For three years, the standard criticism of the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market has been the same sentence: "it's just Microsoft." One buyer writing most of the cheques, everyone else watching. If that buyer sneezed, the market caught pneumonia.
ClimeFi's Q2 2026 report is the first quarterly dataset where that sentence stops being true. We read the report so you don't have to. Here are the seven numbers that matter — and, more usefully, what a factory owner sitting on palm kernel shells or cashew shells in West Africa should actually do with them.
The 7 numbers
What most people will say — and why it misses the point
The headline take you'll see everywhere: "Bio-CCS won the quarter." Technically true — three very large Bio-CCS deals pushed that pathway to 60% of Q2 market share, up from 2% in Q1. Impressive, and worth watching.
But that reading confuses a handful of megadeals with a market. Strip out those three contracts and the picture underneath is the one that matters for anyone actually producing removals: biochar took 86% of everything else. It crossed 1 MtCO₂ in a quarter for the third time in five quarters. That is not a spike — that's a baseline. Bio-CCS is where a few giants park nine-figure commitments; biochar is where the market's actual weekly buying happens, because it delivers real, verifiable tonnes now, at a price mid-sized buyers can approve without a board meeting.
There's a second thing hiding in the issuance number. Commitments are promises; issuances are delivery. 193,000 credits issued in a quarter — nearly double Q1 — means the delivery machine is speeding up, and the registries doing the issuing (Puro.earth, Isometric, Rainbow) are overwhelmingly issuing biochar. Buyers notice which pathway keeps its promises.
The buyer pool is widening in three directions at once
- Corporates beyond the usual names. Seven of Q2's buyers were first-timers. First purchases are small — pilots, "learning tonnes" — but first-time buyers become repeat buyers, and repeat buyers become offtakers. The 2027–2028 offtake pipeline is being seeded right now.
- Cities. Stockholm buying 750,000 tonnes is a category-opening event. Municipal climate budgets exist all over Europe; until now, none of them had a template for procuring removals at scale. Now they do — and municipal procurement copies itself.
- Institutions and rules. The EU CDR Buyers' Club launched. SBTi published Version 2.0 of its net-zero standard. The ISO 14060 net-zero draft went to public consultation. Every one of these turns voluntary "nice to have" buying into structured, expected, repeatable demand.
What this means if you own feedstock (not a trading desk)
We look at every market report through one lens: what does it change for an agro-processor in Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana or Benin whose residues are currently burned or dumped? Three things:
1. Demand is no longer a single point of failure
A market with one dominant buyer is a market where your offtake depends on one company's strategy meetings. A market with 14 non-Microsoft deals a quarter, cities entering, and compliance-style frameworks forming is a market where certified supply has many doors to knock on. Supply — not demand — is now the constraint worth worrying about.
2. First-time buyers buy trust, not tonnes
A company making its first CDR purchase is nervous. It picks the pathway with the cleanest measurement story and the registries with the longest issuance track record. That is biochar's home turf — and it's why certification isn't paperwork, it's the product. An uncertified tonne of biochar is invisible to every buyer in this report.
3. The window for setting up is the quiet part of the cycle
Registration, baseline data, feedstock verification and first production runs take quarters, not weeks. The processors who start the registration process while the market is still "only" 45.9 MtCO₂ cumulative will be the ones holding issuable credits when the Stockholm-copycats and the seven first-timers come back with bigger orders. The ones who wait for the market to feel "proven" will be starting their paperwork just as prices reflect that proof.
Our honest caveats
Two numbers in this report deserve skepticism before anyone gets carried away. The $676M figure only counts publicly disclosed deals above 5 ktCO₂ — the real number is different in both directions (undisclosed deals add; announced-but-renegotiated deals subtract). And quarter-on-quarter growth of 84% off a small base is easy; the test is whether Q3 holds the level without a Stockholm-sized outlier. We track this every quarter in our market tracker, and we'll say so plainly if the trend breaks.
The takeaway
The CDR market spent three years as a one-buyer story and one quarter becoming a many-buyer story. Underneath the Bio-CCS headlines, biochar remains the pathway that actually delivers — 86% of non-mega-deal volume, doubling issuances, and the shortest distance between a buyer's promise and a retired credit. The feedstock for those credits doesn't live in Stockholm or Seattle. A lot of it lies in heaps behind processing factories in West Africa, waiting to be treated like the asset this report says it is.
Source: ClimeFi Q2 2026 CDR market report, as covered by Carbon Herald (July 28, 2026), ClimeFi Q2 2026 Report Shows New CDR Buyers Making Strides. Figures as reported by ClimeFi; commitment values limited to publicly disclosed deals above 5 ktCO₂.