached $1.2 billion in transaction volume in 2025, up from $430 million in 2023, but the composition of that market has shifted dramatically (Ecosystem Marketplace, 2026). High-durability removals (permanence exceeding 1,000 years) now command 58% of total procurement spending, up from 22% in 2023, as corporate buyers increasingly align purchases with the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting and Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) guidance that prioritizes long-lived storage.

The US Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize, announced in late 2025, committed $50 million in federal procurement across four removal pathways, establishing price benchmarks and contract templates that are already shaping private-sector negotiations. Meanwhile, the European Union's Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF), finalized in 2025, created the regulatory infrastructure for quality-differentiated removal credits to enter compliance markets by 2028. These policy signals are compressing the timeline for procurement professionals to build removal portfolios and lock in supply.

Key Concepts

Advance market commitment (AMC): A binding financial commitment to purchase a specified quantity of carbon removal at or above a floor price, providing demand certainty that enables suppliers to raise project capital. Frontier's model pioneered this approach for carbon removal.

Offtake agreement: A contract between a carbon removal supplier and a buyer specifying volume, price, delivery schedule, and verification requirements. Offtake terms in 2025 ranged from 1-year spot purchases to 10-year volume commitments with price escalation clauses.

Permanence tiers: The duration for which removed carbon remains sequestered. Industry practice has converged on three tiers: short-duration (10 to 100 years, including soil carbon and forestry), medium-duration (100 to 1,000 years, including biochar and enhanced weathering), and long-duration (>1,000 years, including DAC with geological storage, mineralization, and ocean alkalinity enhancement).

Measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV): The protocols and technologies used to quantify removal volumes, confirm permanence, and detect reversals. MRV quality has become the primary differentiator between removal credits trading at $20 per ton and those commanding $200 to $600 per ton.

What's Working

Direct Air Capture Offtakes

DAC procurement has matured faster than any other removal subsegment. Climeworks closed $600 million in offtake agreements for its Mammoth plant in Iceland and its planned US Gulf Coast facility, with buyers including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and the Swiss government paying $400 to $600 per ton for verified removals with geological storage permanence exceeding 10,000 years (Climeworks, 2025). The company's delivery track record, having fulfilled 98% of contracted volumes from its Orca facility, has built buyer confidence that translates into longer contract terms and larger volumes.

In the US, Occidental Petroleum's 1PointFive subsidiary secured $340 million in pre-sale commitments for its Stratos DAC hub in Permian Basin, Texas, which began operations in late 2025 with a nameplate capacity of 500,000 tons per year. The Stratos project benefits from the Section 45Q tax credit of $180 per ton for DAC with geological storage, which effectively reduces the net cost to buyers from $350 to $400 per ton down to $170 to $220 per ton. This tax credit arbitrage has made US DAC offtakes the most price-competitive high-permanence removal pathway globally.

Heirloom Carbon Technologies, using a DAC approach based on accelerated limestone calcination, signed its first offtake agreements with the US government and Microsoft, totaling 36,500 tons over three years at prices between $250 and $400 per ton. Heirloom's approach, which operates at lower temperatures and energy inputs than liquid solvent or solid sorbent DAC, has attracted attention from procurement teams seeking pathway diversification.

Enhanced Rock Weathering Volume Commitments

Enhanced rock weathering, the application of crushed silicate minerals (typically basalt) to agricultural land to accelerate natural CO2 mineralization, has emerged as the fastest-growing medium-permanence removal pathway. Lithos Carbon, the leading ERW developer, secured $150 million in multi-year offtake agreements in 2025, with buyers including Shopify, H&M Group, and Boston Consulting Group paying $80 to $150 per ton (Lithos Carbon, 2025).

ERW procurement has benefited from three converging factors: competitive pricing relative to DAC, co-benefits for agricultural productivity (basalt application improves soil pH and provides essential micronutrients), and improving MRV protocols that give buyers confidence in claimed removal volumes. Lithos deployed a network of 2,400 soil sampling stations across its operational farms in the US Midwest and Southeast, combined with isotopic tracer analysis and reactive transport modeling, to verify that applied basalt is indeed sequestering CO2 through carbonate mineral formation at the claimed rates.

UNDO Carbon, operating primarily in the UK and expanding to the US, closed $45 million in offtakes for 2025 to 2027 delivery, with a focus on crushed basalt application to UK and Scottish farmland. Their approach integrates with existing agricultural supply chains by partnering with aggregate quarries that produce basalt as a byproduct, keeping delivered costs between $60 and $100 per ton before margins and MRV overhead.

