Beyond the First Frontier: What Comes Next for Carbon Removal 

Over the past decade, the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) landscape has experienced transformational growth. The sector has evolved from a small number of hopeful start-ups to a burgeoning industry defined by more than 30 different removal approaches and hundreds of companies employing geochemical, biogenic, and synthetic technologies.  

In our past work, RMI has discussed the necessary role CDR has to play in stabilizing and mitigating global emissions, what the industry might look like at scale, and the available levers that can be utilized to accelerate critical deployments from a policy and markets perspective.  

Recently, however, the US CDR landscape has experienced some headwinds, including the termination of several first-of-a-kind government programs, such as the innovative Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hubs. These domestic policy changes have had downstream global consequences, including a decrease in traditional CDR investment and the closure of dozens of CDR ventures as funding contracts across the ecosystem.  

As questions surrounding where the industry will go from here continue to grow, it is important to pause for a reality check on the CDR landscape as a whole. Where does the industry stand today? How far has it come since its earliest days, and what steps need to be taken this decade to ensure it can reach scale before 2050? To answer those questions, we must understand the journey of CDR so far, the reality of today’s industry, and the breakthroughs that must be pursued in the near term if the US carbon removal industry is to meet removal targets. 

The Story So Far 

While the conceptual foundation for CDR dates back more than five decades and the first carbon offset program just celebrated its 37th birthday, the CDR industry as we know it today still exhibits many of the hallmarks of a new industry. Most of the technologies that the broader climate community recognizes today as central pillars of the CDR industry have only come into focus over the last ten years.  

• The first commercial direct air capture (DAC) facility was launched in 2017. 

• The first mineral alkalinity enhancement (MAE) project came online in 2022. 

• The first pilot-scale surficial mineralization project began in 2023. 

• The first commercial wood vault biomass direct storage project was constructed in 2023. 

• The first large-scale bioenergy and carbon capture power generation facility is scheduled to begin operations by 2027.  

These milestones represent more than individual technologies emerging from lab-scale trials; they are demonstrative of the meaningful growth the sector has had while still being in its infancy.  

In addition to deployments and FOAK projects, the number of companies that have been founded in the CDR sector over the last decade also highlights this sectoral growth. There are now as many as seven hundred total companies working on more than thirty unique removal pathways. These companies have been supported by more than $3 billion of private capital investment since 2021, complementing the nearly $12 billion in cumulative removal credits sales as of Q1 2026. Despite the reduction in US governmental support, RMI’s analysis is illustrative of an industry that is navigating headwinds amidst tangible growth. 

However, even with the progress that has been made over the last decade, it is important to acknowledge that the CDR industry still has a long way to go if it is to deliver at the scale necessary for global net-zero targets by 2050. As international guidance continues to reinforce the importance of reducing emissions while addressing historical emissions in order to avoid the worst impacts of rising global temperatures, the task ahead for the CDR sector is clear: deliver gigatons worth of removals annually by 2050 or risk permanently exceeding 1.5° C of warming. Several reports, including our own analysis, indicate a need for as many as ten gigatons of carbon removal annually by 2050. 

What Comes Next 

To make significant scale-up possible, many of the CDR approaches on the market today must still overcome significant technical and economic barriers, including high costs, resource and energy constraints, and lengthy deployment timelines. Additionally, at a project level, companies are struggling to meet construction deadlines and deliver at nameplate capacity, causing leaders in the CDR space to raise alarms that real-world deployment and investment must scale rapidly to keep gigaton-scale removal in reach. 

It is increasingly clear that meeting these removal targets will necessitate innovation and advancements beyond incremental improvements and shared learnings. Technological breakthroughs, including the integration of CDR into industrial processes and increases in CDR capture efficiency, will be critical for scale-up.  

In RMI’s new report, The New Frontiers Report for CDR (NFR), we shed light on breakthroughs that could bring near- and long-term removal benchmarks within reach. In order to better arm private capital and philanthropies with guidance as to how to allocate funding, the report calls out five innovative breakthrough areas that should be targeted for priority investment for each of fourteen distinct CDR approaches. The report also highlights one major breakthrough for each of the three approach taxonomies — biogenic, geochemical and synthetic CDR — which RMI believes could have an outsized potential to positively impact cost, efficiency, and removal efficacy at scale. 

1. Biogenic CDR: Specialty engineered cultivars that can achieve 30%+ of photosynthate storage in stable, long-term carbon pools and 85% stability over 100-year time scales. 

2. Geochemical CDR: Microbially mediated mineralization that helps to achieve mineral dissolution rates that are ten times higher than natural abiotic rates while increasing the fraction of stable cations to greater than 50%. 

3. Synthetic CDR: DAC processes that are capable of reactive capture of CO₂, achieving greater than 85% of captured carbon in final products and enabling an energy intensity of less than four hundred kJ/mol °C. 

Additional technical breakthroughs identified in the report range from automation in feedstock transport and MRV to integration of microalgae fertilization processes on maritime shipping vessels, but share a central goal of decreasing costs, improving capture rates, and enabling deployment at scale.  

The gap between current deployment levels and the removals needed by mid-century remains significant. However, success is possible if resources and funding are deployed strategically, and with urgency, toward the innovations capable of fundamentally changing the sector’s trajectory, while continuing to build supportive market and policy structures. Given that CDR remains a nascent industry, the decisions and investments made this decade will play an outsized role in determining what carbon removal can deliver in years to come. The NFR guides those decisions and investments by identifying innovative breakthroughs now in order to unlock carbon removal’s next frontier before the end of this decade.