97% of all the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits sold have yet to be delivered.
- Delivered: 3%
- Contracted, not yet delivered: 97%
Excluding Microsoft and Frontier purchases, CDR demand grew 151% yearly from 2021 to 2025.
The 49 million tons of CDR credits not yet delivered will be made from feedstock sourced through a CDR supply chain that does not really exist yet. Almost every ton depends on biomass or alkaline minerals as a feedstock.
- In the first quarter of 2026, biochar made up 93% of all durable CDR tons contracted.
- In 2025, Microsoft agreed to buy 6.75 million tons of carbon removal over 15 years from AtmosClear, starting when its plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, opens in 2029. The plant will burn sugarcane bagasse and forest trimmings, then capture and store the carbon dioxide underground.
- In 2025, Microsoft also agreed to buy up to 4.9 million tons of carbon removal through 2038 from Vaulted Deep, which injects biosolids, manure, paper sludge, and food and agricultural residues deep underground.
Sources: CDR.fyi, Q1 2026 durable CDR market update · Biofuels Digest, AtmosClear and Microsoft (2025) · Fidelis, AtmosClear agreement with Microsoft (2025) · Renewable Energy Magazine, Vaulted Deep and Microsoft (2025)
Every new supplier means gathering the evidence for feedstock eligibility from scratch. Registries check where each feedstock came from, what would have happened to it without CDR, and whether buying it pulls material away from another user or incentivizes a supplier to create more of it.
- Isometric requires evidence of each feedstock’s counterfactual fate, such as five years of history from the supplier, purchase records, or an assessment of the feedstock’s most economically viable alternative use.
- Isometric checks each feedstock’s sustainability criteria every reporting period and asks for weigh scale tickets or equivalent records for each batch.
- Puro.earth’s 2025 biochar methodology dropped the European Biochar Certificate’s list of eligible feedstocks and set its own rules for which feedstocks qualify and what evidence proves it.
- Puro.earth requires biochar developers to keep detailed records of every feedstock purchase, including its source, quality, and batch.
Sources: Isometric, Biomass Feedstock Accounting v1.3 · Offstream, Puro.earth 2025 biochar methodology
Registries reduce the risk of a feedstock transaction causing market leakage by limiting what a CDR developer can pay for feedstock. The caps protect the credit, but they leave suppliers little reason to send their material to CDR. Direct evidence of counterfactual fate and leakage can be gathered and assessed before any feedstock changes hands. This does three things:
- It gives registries an evidence-backed assessment of leakage risk to use in place of the price-paid proxy.
- It gives feedstock suppliers a real reason to sell into CDR.
- It builds stronger, more committed supply chains for CDR developers.
- Isometric’s zero-leakage pathway applies only when the payment to the supplier is no more than the cost of recovering, transporting, and replacing the feedstock.
- Outside that pathway, Isometric caps what a developer can pay a feedstock supplier at one of three limits:
- 5% of the revenue from the supplier’s operations;
- two times what the supplier would otherwise pay to dispose of the feedstock;
- 5% of the supplier’s total revenue at benchmark prices.
- Puro.earth’s 2025 biochar methodology now requires each project’s life cycle assessment to count indirect emissions from market leakage and land use change.
Sources: Isometric, Biomass Feedstock Accounting v1.3 · Offstream, Puro.earth 2025 biochar methodology
Biofuel and biocarbon plants are scaling fast, and many of them run on the same residues and wastes that CDR needs. Once a feedstock has a bioenergy user, its counterfactual fate changes. Without CDR, it would have become biofuel decarbonizing the economy. Bioenergy turns the feedstock counterfactual into a lower-carbon scenario, so a CDR credit on that feedstock is less additional than it claims.
- U.S. renewable diesel and other biofuels production capacity grew more than 5x from January 2021 to January 2026.
- In 2024, Synagro agreed to supply biosolids to Firefly Green Fuels to make sustainable aviation fuel in North America. Biosolids are also one of the main feedstocks Vaulted Deep injects underground for CDR.
- In 2023, steelmaker ArcelorMittal agreed to buy biocarbon from CHAR Technologies in Ontario, which makes it from residual wood such as used pallets and sawmill offcuts. Biochar CDR draws on the same kinds of wood residues.
Sources: EIA, renewable diesel and other biofuels capacity · Biobased Diesel Daily, Firefly and Synagro (2024) · Renewable Energy Magazine, Vaulted Deep and Microsoft (2025) · Sustainable Business News, CHAR and ArcelorMittal (2023)
A FEED designation proves the eligibility, non-durability, waste status, counterfactual fate, and leakage risk of every feedstock stream it designates.
The FEEDstock Desk moves it to the CDR developers building the gigaton era.
Every ton of feedstock must be genuine, non-durable waste with no previous or potential downstream productive users. Chain of custody, weights, moisture, carbon content, contaminants, certifications, and legal sourcing must all be documented.
Each CDR developer sends its own data requests, sampling plans, and site visits, often asking for the same records in a different format. You hand over sensitive information such as supplier lists and volumes to every developer who asks. Developers that can’t verify the evidence themselves either walk away or price the risk into what they pay you.
FEED packages the evidence and analysis with a specific stream of your material and presents it in the format each CDR registry uses. The results travel with the feedstock to registries and verifiers, and annual monitoring keeps the FEED designation current.
Without evidence from the supply shed, many CDR registries cap the price a developer can pay for feedstock. A small payment is unlikely to push a supplier to produce more of a waste or residue, and it can’t outbid another user of the stream. Those are the two kinds of market leakage the caps guard against. FEED assesses both directly, with evidence registries can weigh in place of a price cap. That evidence makes your feedstock more valuable and gives you a path to being paid what it’s worth.