Biochar with Durable MRV

Biochar, produced by pyrolyzing biomass in the absence of oxygen, sequesters carbon in a highly stable solid form with estimated permanence of 100 to 1,000+ years depending on production temperature and feedstock. The biochar subsegment has been transformed by improvements in MRV, particularly the European Biochar Certificate (EBC) and Puro.earth's methodology update in 2025 that introduced mandatory production-parameter monitoring, chain-of-custody tracking, and third-party audits.

Carbonfuture, the leading biochar credit platform, facilitated $78 million in transactions in 2025, with average prices of $120 to $180 per ton for EBC-certified credits with full lifecycle documentation. The company's digital MRV platform tracks biochar from feedstock sourcing through pyrolysis (recording peak temperature, residence time, and H:C ratio) to final application or storage, providing buyers with auditable removal verification.

Pacific Biochar, based in California, secured a 50,000-ton multi-year offtake with a consortium of West Coast technology companies, pricing credits at $140 to $160 per ton for biochar produced from agricultural waste and applied to degraded rangelands. The deal structure includes a reversal insurance mechanism through Kita Earth, a carbon insurance underwriter, providing buyers with financial protection against permanence failures.

What's Not Working

Nature-Based Removal Credit Oversupply

Forest-based carbon removal credits continue to face credibility challenges that have driven procurement away from the subsegment. A 2025 analysis by Renoster found that 61% of forestry-based removal projects reviewed had overstated sequestration volumes by 30% or more, and the Verra-certified avoided deforestation market experienced a 44% price decline from 2023 to 2025, with average prices falling below $5 per ton (Renoster, 2025). Corporate buyers with science-aligned procurement policies have largely exited this market, redirecting budgets toward engineered and hybrid removal pathways.

Ocean-Based Removal Procurement Stalls

Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) and direct ocean capture (DOC) remain promising on paper, with theoretical scalability to gigaton levels, but procurement has lagged due to MRV challenges. Quantifying net carbon removal in open ocean systems requires accounting for complex carbonate chemistry dynamics, air-sea gas exchange rates, and potential ecological impacts. Running Tide, which had been a prominent ocean-based removal supplier, ceased operations in 2024 after failing to demonstrate removal claims at contracted volumes. Planetary Technologies and Vesta have secured small pilot offtakes ($5 to $15 million combined), but buyers report that the lack of standardized ocean MRV protocols makes board-level approval of large commitments difficult.

Long Contract Terms and Price Uncertainty

Multi-year offtake agreements exceeding five years remain difficult to structure due to uncertainty about future removal costs, regulatory treatment of credits in compliance markets, and evolving MRV standards. Procurement teams report that CFOs resist committing to $300 to $500 per ton pricing when costs are expected to decline 40 to 60% over the next decade as DAC and ERW scale. This tension between suppliers' need for long-term revenue certainty and buyers' desire for price flexibility has resulted in contract structures with annual volume options, price renegotiation clauses, and milestone-based commitments that reduce the bankability of offtakes for project finance purposes.

Key Players

Category	Organization	Role
Established	Microsoft	Largest single corporate buyer with $500M+ committed across multiple pathways
Established	Frontier (Stripe/Alphabet/Shopify/Meta/McKinsey)	Advance market commitment facilitating $1.6B in purchase agreements
Established	Occidental/1PointFive	Developer and offtake aggregator for DAC hub projects in the US
Startup	Climeworks	Leading DAC developer with $600M in closed offtakes and operational delivery track record
Startup	Lithos Carbon	Dominant ERW developer with $150M in multi-year agreements and robust field MRV
Startup	Carbonfuture	Digital MRV and marketplace platform for biochar removal credits
Startup	Heirloom Carbon Technologies	Limestone-based DAC with US government and corporate offtakes
Investor	Lowercarbon Capital	Leading venture investor in carbon removal with portfolio across DAC, ERW, and ocean pathways
Investor	Breakthrough Energy Ventures	Multi-stage investor in removal technologies including Heirloom and CarbonCapture

