Everybody agrees we need more CDR buyers, but did you ever try to buy certificates yourself?
To offset our own emissions at Carbon Drawdown Initiative, we wanted to buy durable carbon removal certificates. We wanted them delivered this year, so-called “vintage 2025” certificates, or at least delivered in the next 12 months. “Durable removal” means methods that take CO₂ directly out of the atmosphere and store it in a durable manner for hundreds or even thousands of years and more, we consider only these as climate relevant. Afforestation does not fulfill this premise, and carbon offsets backed by somebody reducing their emissions are no removal at all.
Turns out, buying durable CDR certificates based on timely removal is not exactly easy. Very likely, this is one of the reasons why there are so few medium and smaller buyers in the market. One buyer, Microsoft, dominates the market (they bought 93% of all CDR in Q2/2025). They have a whole team whose purchases in Q2/2025 were 30 times more than buyer #2, which was 5 times larger than buyer #3. What’s missing are many smaller buyers, including SMBs and private purchasers. These buyers do not want to buy something for delivery in 5 years or more and hire a team to do so.
We wanted just 200 tons. Here is our shopping experience on the voluntary carbon market:
Step 1: How much CDR do we need?
First we needed to come up with a number of tons to be removed. We considered all activity in 2025 and added up the emissions. The biggest single chunk was the heating of our greenhouse (10 t of fossil heating fuel caused 23 t of CO₂ emissions). For the rest of our greenhouse and other activities, we came up with emissions of 50 t, including transport of soils & samples, lots of lab work, equipment, travel, and online services. Then we have flights and travel of our team (e.g. to conferences), altogether some 25 t in 2025. BTW, Climeworks has a good personal footprint online calculator together with Doconomy and the UNFCCC Secretariat.
Our emissions sum up to approx. 98 tons, which we doubled to 200 tons as our target purchase to support the CDR industry.
Step 2: What methods can actually deliver hundreds of tons in 2025?
We all know that the carbon dioxide removal industry is in its infancy and it is very much a future-oriented market. This shows in the latest quarterly market statistics from cdr.fyi:
CDR Purchased in Q2/2025: 15.5 Mt (which is BTW more than all historic purchases in total)
CDR Delivered in Q2/2025: 0.113 Mt (only 0.7% of purchases)
More than 99% of currently sold CDR certificates will be delivered sometime in the future, in some cases, the delivery is planned/promised for in several years.
When we look at the recent deliveries of different CDR methods, we find that 90% of the 113 kt delivered in Q2/2025 were based on biochar carbon removal (BCR). Only 0.1% came from enhanced weathering. DAC or BECCS don’t even show up in the data. It seems like they still need to build their plants - which is the general problem of the whole industry: An enormous amount of infrastructure needs to be built to serve even just the current demand for removal. And this is only the beginning.
Step 3: Finding vendors and purchase certificates
For us, it was mandatory that the removal of the CO₂ from the atmosphere will happen/has happened in the current year or at least in the next 12 months. We could have simply gone to a large biochar company and purchased our 200 tons there, but we wanted to learn more about the current state of the industry.
So, we started by asking our portfolio companies if they have CDR certificates “vintage 2025”. Many vendors were sold out for 2025 and offered delivery in the following years, but we wanted 2025. 8 weeks and some 50 emails later, we had collected a small CDR portfolio of around 100 tons. Then we purchased some tons on various websites. Until we finally “filled up” by purchasing biochar credits from the marketplace Carbonfuture.
Most of the certificates were certified by third parties like Isometric, but we also bought self-certified certificates, when certification was not yet possible and we trusted the vendors.
In total, we now have bought 214 tons of CDR vintage 2025+ with a biochar share of 59%. EW is 26%.
On average, we paid € 194 per ton with a range from € 134 to € 500 per ton, a total of 41 k€. Only Graphyte and Wren had a simple-to-use online-shop where you could just go, select a number of tons, and pay by credit card. For all others the purchase process always required a conversation with sales, then an invoice via email, and finally our financial team needed to figure out how to send money to 6 different countries. So much hand-holding… Who doesn’t love a seemingly endless email exchange with sales and accounting people for a handful of tons of CDR? Of course, we are spoiled by the frictionless Amazon.com shopping experience… The CDR customers want this!
Conclusion
Overall, the experience was sobering. Despite the fact that we were very flexible regarding the purchase price per ton and we looked globally for options, it was really difficult to buy CDR certificates with timely delivery 2025+ that did not only come from biochar.
The amount of hand-holding necessary to complete the purchases was immense. More than 50 emails for 223 tons? We clearly need more streamlined online shops where the selection and purchase of a few tons of CO₂ can be finished in 2 minutes using a credit card, e.g. when someone quickly wants to offset a flight with durable CDR.
Everybody talks about the need for more buyers in the carbon markets, but there isn’t much attractive infrastructure for small buyers or private individuals to actually buy CDR. Shopify is hosting online shops for CDR, so the basic e-commerce infrastructure is already available. But options are few….
The voluntary carbon market has a long way to go…. We need to make it easier for buyers, especially the smaller ones, and we should aim for a one-click-buy B2C-Online-Shop mindset in the process! This new offering also needs to reduce the complexity of the market (Which method? Which certification? Which permanence? etc.), so there is much less need for sales conversations and long explanations.
Quite likely, it will be hard to run this as a pure B2C company, as the current demand from individuals and small businesses will likely not generate enough service royalties for an intermediate platform to even become ramen profitable. But some of the companies that already sell CDR in a B2B context should be able to make this leap forward.
If you know of other possibilities to quickly purchase durable, timely CDR online in addition to the ones we are listing below, let us know! We will happily extend the list.
We found the following online shops for durable carbon removal credits:
Carbonfuture: US$ 150/ton and up (various vendors)
https://platform.carbonfuture.earth/balancer/portfolios
Climeworks: US$ 500/ton for durable removal (7 years delivery)
https://climeworks.com/actnow
Char2Cool: €20/ton (includes methane avoidance)
https://char2cool.org/shop-fuer-co2-kompensation/
Wren: US$400/ton
https://www.wren.co/offset-anything?portfolio=trailblazer
Heirloom: US$ 1000/ton (sells to US customers only, delivery unknown)
https://heirloomcarbon.myshopify.com/products/individual-removals
Graphyte: US$ 200/ton (2-3 years delivery)
https://graphyte-credits.myshopify.com/
PS: Onlineshops added later:
https://www.octaviacarbon.com/remove-co2
https://inplanet.earth/purchase/
