For ten months Captain Drawdown, our AI-based CDR evangelist, has been building a picture of the carbon removal industry: 913 companies in 65 countries and 55,865 researchers in 170 countries. From now on both databases are open data: versioned, licensed, citable, updated every month. Here is why we do it, and how you use the data with Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini in a few steps.
Our mission is to speed up negative emissions
The Carbon Drawdown Initiative exists for one purpose: to speed up negative emissions. We run field experiments on enhanced weathering, we publish what we find, including the results that did not work, and we are trying to add our voice to the conversations about CDR and the necessary policy (including our support for Negative Emissions Platform).
We are an open data company by conviction. Data moves things forward, and data is what makes a story hold. A decision about the ETS removals programme, a design for a certification process, a journalist's piece on who actually sells carbon removal today, a thesis on where the research sits: each is only as good as the numbers underneath it.
Ten months of building two databases
Captain Drawdown is the AI agent we run with the mission to be an "evangelist for the CDR industry". Every day it reads the carbon removal news, the registries and the new papers, and it maintains three databases: the companies, the researchers, and the shops where a person can buy certified removal with a credit card. We review what it publishes, and we correct it when readers tell us it is wrong.
The company directory went public in March 2026 with 734 companies, seeded from Grant Faber's public list. Since then it has been rebuilt from the ground up, every company has been assessed for signs of life, and it has been refreshed every month. Today the database holds 1,470 active companies, 913 of which are published as suppliers of carbon removal. The researcher census started in March too.
We count permanent removal only: direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, biochar, enhanced weathering, mineralisation, ocean CDR and biomass burial, plus the companies that enable them. Soil carbon research and reforestation is not our focus.
What is in the first open release
Release 2026-11.4, published on 5 November 2026, is the first public release. It holds three datasets.
CDR Company Directory: 913 published companies out of 1,470 monitored, from 65 countries, 403 in Europe and 273 in the United States. Per company: pathway, country, a liveliness tier with a 0 to 100 score, EU SME size class, registry presence and evidence dates. Biochar 377, enabling technology 179, direct air capture 125, BECCS 84. Licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
CDR Researcher Census: 55,865 researchers from 15,896 papers and 11,015 institutions in 170 countries; a calibrated estimate of 51,946 corrects for author records that are still split. Six pathway top lists, each by activity and by citations. Licence CC BY 4.0.
CDR Shops: 14 shops with a live checkout and third-party certification, prices per tonne, re-checked monthly. Licence CC BY 4.0.
The two maps above come straight out of these files, and they show two different geographies. China has 16,476 carbon removal researchers and 9 published companies, India 3,945 and 27. The United States has 6,606 researchers and 273 companies, Germany 1,728 and 73. Research is everywhere. The industry is not, yet.
Plot the two numbers against each other, one dot per country, and the gap is the picture: 106 countries have carbon removal researchers and not a single published company. Among countries with at least 100 researchers, Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden and the Netherlands have the most companies per researcher, China, South Korea and Saudi Arabia the fewest.
Every file is versioned and listed in a manifest with checksums. The files live in the public GitHub repository dirkpaessler/cdr-databases, mirrored at captaindrawdown.com/data and as datasets on Hugging Face; each dataset is archived at Zenodo with its own DOI (companies, researchers, shops). A JSON API and an MCP server serve the same release; Captain Drawdown's technical note walks through all five ways in.
A release every month
From now on we release an update every month, around the 15th. A release covers all three datasets and carries a version number: 2026-11.4 was the fourth cut of November, patches within a month count up. A published release never changes; corrections go into the next one, and v1/latest/ always points at the newest. The changelog lists what changed in each release, down to single corrections. Cite the version with the number, and the number stays reproducible whatever we fix later.
Quick start with Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini
Use the data where it lives, not a copy. A file downloaded in November is stale in December; every path below reads the current release at the moment you ask, and every answer names the version it comes from.
Hand the assistant the map to the files. The release manifest at captaindrawdown.com/data/v1/latest/manifest.json lists every file of the newest release with what it holds, its row count, size, licence and checksum: 37 CSV files, each also as JSON, from companies.csv (913 rows) and researchers_by_country.csv (171 rows) to the top-100 lists per pathway and shops.csv. Paste that one address into Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, ask your question, and the assistant picks the file, fetches it and names the version. captaindrawdown.com/llms.txt is the same front door in plain words, and /api/v1/index.json lists the JSON endpoints for single companies, top lists, shops and headline numbers.
Connect the data as tools. For Claude Code, Cursor and ChatGPT in developer mode: pip install captain-drawdown-mcp, then claude mcp add captain-drawdown -- captain-drawdown-mcp. The server reads the public API when it is asked and keeps nothing older than six hours, so a question about enhanced weathering companies in Germany is answered from this month's release, with the version attached. The setup for ChatGPT and Cursor is on captaindrawdown.com/api.
Spreadsheets and code, always current. The newest release sits behind a fixed address, https://captaindrawdown.com/data/v1/latest/companies.csv (the same under v1/latest/ on GitHub). In Google Sheets, =IMPORTDATA("https://captaindrawdown.com/data/v1/latest/companies.csv") refreshes when the sheet opens. In Python, pandas.read_csv on that address, or load_dataset("carbondrawdowninitiative/cdr-company-directory") with the Hugging Face datasets library, pulls the current release on every run.
Two exceptions, on purpose. If a result must not change, say for a paper, use a version folder such as v1/2026-11.4/ and cite its DOI. And if your assistant cannot read the web, attach the file from v1/latest/, write the version into your notes, and replace it after the next release.
Please cite the data
The data is free to use, and we want it used. The researcher census and the shops are CC BY 4.0: use them for anything, commercial or not, and name the source. The company directory is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, because the seed list we built on carries that licence: non-commercial use, share alike, name the source. A citation looks like this:
Captain Drawdown and Dirk Paessler (2026). CDR Company Directory, version 2026-11.4. Carbon Drawdown Initiative. https://captaindrawdown.com/data/companies/. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23957359
Replace the dataset, the DOI and the version as needed; every API answer and every dataset page carries its own citation line. If you publish something built on the data, a paper, a chart, a story, send us the link. We read everything.
Corrections and improvements
Nine hundred companies and fifty-six thousand people will not be right in every row. If a company is missing or misfiled, if a researcher's record is split or wrongly placed, if a shop has closed or changed its prices: write to info@carbon-drawdown.de or open an issue in the GitHub repository. Corrections go into the next monthly release and are listed in the changelog with the version they landed in. Researchers who want their entry corrected or removed write to the same address; the privacy notice describes what the census holds: authors, institutions and papers from OpenAlex and ORCID, nothing beyond the public record.
