Nori Tackles Supply-Side Carbon Bottleneck
Paul Gambill, CEO of Nori, on tokenized projects for social good
The bottleneck in carbon removal is getting more verified tonnes onto the market, not finding buyers. Nori is built around the idea that large buyers already want removals, but small project developers and farmers face high upfront verification costs, opaque pricing, and bespoke brokered sales. By turning each tonne into a standardized asset and paying suppliers more directly, the model is trying to make new supply easier to finance and easier to sell.
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In practice, the supply problem starts with project economics. Nori describes traditional registries as expensive and slow, with manual records, limited price visibility, and meaningful upfront certification costs. Its soil carbon program cut supplier verification cost to about $4,000 and had paid nearly $1.5 million to farmers across about 86,000 tonnes sold at the time of the interview.
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Comparable infrastructure companies were solving a different layer of the stack. Patch focused on helping buyers procure and manage portfolios across many projects, while also giving developers software for inventory and commercialization. That contrast helps explain Nori's claim, Patch reduces buying friction, while Nori is trying to pull more sellers into the market in the first place.
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External market development since 2023 supports the core point. Stripe Climate and Frontier are explicitly organized around pre ordering future carbon removal supply, and Microsoft said in May 2025 that it had signed nearly 22 million metric tons of carbon removal contracts in FY24. The market signal is strong, but buyers are still contracting forward because current supply is scarce.
The next phase of the market is a race to industrialize supply. The winners are likely to be the platforms that make it cheap for project developers to get financed, verified, and sold into long term demand, because buyer appetite is increasingly visible and the scarce asset is no longer intent, it is deliverable inventory.