Insights from the Carbon Removal Investment Summit – London, May 2026

Overview

If the inaugural 2025 summit set out to ask whether carbon dioxide removal could be financed at scale, the 2026 edition was a working session on how and on what is now blocking the path. The mood was sober rather than deflated: a recognition that voluntary momentum alone will not carry the sector to gigatonne scale, paired with a clear-eyed view that the policy, contracting and financing infrastructure required to do so is now visibly under construction.

• The market has crossed from “promise” into “proof,” but not yet into compliance. Several engineered projects have reached financial close, offtakes are diversifying, and standards are coalescing, but a low and volatile carbon price remains the central economic constraint.
• The capital stack is rebalancing, with a “missing middle” exposed. Banks are willing to finance bankable offtakes; equity is more selective. The acute gap is the first $5–10 million of equity-like capital for early-stage developers.
• MRV is the bottleneck on every panel. Across ARR, soil, ERW, biochar, BECCS and frontier technologies, the discipline that determines bankability is increasingly the measurement, registry and settlement infrastructure, not the underlying technology.
• “Infrastructure thinking” has displaced “innovation theatre.” The framing that drew the loudest agreement was that developers must rebuild their projects to look like infrastructure that banks can underwrite, not venture stories investors must believe.
• Compliance is now the gravitational centre. The UK and EU ETS pathways, the CRCF, the prospect of GGR inclusion by 2028–2029, Article 6.2 bilateral and emerging public procurement (Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden) collectively form the “signals from the future” that are already shaping today’s purchasing and financing decisions.

Cross-cutting themes

Five threads ran through the day with sufficient consistency that they deserve to be drawn out before the session-by-session synthesis.

• The first is the transition from “promise” to “proof,” the phrase the opening remarks established and that recurred in every subsequent session. Speakers repeatedly cited the first GGR projects in the UK’s Hynet cluster — the Enviros energy-from-waste project and the Drax BECCS facility — as illustrative of a market now able to point to financial closes and operational milestones rather than only roadmaps. That shift has consequences for capital: investors are now demanding track record and predictable outcomes, and the projects that cannot produce them are visibly struggling to raise.
• The second is the concentration risk in demand. Microsoft’s dominance, over 70% of advanced offtake commitments globally, was acknowledged by virtually every panel, and described with a mixture of gratitude and unease. The “Microsoft pause” referred to throughout the day captures a structural weakness: a market in which a handful of tech buyers underwrite the demand curve is a market that can be paused by a handful of procurement decisions. The recurring response was that the next phase requires “a thousand real companies”, – manufacturers, financial institutions, pharmaceutical and consumer firms – to begin buying on procurement rather than CSR terms.
• The third is the rebalancing of the capital stack, set out most explicitly in the cCarbon State of the Sector spotlight. Of roughly $11.5 billion committed to CDR to date, around $6.4 billion is equity, $4.5 billion is grants and government support concentrated on engineered pathways, and only $0.7 billion is debt. The implication, reinforced from the Aviva and J.P. Morgan side of the financing plenary, is that the binding constraint is no longer capital availability per se but bankability: contracts, registries, title and settlement architecture that meet institutional standards. “Atomic settlement,” the use of registry and ledger infrastructure to enable simultaneous cash-for-credit transactions, came up repeatedly as the missing piece for both lenders and traders.
• The fourth is the MRV chokepoint, common to every pathway. In ARR, the conversation is about Lidar, geospatial mapping, AI-assisted PDDs and the move to higher-integrity Verra methodologies. In soil, it is about regional tailoring of equations like RUSLE, the treatment of secondary reversal events, and standards built for carbon programmes rather than borrowed from government reporting. In ERW, MRV costs are quoted today at around $150 per ton, with credible projections that data accumulation will bring this towards $5 per ton without sacrificing scientific credibility. In biochar, measurement has advanced to the point where panellists argued permanence can be quantified directly rather than estimated. In BECCS and frontier technologies, the conversation pivots to standardised CO₂ specifications, transport and storage liability, and registry interoperability. The common thread is that MRV is now both the gating issue for debt finance and the precondition for compliance market eligibility.
• The fifth is the “infrastructure thinking” framing, articulated most sharply in Track 2 but pervasive across the summit. The conviction is that biochar, BECCS and increasingly ERW should be presented to capital markets as infrastructure assets — proven systems, repeatable unit economics, long-tenor offtake contracts, IRRs in the 15–18% range — and that developers who continue to present them as venture stories will struggle in the current environment. As one Frontiers panellist put it, the sector must move “from beauty to duty.”