Action Checklist

• Assess current voluntary carbon credit portfolio for permanence tier alignment with SBTi and Oxford Principles guidance
• Establish a removal procurement budget as a distinct line item, separate from offset purchasing, with a 3-year spending trajectory
• Diversify removal purchases across at least two permanence tiers and three removal pathways to manage technology and delivery risk
• Require MRV documentation from suppliers including third-party verification, monitoring methodology, and reversal risk assessment
• Evaluate Section 45Q pass-through economics for US-based DAC offtakes to optimize net cost per ton
• Structure multi-year agreements with annual volume optionality and price review clauses tied to published cost benchmarks
• Engage legal counsel experienced in carbon credit contracting to address delivery risk, reversal liability, and regulatory treatment of credits
• Join a procurement coalition (Frontier, First Movers Coalition, NextGen CDR) to access aggregated pricing and shared due diligence

FAQ

Q: What price ranges should procurement teams expect for different removal pathways in 2026? A: Current market pricing varies significantly by pathway and permanence tier. DAC with geological storage commands $250 to $600 per ton depending on scale and contract structure, with US-based projects effectively $170 to $420 per ton after Section 45Q benefits. Enhanced rock weathering ranges from $60 to $150 per ton. Biochar credits trade at $100 to $200 per ton for EBC-certified quality. Nature-based removals (afforestation, soil carbon) range from $10 to $40 per ton but face growing buyer skepticism on additionality and permanence claims.

Q: How should companies allocate between carbon removal and emissions reduction spending? A: SBTi's Corporate Net-Zero Standard requires companies to reduce value chain emissions by at least 90% before using removals for residual emissions. Best practice among leading corporate buyers is to dedicate 5 to 15% of total carbon management budgets to removal procurement while maintaining aggressive internal abatement programs. Microsoft, Salesforce, and Swiss Re have published internal carbon pricing frameworks that charge business units $100 to $200 per ton for unabated emissions, with a portion of collected funds directed to removal purchases.

Q: What MRV standards should buyers require from removal suppliers? A: At minimum, buyers should require: third-party verification by an accredited body (such as Aster Global, SCS Global Services, or EcoAct), a documented monitoring methodology aligned with ISO 14064-2 or a recognized registry standard (Puro.earth, Isometric, or Verra's forthcoming removal methodology), quantified uncertainty ranges on removal volumes, a permanence risk assessment with provisions for buffer pools or insurance coverage, and annual re-verification of ongoing storage. The Isometric registry, launched in 2024, has established the most rigorous science-first verification standard and is increasingly referenced as a procurement benchmark.

Q: How do regulatory developments affect procurement strategy? A: The EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework creates a pathway for certified removal credits to enter the EU Emissions Trading System by 2028, which would establish a compliance-grade price floor for qualifying removals. In the US, the Section 45Q tax credit ($180/ton for DAC with storage, $130/ton for other technological removals) runs through 2032, creating a window for cost-effective procurement. Companies should structure offtake portfolios to capture these regulatory benefits while building optionality for evolving compliance market integration.

Q: What are the biggest risks in carbon removal procurement? A: Delivery risk (supplier fails to produce contracted volumes), permanence risk (stored carbon is released prematurely), regulatory risk (credits are not recognized in future compliance frameworks), and reputational risk (purchased removals are later found to be low-quality or overstated). Mitigation strategies include diversifying across suppliers and pathways, requiring performance bonds or delivery guarantees, purchasing reversal insurance, and aligning with the most rigorous available MRV standards.

Sources

• Frontier. (2026). Advance Market Commitment: 2025 Annual Report and Portfolio Update. San Francisco, CA: Frontier Climate.
• Ecosystem Marketplace. (2026). State of Carbon Removal Markets 2025: Voluntary Demand, Pricing, and Quality Trends. Washington, DC: Forest Trends.
• Climeworks. (2025). Corporate Sustainability Report 2025: Delivery Track Record and Offtake Portfolio. Zurich, Switzerland: Climeworks AG.
• Lithos Carbon. (2025). Enhanced Rock Weathering: Field Monitoring Results and MRV Protocol Documentation. San Francisco, CA: Lithos Carbon Inc.
• Renoster. (2025). Carbon Credit Quality Assessment: Analysis of Removal and Avoidance Project Performance. New York, NY: Renoster.
• US Department of Energy. (2025). Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize: Program Design and Procurement Framework. Washington, DC: DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
• Puro.earth. (2025). Methodology Update 2025: Biochar Carbon Removal with Enhanced MRV Requirements. Helsinki, Finland: Puro.earth Oy.
• Isometric. (2025). Science-First Verification Standard for Carbon Removal Credits. London, UK: Isometric.