How to Explain Carbon Removal Technology to Investors and Buyers

This guide covers the whole carbon removal story, from pathway and MRV to buyer and investor. For offtake and carbon removal purchase agreements, read What Is an Offtake Agreement and Why Does It Matter for FOAK Climate Tech?.

In May 2023 Frontier, a coalition of companies that buys carbon removal in advance, announced a $53 million offtake agreement with Charm Industrial, a contract to buy removals Charm would deliver in future. The headline described a large future commitment. A buyer still had a simpler diligence question. It wanted to know which tonnes existed today and which existed only because a contract said they should be delivered later. In 2024 Charm announced its first carbon removals verified by the registry Isometric, delivered to buyers including Stripe, Shopify and JPMorgan Chase. Those two announcements belong in the same story and in different columns, whether or not the delivered tonnes sat under that particular contract. Frontier's agreement is evidence of demand. The verified deliveries are evidence that the environmental product exists.

Every carbon removal claim sits in one of those columns. A tonne can be designed into a plant, contracted to a buyer or delivered and verified, and each state proves something different. The explanation works when a reader can follow one tonne from atmospheric carbon through removal and storage to a verified delivery and can see at each step which column it sits in. Ambition can be large as long as the states underneath it stay separate, and a buyer can value both a contract and a delivery without having to infer which is which.

Start with the physical pathway

Carbon dioxide removal takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores it through a defined pathway. Direct air capture, bioenergy with carbon capture, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, ocean approaches and forestry all use different mechanisms and storage reservoirs.

The first job of the explanation is to make that pathway retellable. Say where the carbon starts, what captures or binds it, what inputs the process consumes, where the carbon goes and what prevents it returning quickly to the atmosphere. The pathway sets up the diligence that follows. Geological storage raises questions about injection and wells. Forest storage raises reversal questions. Ocean pathways raise measurement and boundary questions. A reader should know which questions apply before the market-size slide arrives.

Attach the inputs to the tonne

Every removal process consumes something. Energy, biomass, minerals, land, water, sorbents, transport and industrial equipment all appear somewhere in the sector.

Those inputs determine cost and create emissions of their own. Gross capture therefore has to be separated from net removal under a defined accounting boundary. The specific calculation varies by pathway and standard. The communication discipline stays the same. Name what the system measures directly, what it models, what sits inside the boundary and what remains outside it. A buyer comparing suppliers will eventually make this comparison, and a company gains credibility by making the arithmetic visible before diligence forces it into the open.

Measurement belongs inside the product

The buyer is paying for a removal claim that has to survive scrutiny. MRV stands for measurement, reporting and verification. Some registries say monitoring. It is the system a project uses to quantify that claim, document it and have it checked under a published methodology. Some variables are measured directly, some are modelled and some are estimated with conservative deductions. Sensors, mass balance, laboratory analysis, remote sensing, operating logs, life-cycle data and models can all feed the final figure. A website that implies one device counts every tonne is making a claim the methodology probably does not support.

Reporting turns those observations into a record. That needs a documented process with data quality checks, version control, stated assumptions, a defined boundary and a rule for missing or uncertain data. Registries publish their own rulebooks. Isometric, for example, has released a white paper on monitoring, reporting and verifying carbon removal. Link to the protocol your project uses and name the version, so a specialist can check your logic without asking.

Verification raises confidence in a claim, and it has a defined scope. A verifier typically reviews data, methods, calculations and compliance with a standard for a stated period. Future performance sits outside that scope. "MRV verified" on its own is too vague to help a buyer. Name the verifier, the standard, the methodology version, the monitoring period and the quantity verified.

Show uncertainty too. A model can produce a precise-looking number while the estimate underneath still carries a range. Where the methodology uses confidence intervals, conservative deductions or uncertainty discounts, explain them. Expert readers already expect a range, and showing it tells them the company has applied the discount the buyer would otherwise apply in private.

Monitoring also has a cost. In open systems such as soils and oceans, proving the tonne can require significant measurement infrastructure. That belongs in unit economics alongside the physical removal process.

Durability needs a mechanism and a rule

Durability describes how the carbon is stored and the expected persistence of that storage. One headline number does not explain the claim. A reader needs the storage mechanism, the evidence behind its stability, the monitoring that continues after storage and the rule that applies if carbon is released.

Standards bodies have started to set explicit storage thresholds. Puro.earth, a carbon removal standard and registry, announced that Puro Standard CORCs will require 100 years minimum carbon storage. CORCs are the carbon removal certificates issued under its standard. For a developer certifying with Puro, that rule becomes part of the claim and of the evidence it has to hold. The storage mechanism, the monitoring plan and the reasoning behind the expected storage period all need to support the threshold. Stated together on a public page, the rule and the evidence tell a buyer which test the tonne has passed.

Hannes Junginger of Carbonfuture, whose platform records carbon removal activity for projects certified under third-party standards, described one way to give durability a shape when we interviewed him in December 2023. Carbonfuture attaches a sequestration curve once an activity is quantified. “Instead of simply stating that we remove a ton of carbon, we specify the amount removed and how long it will be sequestered.” That is his account of his company's product at the time, and the curve is only as good as the measurement and standard behind it. It still turns durability from a single adjective into a record a buyer can read against time.