Morning and plenary framing: Between promise and proof

The opening remarks, delivered by Paul Davies in his capacity as Summit Advisor and Chair of the Coalition for Negative Emissions, set the editorial frame for the day with a deliberately balanced “glass-half-full, glass-half-empty” diagnosis. On the optimistic side, Mr. Davies pointed to the inclusion of GGRs in the UK and EU ETS as “absolutely fundamental to driving demand,” the long-awaited endorsement of GGRs by the Science Based Targets initiative, the coalescing of standards around the European CRCF and UK BSI frameworks, and the financial close of the first GGR projects in the Hynet cluster. He cited a Carbonaires RFP that drew more than 200 submissions matching developers to purchasers, the rollout of non-pipeline transport, and his own work on a cluster in Avonmouth that could ultimately host up to 2 million tonnes of GGR projects per year.

On the other side of the ledger, Davies named the carbon price as “the elephant in the room” — “in January 72 pounds a tonne by March it was at 35 pounds a tonne,” he noted, “too low, too volatile to be financed” — and pointed to a pullback from ESG in investor and corporate discussions as a real headwind. He closed with a call directed at the financial sector itself, arguing that banks and asset managers, whose own Scope 1 and 2 emissions are a tiny fraction of their profits, should be “fundamental purchasers” rather than passive intermediaries.

The opening keynote was delivered by Jules Kortenhorst, Co-chair of the Energy Transitions Commission and CEO of Bridge Carbon. Where Mr. Davies surveyed the policy and market landscape, Mr. Kortenhorst grounded the conversation in physics. His framing was that carbon dioxide removal is “not an optional extra, not a Plan B, not something we do if we fail to decarbonize” but a scientific requirement to meet the Paris Agreement goals — a “scientific reality” that follows directly from the carbon budget arithmetic. At present global emissions of roughly 40 gigatonnes per year, he argued, the budget consistent with 1.5°C is effectively exhausted within a small number of years.

Removal capacity needs to scale from approximately 2 gigatonnes today to roughly 12 gigatonnes by 2050 — a roughly six-fold increase — and funding flows must scale in parallel, from under $10 billion today to in the order of $200 billion per year by 2030. Mr. Kortenhorst was emphatic on the portfolio approach: nature-based pathways for nearer-term scale, hybrid pathways (biochar, BECCS) bridging the gap, and engineered pathways including DAC as the only solution that is “effectively unlimited at scale” once energy abundance is achieved. His sharpest line was the temporal warning: “The trees we plant today will be mature forests, delivering sequestration in 2040.” If we wait, the window closes.

The cCarbon State of the Sector spotlight, delivered by Pawan Mehra (cKinetics), then translated the keynote’s framing into market data. The most cited figures from this spotlight became the analytical spine of the rest of the day: the $11.5 billion committed to CDR to date and its split across equity, grants and debt; Microsoft’s 72% share of advanced offtakes (74% of technology-based offtakes); the “valley of death” between TRL 6/7 pilots and commercial scale; and the characterisation of the present moment as pre-compliance — a phase in which signals from anticipated 2028–2030 regulation are already shaping today’s procurement and capital decisions. Pawan’s analogy of the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 — markets transitioning “slowly, then all at once” from one infrastructure paradigm to another — was picked up by several later speakers.

The scale of funding so far | cCarbon

Another headline from the spotlight concerned operational supply. Pawan noted that where last year the annual CO₂ removal capacity was at roughly 12.5 million tonnes, this year’s estimate is approximately 18 million tonnes of annual CO₂ removal capacity created — with biochar identified as the leading breakout on the strength of its modular deployment and lower infrastructure dependency, rapid growth in soil carbon issuance capability, and ERW and mineralisation flagged as the “new kids on the block,” where roughly 97% of issuances and retirements have occurred since 2025. His near-term projection pointed to actual removal capacity reaching 35–61 million tonnes over the next three years.

