The United States pays more to build engineered carbon removal than any other country on earth. Section 45Q hands direct air capture projects $180 for every ton they pull out of the air, one of the most generous climate subsidies written into law anywhere.
Now look at what companies are actually buying. Direct air capture makes up 2% of the largest US buyer's contracted removal portfolio. Nature-based removals still outsell technical ones. The pathway the government has backed hardest is not the pathway the market has chosen.
That gap is the most revealing thing about US carbon demand, and it is not really a story about preference. It is a story about what was already there. Almost every feature of the US buyer base traces back to infrastructure built for some other purpose and inherited by the voluntary market. That is why demand looks the way it does, and why it has proved so difficult to broaden.
Our report, The US Carbon Market: Buyers, CDR and the Cost of Standing Outside A6, sets out who holds the volume and where supply is heading. This piece takes the buyer side in more detail: who is writing the cheques, what they are buying, and what that means if you are trying to sell a US project.
Among US buyers, nature-based removals continue to outpace technical removals.
The reason sits in a compliance program, not a voluntary one. California's cap-and-trade offset program has issued more than 267 million offset credits as of the end of 2024, and 81% of those came from forest projects across the continental United States and Alaska. Peer-reviewed analysis puts 84% of credits with improved forest management projects since 2012.
Fifteen years of protocol development, accredited verifiers, registry infrastructure and experienced project participants were built to serve a state compliance market. The voluntary market inherited all of it. When a US company decides to buy, domestic forest credits are the deepest and best-understood option in front of them, because a regulator spent a decade and a half making them so.
That also explains a feature of the US buyer base with no equivalent anywhere else. Alaska Native and Native American entities sit among the largest US retirers, which follows directly from the scale of land they hold and the forest protocols written to credit it.
Section 45Q pays $85 per ton for point-source capture and $180 per ton for direct air capture, values preserved under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025 alongside utilization parity and transferability.
Read carefully what that subsidy does. It pays for the capture. It makes the facility financeable. It does not create a buyer for the credit.
Buyers have gone somewhere else entirely. According to CDR.fyi, biomass carbon removal and storage accounted for 96% of durable CDR purchase volume in 2025, led by BECCS at 69% of the total. On the delivery side, BiCRS methods made up 91% of volume, with biochar responsible for 80% of that.
So the pathway carrying the largest per-ton federal incentive is not the pathway carrying the market. Biomass routes are the ones reaching delivery at scale, and for a developer that is the more instructive signal than the subsidy schedule.
The US CDR buyer base has roughly doubled since 2022, to 69 buyers in 2026. Volumes have moved the other way this year. More companies are buying removals and each is buying less.
The most useful framing of this comes from CDR.fyi's split between contracting and delivery. Excluding Microsoft and Frontier, the rest of the market accounts for only 17% of contracted tons but 90% of delivered tons and 94% of retired tons.
Two different markets are running at once. The contracted market is a forward commitment from a very small number of very large buyers. The delivered market, the one where credits actually change hands and get retired, is already far broader than the headline purchasing figures suggest. A developer reading only the offtake announcements will badly misjudge who their realistic customer is.
The companies buying credits from US projects in 2026 include Google, Lenovo, Ascend, Range Resources and NW Natural.
Two technology companies, a chemicals manufacturer, a natural gas producer and a gas utility. Technology and telecommunication accounts for 6.2% of US retirements. Energy, airlines and agriculture between them account for roughly half.
The origination implication is direct. The crowded conversation is with technology buyers. The larger and less contested one is with industrials, utilities and gas producers.
Two forces are moving, and neither is US federal policy.
The SBTi published Corporate Net-Zero Standard Version 2.0 in June 2026, recognizing carbon credits formally for the first time and requiring large companies to buy removals from 2035, starting at 1% of ongoing emissions and rising to full coverage by their Net Zero year. Targets set from 2027 must follow V2. That is aimed squarely at the long, shallow buyer tail.
Airlines remain the only US sector buying under an international compliance obligation, which is why they sit so far above their economic weight in retirement volume. We have covered how airlines source CORSIA Eligible Emissions Units separately.
The constraint on all of it is eligibility. With no US project able to obtain a Letter of Authorization since the country's Paris Agreement withdrawal took effect on the 27th of January 2026, the international demand that might absorb the gap between US supply and US buyers is out of reach.
For anyone positioning a US project, three things are worth watching: whether delivery-stage buyers rather than offtake headlines become the practical route to revenue, whether the 2035 SBTi requirement converts the long tail into volume, and whether industrial buyers turn out to be where the next tranche of demand comes from.
The full report covers the buyer breakdown, CDR offtake activity, CORSIA supply and demand scenarios to 2035, and the forecast for US supply by project type through and beyond 2035.