Carbon removal (DAC): where the field actually stands

Direct air capture carries four metrics and 8 milestones here, and it is the field on this tracker where scale has moved fastest while economics have moved least.

Capacity is the frontier number, counting nameplate capacity of operating plants rather than announced ones. Climeworks' Orca in Iceland opened in September 2021 at about 4,000 t/yr, the first commercial direct-air-capture-and-storage plant, pairing capture with permanent mineral storage. Mammoth followed in May 2024 at about 36,000 t/yr, roughly ten times Orca and proof the modular design scales. Then 1PointFive and Occidental's Stratos in Texas began ramping toward about 500,000 t/yr in 2025 — over an order of magnitude larger than anything before it, and the first industrial-scale DAC facility. Heirloom's Tracy plant in California sits at about 1,000 t/yr. From Orca to Stratos is a 125-fold increase in four years.

Cost is the unsolved half. Today's plants run roughly $400–1,000 per tonne captured and stored; Occidental estimates about $600/t for Stratos at scale, and Climeworks and Heirloom both target $600 at scale. The industry goal is about $100/t, the level at which large-scale removal becomes economic. Early plants ran near $1,000. These are operator estimates and they fall as plants scale, which the tracker notes rather than treating them as audited figures.

Demand is what funds the buildout, and it is concentrated. Microsoft has contracted about 6,000,000 tonnes of durable removal, dominating the market; Google's offtake deals total about 500,000. That is a market-size indicator rather than a fixed-goal metric — and a market where one buyer's decisions materially set the pace. Microsoft's multi-million-tonne contracts across suppliers in 2024 are what made durable CDR a real market rather than a pilot category.

Research output runs about 1,741 papers a year.

The field also produced one genuinely unexpected result: Savor made butter-like fat thermochemically from CO₂ and hydrogen with no animals or plants, spotlighted by Bill Gates — proof that captured carbon can become food rather than only storage. Savor is scaling from lab toward pilot production, early stage and not yet at commercial volume.

What remains ahead is the megatonne plant. 1PointFive and Climeworks are building toward single facilities removing about 1,000,000 t/yr, under construction rather than operating, targeted around 2027. The locked milestone is removal at roughly $100 a tonne, dated 2030 — the cost at which gigatonne-scale removal becomes economic. On the current curve, capacity is arriving considerably faster than cost is falling, and the tracker keeps both metrics visible precisely so that gap stays legible.