Estimated Current CDR Capacity | cCarbon

With the market data and the keynote’s physics framing now on the table, the day moved into two back-to-back morning panels — one on demand, one on capital — before breaking into parallel tracks after lunch.

Session 1 on Carbon Removal Demand Dynamics panel, was moderated by Pawan Mehra and featured James Screen (UK DESNZ), Rui Kakuda (Sumitomo Corporation Europe), Sebastien Dewarrat (ClimeFi), and Stephen Smith (CO2RE / Oxford Net Zero). The synthesis was unambiguous: voluntary demand, while now genuinely doubled year-on-year once Microsoft is excluded, remains too concentrated and too discretionary to underwrite the gigatonne pathway.

The transformative demand signal is compliance integration — the UK plans to legislate for GGR inclusion in the ETS by 2028; the EU CRCF and forthcoming methodology updates including ERW are in train; Japan’s GX-ETS and bilateral Article 6.2 mechanisms are emerging as high-integrity, high-price channels. Public procurement (Canada and Switzerland as direct buyers; Denmark and Sweden via reverse auctions) was singled out as the lever most capable of crossing the engineered-pathway “valley of death.” Stephen Smith’s line — “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” — captured the panel’s recurring concern that national CDR inventories lack the international guidance to ensure consistent accounting.

Session 2 on Following the Capital, moderated by Upendra Bhatt (cKinetics) brought Agustin Silvani (Bregal Sphere Nature), David Gardner (Gresham House) and Alastair Northway (J.P. Morgan) into a conversation that translated demand-side optimism into financing reality. Two framings recurred. The first was Northway’s diagnosis that the market today is “still a carbon hobby rather than a market” — meaning that without title, registry interoperability and atomic settlement, banks cannot lend at scale. The second was Silvani’s countervailing conviction that “demand solves everything”: a sufficient compliance signal would force the legal, contractual and infrastructure work to follow. The tension between these two positions — whether bankability infrastructure will pull demand or whether demand will pull infrastructure — was the most productive disagreement of the day.

Track 1 insights – ARR, Soil, and Enhanced Rock Weathering

Afforestation and Reforestation

The ARR panel — Esben Brandi (BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group), Suraj Vanniarachchy (Macquarie Group), Neelesh Agrawal (Calculus Carbon) and moderator Harry Horner (cKinetics) — opened with a striking statistic: roughly 30% of all advance offtakes ever announced in ARR have occurred in the nine months between June 2025 and the summit. The momentum is real, and its character has changed. Where 2025 framed ARR as a long-payback, slow-revenue pathway most attractive in mixed-asset configurations, 2026 framed it as a sector now experiencing genuine demand pull, increasingly from buyers willing to pay for high-integrity, “removal-first” credits rather than legacy avoidance instruments.

Three insights crystallised. First, institutional capital still prefers ARR with mixed revenue streams — timber alongside carbon — and continues to find pure carbon plays difficult to underwrite. Brandi’s observation that institutional investors are “extremely uncomfortable” relying exclusively on carbon revenue is the single best summary of the bankability gap. Second, the buyer base, while still anchored by Microsoft and Meta, is showing signs of “reverse discount on scale” — larger projects can secure better pricing because they reduce the due-diligence burden on major corporate buyers.

Third, MRV innovation (Lidar, geospatial mapping, AI-assisted PDDs, the move to Verra VM0047) is materially compressing project preparation cost and time, even as panellists insisted that experienced foresters remain irreplaceable in managing delivery risk. The open question, and an explicit tension,  is whether offtakes alone are sufficient to unlock debt, or whether three-way negotiations between developer, buyer and financier (the pattern seen in recent landmark deals) will remain the operating model.

Compared with 2025, the panel’s tone on ARR sharpened in two ways: the discount that buyers attach to avoidance-style credits is now sharper and more explicit; and compliance integration is no longer treated as a distant prospect but as a near-term floor that will set the trajectory of pricing over the next 12–24 months.

Soil carbon

The soil panel — featuring Giulia Stellari (Fall Line Capital), Laurène Aigrain (Cygnum Capital), Ellen Brookes (British International Investment), Tripurari Prasad (Climate Asset Management) and Dan Lambeth (British Society of Soil Science) — was the session in which the sharpest evolution since 2025 was visible. The dominant frame is no longer that soil carbon is a venture-stage technology problem; it is that soil carbon is a commodity-and-co-benefits play in which carbon revenue is “the upside, not the base.” As one panellist put it, “if it doesn’t work for the farmer, it won’t work as an investment.”

