Microsoft is keeping the still-nascent carbon removal market afloat.
The tech giant purchased 93% of all the carbon removal credits globally last year, according to new research by BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. The data, part of the organizations’ annual Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, marked the first time the groups tracked market demand for carbon removal.
Microsoft’s near monopoly over the sector reflects its goal of removing all the carbon emissions that the company produced since its founding by Bill Gates in 1975. After making the pledge in 2020, Microsoft defined what it considered to be “high quality” CDR and struck long-term deals with startups like Climeworks and Heirloom, which each take distinct approaches to direct air capture.
For now, the industry needs an anchor buyer like Microsoft that’s willing to pay high prices for every ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. That funding, combined with long-term offtake agreements, is helping companies scale up their operations in order to eventually drive down prices.
However, having one buyer dominate the market isn’t a sustainable strategy long-term, and industry advocates argue that governments need to procure CDR on a larger scale for the economics to work.
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Microsoft in 2025 updated its criteria for high-quality CDR, specifying that they must be “additional,” meaning that the removal wouldn’t have happened if not for the purchase of the credits. The update also added that ideally they would store carbon for more than 1,000 years for “high durability.”
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