Once part of your stream is designated, sell your feedstock directly to CDR developers or through the FEEDstock Desk. Ecostrat buys through the Desk as a principal and takes ownership of your feedstock, so it can pool demand from many CDR developers and commit to buying from you. That gives you one counterparty, Ecostrat, at a known price, with steady demand behind it. The Desk builds your sales pipeline and handles transport and delivery, so you never field a developer’s data requests or negotiate deal by deal.
Turn a disposal cost into a CDR commodity.
CDR developers need evidence for every ton of waste they buy. A FEED designation gives each of your waste streams that evidence, including what the waste would have done without CDR and whether selling it causes leakage. That evidence turns your disposal cost into a premium feedstock that CDR developers can use to back the credits they sell.
Let low-value slash pay its way out of the woods.
A FEED designation gives slash and invasive species removals the evidence CDR developers need to buy them. Material you once paid to burn or haul can now help pay for fuel reduction and cleanup.
The costs start upstream with origination, evidence gathering, hauling, and surprises like an endangered species on a harvest site. They follow the feedstock into your plant, where wet, contaminated, or off-spec loads drag down yield.
At the registry, weak evidence on counterfactual fate or leakage becomes a credit deduction or reversal. This risk in particular will grow as bioenergy producers compete for feedstocks with no other users today.
FEED runs a techno-economic analysis of each stream’s evidence against temporal supply shed data, producing counterfactual and market leakage findings that sit upstream of, and independent from, the price-paid proxies registries use to track leakage.
Every FEED-designated stream can be bought directly from the supplier or through the FEEDstock Desk. Buying through the Desk gives you a turnkey solution for your supply chain, with feedstock delivered to your site and evidence delivered to your verifier’s desk. Buying in volume from one supplier? You can sponsor a FEED designation for that supplier and buy its feedstock without the premium for as long as you sponsor its designation and monitoring.
| Cost & liability | What changes | Handled by |
|---|---|---|
| Origination | Designated feedstock sourced, aggregated, and contracted for you. | FEEDstock Desk |
| Evidence & analysis | Evidence and analysis completed for each stream before you buy. | FEED designated |
| Feedstock emissions | Emissions from collecting and processing each stream, calculated in the format of each registry’s life cycle assessment. When you buy through the FEEDstock Desk, transport emissions are included too. | FEED & FEEDstock Desk |
| Site constraints | Species and cultural-site screening completed before harvest on land-based feedstock. | FEED designated |
| Supplier incentives | Leakage analysis independent of price proxies, so upside can reach CDR feedstock suppliers and keep supply committed. | FEED designated |
| Logistics | Hauling, scheduling, and delivery to your project site. | FEEDstock Desk |
| Operations | Every delivery spec’d to your process, to keep wet, contaminated, or off-spec loads out of your plant. | FEEDstock Desk |
| Supply security | Backup supply at the same spec, so one failure won’t stall your plant. | FEEDstock Desk |
| Verification | Evidence delivered to your verifier’s desk, ready to recompute. | FEED designated |
| Credit deductions | Guards against deductions over feedstock durability, counterfactual fate, or market leakage. | FEED designated |
| Bankability | A derisked, evidenced supply chain your buyers and future investors can trust. | FEED & FEEDstock Desk |
Registries, verifiers, rating agencies, marketplaces, buyer advisors, buyers, and investors all depend on records that start with a supplier and pass through a CDR developer. That evidence arrives in a different form every time. It is often incomplete, rarely consistent from one supplier to the next, and hard to defend under scrutiny.
Each evidence package includes a crosswalk to the feedstock requirements of the most established CDR registry’s protocol. You can see where each requirement is met and trace it back to its evidence. When feedstock moves through the FEEDstock Desk, the Desk sends the FEED evidence package directly to the verifier the CDR developer hired. All of this is in place before any feedstock changes hands, so problems surface long before a credit is issued.
A verifier assigned to a project using FEED-designated feedstock sees the complete, unredacted evidence package. The feedstock work arrives done and mapped to the registry’s protocol, so every project that uses a FEED designation takes less time to verify.
Screened rating agencies, marketplaces, buyer advisors, buyers, and investors can request a FEED evidence package for any designated feedstock stream at no cost. Commercially sensitive data, such as source lists and pricing, is redacted for anyone not party to the transaction. A shared FEED designation lets everyone downstream see and trust the supply chain behind a CDR project.
A subscription adds an API that brings FEED designations into your tools, with alerts when a designation changes status and a portfolio view of the streams behind your credits.
We want to work with you. Tell us what would make FEED more useful in your verifications, ratings, or trades.
Registries set the rules and issue the credits. Verifiers check the evidence. FEED supplies it, ready to recompute.
A FEED designation records that a feedstock stream’s evidence and analysis meet the published FEED standard and support its claims on eligibility, non-durability, waste status, feedstock emissions, counterfactual fate, and leakage risk. Registries and their verifiers decide whether that feedstock earns credits.
- The FEED standard is public.
- FEED fees are set before any designation and never depend on the outcome.
- FEED-designated feedstock can be sold to anyone, not just through the FEEDstock Desk.
- Ecostrat never selects or pays the verifier, and every result can be recomputed.
Ecostrat has been in the biomass business for over 25 years. We’ve built one of the largest biomass supply networks in North America and use it to rate biomass supply sheds. Our Carbon Markets division builds on that foundation for the future of the biomass economy.
Help us build the CDR supply chain.
Come talk to us about building the supply chains needed for the gigaton era of CDR.
We’ll reach out with details as the division and the standard develop.