Capital by Actor| Cygum Capital

Three threads stood out. The first is the regional variability of approaches: Grow Indigo’s joint venture in India leveraging Mahyco’s six-decade rural distribution network; the US conversation centered on existential topsoil erosion (with the staggering 7.7 million tonnes per year figure cited by the panel); and the African context where smallholder aggregation and LOA quality remain binding constraints. The second is the dMRV question, where uncertainty translates into heavy discounting and large buffer pools, and where panellists called for measurement standards designed for carbon programmes rather than borrowed from agricultural reporting.

The “secondary reversal” problem — a farmer using a tractor to remediate erosion thereby disturbing sequestered carbon — was raised as the kind of issue current standards do not yet handle elegantly. The third is sovereign risk: Ghana’s progress and Nigeria’s recent LOA improvements were positive examples; Kenya, which has a framework but has yet to issue LOAs, was a cautionary one. One panellist recounted being on the verge of signing when a host country issued a new carbon framework taxing top-line revenue at 40% — a vivid illustration of how quickly a sovereign decision can reset project economics.

The recommendation that emerged was that soil carbon, today, is suited to equity rather than debt: the 12–18 month repayment cycles that debt requires cannot be reconciled with the biological pace of sequestration. The role of development finance institutions like BII in providing patient, technical-assistance-rich early capital — eventually crowding in private commercial capital — was framed as central to scaling.

Enhanced rock weathering

The ERW panel — featuring Jim Mann (UNDO) , Ed Phillips (Future Planet Capital) and  Benedikt Kratochwil (Carbon Removal Partners) — was perhaps the cleanest example of the day’s “infrastructure thinking” frame. ERW is OpEx-driven rather than CapEx-driven; the technology itself is, as one panellist put it, ultimately “the dumb business of spreading rock on a field,” with complexity concentrated in the science, the IT and accounting layers, and the financing structure. The current MRV cost — around $150 per ton — is expected to fall toward $5 per ton as datasets accumulate; current Frontier-style offtake prices of $300–$400 per ton are expected to settle toward a long-run clearing price closer to $200 per ton, with the most efficient configurations potentially reaching $50–$60. ERW is under consideration for EU CRCF methodology development.

ERW Investment Case| Carbon Removal Partners

The financing story is where the panel was most instructive. UNDO’s deal pattern — a three-way negotiation between developer, offtaker (Microsoft) and financier (Barclays), supported by additional debt structuring with BII — is being treated as a template. The lesson is uncomfortable: many offtake agreements signed today, even with marquee buyers, are not fit for purpose for traditional lenders. To unlock debt, developers must rebuild contract and software stacks to provide the data transparency banks require, often accepting interest rates above 10% along the way.

The panel’s most quoted line — that developers must “stop expecting capital markets to meet them halfway and instead reengineer their business models to look like infrastructure plays that banks can understand” — could equally have been said in the biochar or BECCS sessions. The most interesting forward-looking idea was the bundling of ERW with super-pollutant abatement to create “temperature neutralisation” claims — combining the immediate cooling impact of super-pollutant work with the long-duration durability of weathering to pull financing forward.

Compared with 2025, ERW has moved from being a venture-stage technology curiosity to a financeable but still venture-and-early-project-finance proposition, with a clear bridge to bank debt now beginning to be visible.

Track 2 insights – Biochar, Frontiers of CDR Innovation, and BECCS

Biochar

The biochar panel — Benjamin Schulz (Altitude Carbon), Mauricio Benitez (Big Valley), Alastair Collier (A Healthier Earth), and Hamed Sanei (LOC Laboratory, Aarhus University) — set the year’s clearest example of how a CDR pathway can mature from narrative into asset class. The panel’s framing was that biochar today has the best unit economics in carbon removal, supports IRRs of roughly 15–18%, and is reaching the stage where the second and third plant in a developer’s pipeline can integrate debt and project finance rather than relying on equity alone. The deliberate rhetorical pivot — Collier’s “don’t start with carbon; don’t start with the climate; start where your investor lives: cash flows, contracts, certainty” — captured a shift in posture that the rest of Track 2 then echoed.

