Carbon removal arrived as an act of optimism. The idea that through human ingenuity, we could do more than only stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That we must begin removing what was already there. It demanded a certain leap of faith. For a long time, faith was what the market ran on.

The faith was not misplaced. In less than a decade, carbon removal moved from scientific concept to a market where tens of billions of dollars have been spent (more on that later) by companies across all major sectors of the world's economy. Technologies that barely existed at commercial scale in 2020 are now contracting in millions of tonnes. The momentum is real.

But momentum has consequences. When the stakes are small, trust is enough. When the stakes become material — when contracts span fifteen years and commitments are made to regulators and shareholders — something more rigorous is required.

Carbon removal is entering its accountability era.

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Three chapters

The market's short history can be read in three chapters.

Chapter One, roughly 2018 to 2022, was about proving that demand existed. Would serious companies actually pay for carbon removal? Would anyone put their name to it? The answer, it turned out, was yes.

Chapter Two, 2022 to 2025, was about proving the technologies work. Could direct air capture scale? Could biochar generate credits that would survive third-party scrutiny? Could ocean alkalinity enhancement be monitored and verified? The answers, across most of the durable removal landscape, were broadly affirmative.

Chapter Three is now. Its central question is harder than either of the first two: will contracted projects actually deliver, at the volumes promised, on the timelines agreed?

The buyers entering the market in 2025 and 2026 — many of them finance teams and procurement functions rather than sustainability leads — are asking Chapter Three questions. Yet they struggle to find chapter three answers.

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The gap between contracted and delivered

Carbon removal is, overwhelmingly, a made-to-order market. When a corporate buyer signs an offtake agreement, they are not purchasing an existing asset. They are contracting for something that does not yet exist at the required scale, to be delivered years from now.

That gap — between a contract and its delivery — is wider than most buyers currently price.

Across hundreds of projects assessed by CUR8, 1 in 5 developers has recorded a year of zero delivery against planned targets. Fewer than 30% of projects in the market today have fully scaled technology (TRL 9).

The reasons projects fail are predictable, if not always visible. Engineering assumptions made at the design stage prove incorrect, sometimes expensively so after a final investment decision has already been made. Permitting timelines compound with regulatory uncertainty. The human capital required to execute complex industrial builds at scale is genuinely scarce: the experienced project manager who has delivered a multi-billion-dollar industrial facility and is willing to bring that expertise to a nascent market is, as one observer put it, "the scarcest exotic bird in our ecosystem.

Buyers anchor on climate-impact scores. But impact tells you almost nothing about whether the tonnes actually show up.

In CUR8’s data, the correlation between a project's climate-impact score and its delivery score is essentially zero (r = 0.15). Roughly half of the projects that score high on impact score poorly on delivery risk. If you're buying on climate impact alone, you're buying a delivery risk you can't see.

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Why failures don't stay contained

In commodity markets with depth and redundancy, a supply disruption is painful but containable. CDR does not yet have that resilience.

A significant project failure in carbon removal is not an isolated corporate event. It slows growth, slows regulatory momentum, and tightens the financing conditions that developers depend upon. The market's lack of redundancy means that accountability is systemic, not just individual. When one project fails, every asset gets a haircut.

This is not an argument against the market. It is an argument for building the infrastructure to make it more reliable — and for buyers to understand which projects are accountability-ready before committing capital, not after.

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Building for accountability

The infrastructure for pricing delivery risk is being constructed. It draws on technical project data — engineering assessments, operational track records — AND technology readiness data which in carbon removal is an inherently scientific data set. All modelled in ways that translate into language a CFO or credit committee can use: risk scores, portfolio stress tests, scenario analysis against regulatory deadlines.

The buyers investing in this intelligence now are mitigating capital risk but also their strategic risk. Without it, you cannot deliver on your brand position, your product's positioning, your regulatory reporting, or your compliance risk.

At CUR8, we have spent three years building the models and datasets to support this. More than 400 project assessments. A risk scoring methodology that has compressed 6 weeks of specialist human review into 6 hours. Powering, the ability to construct diversified portfolios that protect against concentration risk as the market matures.

Living models that get more precise each day, and provide true data traceability (we average 3000+ sourced data points behind each assessment).

Carbon removal's first two chapters were written by scientists and pioneers. Chapter Three will be written by the buyers, financiers, and intermediaries who take delivery seriously.

The companies that are ready for that chapter will define what comes next.

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Click here if you'd like to understand where your risk sits, we'd welcome the conversation.