Different pathways manage reversal through different systems, including buffer pools, make-good clauses and minimum storage periods. In forestry and restoration, where trees can burn or be cleared, monitoring and the buffer work together. Thibault Sorret, founder of the restoration standard ERS (now Equitable Earth), described that link in a September 2023 interview. “We use satellite imagery to gather information every three months about the health of our projects. It allows us to understand the projects that our organisation certifies, follow up on them, and use any buffer pool credits needed to replace any missing credits from the market.” Sorret was describing his own standard's rules, which apply to forestry and restoration and say nothing about geological or mineral storage. A rule like his only reassures a buyer who can follow it. When we worked with ERS, part of the brief was to make digital monitoring, reporting and verification clear and easy to take in. The strongest commercial explanation in any pathway says who carries the loss if storage fails, which can matter more to a buyer than another statement about theoretical permanence.

Buyers and investors use the same facts in different order

A buyer starts with the tonne. They care about quality, verification, delivery date, price, portfolio fit and the claim they can make once delivery occurs. An investor starts with the company and asset. They care about pipeline, unit economics, capital intensity, project delivery, demand depth, policy exposure and whether later plants improve on the first.

Both read against rising formal infrastructure. The European Union's Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming framework has moved into implementation, including certification methodologies for permanent removal pathways, and the US Department of Energy launched its $35 million Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize in 2023 with monitoring, reporting and verification requirements attached.

The fact base should stay consistent across both readers while the hierarchy changes. A buyer should not have to reverse-engineer a venture deck to discover delivery conditions, and an investor should not mistake a signed purchase agreement for proof that the plant can be built economically. Our guide to offtake agreements covers the buyer's contract in more detail.

Maturity labels protect the strongest evidence

Carbon removal claims span laboratory results, pilots, demonstrations, contracted projects, construction, operating assets and delivered removals. Each state proves something useful. Problems begin when the language blends them.

Capacity can mean nameplate design, permitted volume or actual output. Pipeline can mean signed projects or early conversations. Contracted tonnes can be confused with delivered tonnes. A diligence team that finds one word used three ways will start checking every other figure. Cost claims carry the same risk. Florian Tiller, founder of the Berlin direct air capture start-up Ucaneo, gave a target below €300 per tonne within three years in his April 2024 interview, and named the question every direct air capture company has to answer about the scale at which its cost holds. Our guide to first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plants opens on that question. A target stated with its scale and date reads as a target, and the same number without them reads as a price.

Brighter Future will not use capacity, contracted volume and delivered removal as interchangeable signals of scale. We will also not compress durability into a single number if the underlying reversal rule and storage mechanism are missing.

An MRV evidence stack for a public page

A public MRV page can give a non-specialist a route through the logic and give an expert a route to the detail. The stack below works as a checklist.

• Physical pathway, and what happens to the carbon
• Measured variables, observed directly
• Modelled variables, calculated or inferred
• Boundary, the emissions and processes included
• Protocol, the methodology and version that govern the calculation
• Verifier, who reviews it and for which period
• Durability, the storage mechanism and the reversal rule
• Uncertainty, what remains and how it is treated

Ask someone outside the company to read the page and write down, from the page alone, each of those eight lines. Every blank marks a place where the removal claim carries more confidence than the explanation beneath it. Start with the blanks a buyer would ask about first, usually net accounting and durability.

When the page leaves blanks and the data exists, our climate science communication work writes all eight lines into a page a buyer's specialist can check.

One tonne, made inspectable

The 2024 edition of the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report estimated that seven to nine billion tonnes of CO2 will need to be sustainably removed each year to meet climate targets. Buyers still purchase individual tonnes from specific projects under specific rules, and the billion-tonne story becomes credible only when the one-tonne story is inspectable.

Junginger's sequestration curve is what one inspectable tonne looks like. It says how much carbon was removed, by which activity and how much of it is still stored at each point in time, and a buyer can hold that record against the claim on the label. Scale is that record repeated until the numbers reach the size of the problem, and each repetition is only as credible as the single tonne a buyer could open and check.

Sources and further reading

• State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, Oxford, 2024
• IPCC AR6 carbon dioxide removal factsheet
• CRCF certification methodologies, European Commission
• Carbon Dioxide Removal Purchase Pilot Prize, US Department of Energy
• Frontier's first offtake agreements
• Charm's first Isometric-verified deliveries
• Hannes Junginger, Carbonfuture, founder interview, December 2023
• Thibault Sorret, ERS, founder interview, September 2023
• Ecosystem Restoration Standard case study
• Monitoring, reporting and verifying carbon removal, Isometric, 2025
• Raising our ambition, Puro Standard CORCs will require 100 years minimum carbon storage, Puro.earth
• What Is an Offtake Agreement and Why Does It Matter for FOAK Climate Tech?
• Carbon Company vs Project Story
• What Is FOAK in Climate Tech?