Biochar Investment Case| Big Valley

Several substantive points stood out. Feedstock control and logistics are now treated as the dominant determinants of project risk and price, with the most competitive projects built around cheap biomass access and embedded inside industrial supply chains rather than retrofitted to them. Regional viability is increasingly differentiated by an emerging set of regional buyer preferences: UK and European buyers paying premiums for domestic credits, with Global South production remaining cost-competitive but facing acceptance constraints in some Northern markets.

Permanence was discussed in measurement rather than narrative terms — modern characterisation enables direct quantification — and the panel argued that 300-year permanence is operationally sufficient for current climate goals, with CRCF treatment moving toward acceptance of biochar as a permanent removal. Barriers to scale sit in the “missing middle” between sub-$25 million pilot scale and the $100 million-plus thresholds at which institutional infrastructure investors will deploy.

Frontiers of CDR innovation

The Frontiers panel — Andrew Shebbeare (Counteract), Tim Kruger (Oxford), Patricia Silva (Satgana) and Matt Jolley — was the most candid session of the day on the “financing winter” facing deep-tech CDR. Rounds are taking 9–12 months; companies are pivoting toward e-fuels, industrial chemicals or secondary commodities to survive until the carbon market matures; and the strongest signal in investor behaviour is “de-risking” — Shebbeare’s wry observation that if you asked him what was “sexy” in CDR today, the answer would sadly be “de-risking.”

De-risked Scale| Counteract

Technologically, the panel’s most provocative claim was that the first megatonne of frontier removal is more likely to come from water-based pathways — alkalinity enhancement via existing river and wastewater infrastructure — than from headline DAC. The reasoning is economic: water-based systems leverage existing flows and infrastructure, reducing both CapEx and the energy intensity that has historically been DAC’s binding constraint. Kruger’s “lime cycle” — a relaxed-capture middle ground between ERW and DAC, with weeks-to-months kinetics and a sellable end-product for construction or water treatment — was offered as a similar example of pathways that look more like industrial chemistry than venture-style innovation. DAC itself was framed as a “30-year game,” a long-run “infinite” solution whose role is to become cost-effective and scalable as nature-based and hybrid pathways approach their marginal cost ceilings.

Silva’s observation that a number of frontier pathways are being funded “not because they have the best science, but because they have the best industrial partners on their capital back” was perhaps the most diagnostic line of the session. The pattern that is emerging is that frontier CDR business models increasingly depend on industrial co-location — wastewater plants, bio-gas facilities, data centres, mining operations — to provide feedstock, engineering validation, secondary revenue, and the regulatory comfort banks now require.

Kruger’s call for the “dullification” of CDR — moving from “voluntary, artisanal projects” to “highly regulated, global compliance markets,” from “beauty to duty” — was, perhaps unexpectedly, the line most likely to be quoted from the day. It is also, in editorial terms, the closest the summit came to a manifesto.

BECCS

The BECCS panel — Georgia Berry (Green Finance Institute), Jasper van Balen (Rabobank), Erik Rylander (Stockholm Exergi) and Misha Glubokovskiy (Standard Chartered) — converged on the Stockholm Exergi project as the year’s defining case study. The roughly $1 billion FID reached in 2025 was made possible by stacking three legs of revenue: European Innovation Fund grants, Swedish state aid in the form of long-term per-tonne support, and large private offtake agreements including a substantial multi-year deal with Microsoft. The lesson the panel drew was that first-of-a-kind BECCS at scale is achievable only when government, voluntary and energy-system revenues are layered together.

BECCS Stockholm | Stockholm Exergi

On policy, the panel’s expectations were specific. The UK is designing a GGR business model around Carbon Contracts for Difference, with the intention of including biogenic CO₂ in the UK ETS from 2029. The UK has, in the meantime, revised its 2030 CDR target downward — from approximately 5 million tonnes to around 0.7 megatonnes — while continuing to project a substantial surge to 21.8 megatonnes by 2035; the panel was candid that this revision reflects the difficulty of moving individual first-of-a-kind deals to FID rather than any retreat from ambition. The CRCF was welcomed as a positive directional signal, with the open question being how interfaces between national subsidy regimes and the wider ETS will be designed.

