Emerging Permanent Carbon Removal Pathways
Brennan Spellacy, CEO of Patch, on the API layer of the carbon stack
The biggest change in carbon markets is that supply is shifting from promises about avoiding emissions to physical systems that lock CO2 away in rock, concrete, or ocean chemistry for centuries to millennia. In practice, that means buyers can now choose from a much broader menu of durable removal pathways, including direct air capture with geologic mineralization, concrete mineralization, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and biomass based ocean storage, while older forestry projects are being upgraded with tighter monitoring and ratings.
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Direct air capture moved from pilot to commercial supply during this period. Climeworks combined DAC with underground mineralization in Iceland in 2017, launched Orca in 2021 at 4,000 tons per year, and helped establish a model for permanent, metered carbon removal that turns captured CO2 into stone in under two years.
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New durability pathways also appeared outside geologic storage. Heirloom showed DAC CO2 stored in concrete through mineralization in 2022, and Frontier-backed ocean alkalinity projects like Planetary and CarbonRun are commercializing approaches that convert CO2 into stable bicarbonate in ocean and river systems for very long term storage.
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What grew alongside new chemistry was new quality control. Patch described third party registries, post transaction monitoring, and integrations with ratings firms like Sylvera and BeZero, which reflects a broader market shift from simply issuing credits to measuring whether the underlying asset is still there and still working.
The next phase is a split market. Commodity offsets will keep getting squeezed, while durable removal suppliers with strong measurement, financing, and software distribution will win the highest quality demand. That favors marketplaces and buyers that can compare very different project types side by side and route capital toward the few pathways that can scale without sacrificing permanence.