The structural concerns the panel raised were cross-chain in nature: CO₂ volume risk if storage hubs are not ready when emitters are, the absence of a standardised CO₂ specification, long-term leakage liability, and the cost gap between offshore (more expensive) and onshore (more socially contested) storage. The SAF angle was treated as a meaningful demand lever rather than a primary revenue source — flexibility within SAF mandates to include CDR could unlock the scale of demand needed to bring further BECCS projects to FID. Rylander’s line — “demand is for sure the industry’s biggest challenge … you cannot negotiate deals over a few thousand tonnes if you have a project with 800,000 a year” — encapsulated the mismatch between voluntary buyer scale and project-finance scale that compliance markets will need to close.

Getting Towards Gigatonne Scale

The evening joint session — moderated by Michelle You (Supercritical) with Greta Talbot-Jones (Aviva Investors), Doris Honold (ICVCM) and Dr. Gabrielle Walker (CUR8) — was the editorial centre of gravity of the day. It moved the conversation from technology and finance to the system-level conditions under which today’s project-by-project momentum could compound into gigatonne-scale outcomes.

Four arguments, distinct but connected, ran through the panel. The first was the maturity gap: Supercritical’s experience that roughly 80% of projects fail their initial quality review captures how far developer data rooms, financial models and DD packages still need to travel before they can engage institutional capital at scale. Closing the gap will require deliberate supply-side development programmes, not only demand-side stimulus. The second was the “first $5 million” problem: the panel was emphatic that banks today are willing to finance projects with de-risked offtakes in the $10–20 million range, and that the binding constraint has migrated upstream, to the early equity-like capital that gets projects to the point where banks will engage.

The third was the infrastructure narrative shift: Honold’s framing that developers must “pitch for infrastructure, not for climate” — and that “de-risking is sexy” — articulated a now-common conviction that the language of CFOs and project finance committees must replace the language of mission and morality if institutional money is to flow at scale. The fourth was the pre-compliance dynamic: Walker’s “signals from the future” framing — that anticipated 2028–2035 regulation (UK and EU ETS integration, SBTi updates, CRCF methodologies, ISO standards) is already shaping today’s procurement and CFO budget decisions — captured why the present moment matters even though compliance demand is not yet on the balance sheet.

The panel was explicit about realistic trajectory. The current period is a “great pause” or consolidation phase, in which learning from delivery shortfalls (the panel noted some buyers receiving under 40% of contracted volumes) is reshaping contracting practice. The 2030s are likely to see growth led by nature-based solutions, which have the highest TRL and shortest path to scale, with engineered removals taking the dominant share later in the decade as costs fall and compliance markets deepen. Walker’s two analogies anchored the realism of the panel: “operation: get the money in the hands of the people with the shovels” as a description of CUR8’s mission; and “it takes nine months to make a baby, no matter how many people you put on the job” as a reminder that scaling timelines, like biological ones, cannot be wholly compressed by capital.

What would have to be true for gigatonne scale to materialise was, in the panel’s distillation, a fivefold condition: that carbon becomes a standardised, liquid commodity with transparent pricing; that developers close the maturity gap and present institutional-grade DD packages; that regulators and buyers create a “grace period” for early-stage technology to fail without punishing the asset class; that CFOs, not CSR departments, hold the budget lines; and that credits become fungible across voluntary, compliance and Article 6 markets.

Closing keynote and reflections

The closing keynote was delivered by Chris Hayward, Policy Chairman of the City of London, framing CDR as moving from a “marginal” activity to a “central economic opportunity” — and arguing that the UK is uniquely positioned to lead, on the strength of North Sea sequestration geology, the concentration of more than 170 banks and the depth of London’s legal and contracting infrastructure. The speech’s most provocative move was a deliberate defence of profit-as-catalyst: “if I have a project which makes money and absorbs carbon, why can’t I make more money? Because if I make more money … I’ll go do more of it.” Where 2025’s closing reflections centred on the capital stack, 2026 closed on integrity infrastructure and personal responsibility.

Two calls to action stood out. The first was a proposal for a financial-style AAA-to-C credit-rating system for carbon credits, replacing the present pass/fail binary with a transparent, public scale in which price reflects degree of integrity and risk. The second was unusually personal: a challenge to the audience to become individually carbon neutral as a precondition for credibly persuading institutions to do likewise. “It’s so much more inspirational to demonstrate and not to preach” is the line most likely to travel.

The day’s closing remarks from the cCarbon team underlined that the scale of the challenge is at once individual and collective — that “a room full of people like this, and maybe ten thousand other rooms full of people like this” is the realistic minimum coalition required to bring CDR to meaningful scale.

Implications for investors, policymakers, and project developers

For investors, the operative question has shifted from which pathway to which point of entry. The capital stack has rebalanced enough that each pathway now has a recognisable financing seat: equity-led for soil; venture-to-early-project-finance for ERW and frontier; project finance for biochar; infrastructure for BECCS; mixed-revenue structures for ARR. The discipline that will differentiate returns over the next 12–24 months is less pathway selection than MRV diligence — increasingly the decisive determinant of whether an asset is bankable or stranded. The Microsoft concentration in offtakes is a portfolio risk in itself: exposure to pathways whose demand curves depend on a single buyer should be priced accordingly.

For policymakers, the summit’s clearest message was that credible compliance timelines are worth more than headline price support. The 2028–2029 ETS inclusion pathway in the UK and EU is already shaping today’s capital decisions; slippage would be costly in a way that no incremental subsidy can offset. Beyond ETS design, three quieter levers carry disproportionate weight: faster Article 6.2 LOA processes, visible public procurement schedules, and standardised CO₂ specifications with clear long-term liability rules. The counterwarning is on sovereign predictability — recent instances of abrupt host-country tax and framework changes have demonstrated how quickly project economics, and investor confidence, can be undone.

For project developers, the practical translation is to build for the lender, not the believer. That means contract architectures, data layers and reporting disciplines designed to be underwritten; offtakes structured for bankability from day one, with three-way developer–buyer–financier negotiation as the default operating model; and pricing models that treat carbon as upside in soil and ARR, as core revenue in biochar and ERW, and as one of three stacked legs in BECCS. The strategic risk is no longer the technology — it is presenting a fundable project in the language CFOs and credit committees use.

Recommendations and opportunities — the next 12–24 months

The summit pointed to a tight set of priorities for the period ahead, several of which are both realistic in scope and material in impact:

• Design offtakes for bankability from day one. The UNDO–Microsoft–Barclays pattern should be treated as the default rather than the exception, with three-way structuring built into the contracting workflow.
• Invest in MRV as core infrastructure. Falling unit costs in ERW and the move toward direct measurement in biochar are leading indicators; the same discipline now needs to extend across soil, ARR and frontier pathways.
• Develop the first $5–10 million of patient equity. This is the most acute bottleneck identified at the summit and the one most amenable to coordinated action by DFIs, philanthropic capital and specialist climate funds.
• Diversify the buyer base beyond Big Tech. Procurement-led purchasing by financial institutions, manufacturers and pharma firms — pricing CDR at a fraction of profits rather than as a discretionary CSR line — is the realistic route out of concentration risk in advance of compliance demand.
• Sequence compliance signals. Earlier and clearer policy clarity on UK and EU ETS inclusion, faster Article 6.2 LOA processes, and visible public procurement schedules would do more than any single price intervention to crowd in capital.
• Build out integrity rating infrastructure. A financial-style rating system for credits — replacing pass/fail with a transparent scale — would let pricing efficiently reflect risk and would make portfolio construction tractable for institutional buyers.
• Pursue industrial co-location for frontier pathways. The frontier panel’s evidence is that pathways with strong industrial partners are reaching scale; this should be an explicit design principle for both developers and their backers.

Next steps

The 2026 Investor Conclave generated a body of cross-capital-stack ideas which cCarbon will frame and release in a follow-up whitepaper. The Carbon Removals & Offsets Monitor (CROM) and the Carbon Removals Market Compass continue to be developed as freely available reference infrastructure. The next CRIS edition is being planned, and the convening will continue the conversation on demand, integrity and the path to compliance markets.

To get involved in CRIS 2027 — as attendee, partner, speaker, workshop co-host or investor conclave participant — contact events@ckinetics.com.

Our next convening for the Canadian-curious folks out there is the Canada Clean Fuels & Climate Markets Summit in Toronto on the 21-22^nd October,2026.

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