After what seemed like a quiet year for carbon removal in the U.S., it’s been a noisy few weeks. As Latitude Media first reported, the Department of Energy gave Congress a list of more than 2,000 projects it plans to retain from the Biden era, including two massive direct air capture projects that were thrown into limbo last year when the so-called Department of Government Efficiency swept through the agency.
Then, there’s the confusion about Microsoft’s future role in the market, after Heatmap reported that the tech giant, which has been the top buyer of carbon removal credits in recent years, told some suppliers it is pausing future purchases.
But the broader industry trends over the last few years tell a slightly different story. The center of CDR gravity has been shifting in the last few years: away from massive, standalone projects like the DAC hubs, and toward approaches that deploy within existing, scaled industries like waste treatment, mining, and agriculture.
At this point, industrial partnerships are no longer niche, they’re the default, explained Eli Cain, deputy director of policy at the Carbon Removal Alliance who led the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s carbon removal portfolio during the Biden administration.
Essentially all of CRA’s member companies today work with industrial partners, he added, and that’s not just a reflection of the Trump administration’s agenda. Rather, it’s because investing in infrastructure upgrades and industrial efficiency solutions is an opportunity that’s “too large to pass up.”
“It’s about creating long-term, durable political coalitions for carbon removal,” Cain explained. “Our industry cannot exist in a silo. We have to integrate with existing industries and the existing stakeholders that they have.” That integration, he acknowledged has “accelerated over the last year as we’ve talked less about carbon removals climate impacts and more about its industrial impacts” — but integration was “always going to be the way the industry scaled.”
Wastewater treatment
The two clearest examples of this shift, Cain said, are the mining and waste sectors, which enjoy political durability and relatively strong economics. Both sectors are seeing a lot of momentum at the moment, and therefore have money to spend on increased efficiency and regulatory compliance.
“I really think that wastewater treatment is low hanging fruit for carbon removal,” Cain said, pointing to the regulatory requirements that wastewater treatment facilities must comply with for things like the pH of their discharge.
America’s water infrastructure is old, and requires billions of dollars of investment to make it efficient, he explained. He pointed to Crew Carbon, a Brooklyn-based startup that provides wastewater treatment facilities with a process intensification solution to improve performance, lower costs, and permanently remove greenhouse gases, as an example. Crew is essentially applying enhanced rock weathering, a form of alkalinity enhancement, to wastewater reactors by adding a mineral-dosing retrofit that helps manage nutrients and improves treatment.
Crew, which bills itself as a water technology company, has signed multiple long-term deals with wastewater treatment facilities around the country. The most recent is Virginia’s Hampton Roads Sanitation District, which will deploy Crew’s process at two wastewater treatment facilities in its coverage area. These plants already have permits, which extend to Crew’s retrofit and allow the company to circumvent a massive amount of bureaucracy, explained co-founder and CEO Dr. Jo Katchinoff. That’s compared to something like a greenfield DAC project, which could take years to permit and could run into community opposition and other challenges during the process.
I really think that wastewater treatment is low hanging fruit for carbon removal.
Enhancing wastewater treatment also offers a “social license to operate,” Katchinoff explained. Biological treatment, where microbes remove pollutants and produce carbon dioxide, needs to be managed accurately to work well; if it doesn’t, it can cause facilities to discharge more pollutants into the surrounding environment. By optimizing alkalinity in these wastewater treatment systems, Crew removes CO2 and at the same time improves the efficiency of the legacy infrastructure, which helps both operators — who can then delay if not altogether reduce future capital upgrades — and the nearby communities they serve.
Of course, the legacy CDR company in the waste treatment space is Vaulted Deep, a Houston-based startup using slurry injection tech developed by the oil and gas industry to inject organic waste into deep wells. It’s a potentially enormous business at a time when the country is struggling to find enough landfill capacity. And even though there’s been a negative tinge in carbon removal news recently, co-founder and CEO Julia Reichelstein said that at least for companies working in heavy industry, things are more or less going as planned.
Efforts like the Frontier Coalition, the advanced market commitment aggregating corporate demand for carbon credits, were always supposed to be a catalyst “for bigger and future adoption, whether that be compliance or industries themselves,” Reichelstein said. “I think we’re seeing that play out.”
The early support of tech companies — especially Microsoft — have made a material difference in CDR adoption by large industrial customers, she added.
“Even if we are cost competitive, or sometimes even lower-cost than some of the current options, there’s always some structural barrier — I’d call it high switching costs — for heavy industry,” Reichelstein said. Financing from major tech buyers, she explained, can help change the equation, just as renewable energy credits helped boost solar adoption even as it became cost competitive. “I think the carbon financing piece is really key to having that innovation be adopted,” she added.
Doubling down on domestic mining
The playbook for waste treatment is also being applied to the mining sector, where the majority of material processed is left as waste.
That rock can actually be feedstock for carbon removal, Cain explained. CDR processes can both help active mining operations operate more efficiently and reduce environmental and public safety risks, and serve as cleanup for abandoned mine sites.
“We’ve seen really strong federal interest in this space…for the last two or three presidential administrations,” Cain said. “You’ve seen departmental orders…all with the same goal of increasing domestic mining, and doing it in a more thoughtful way that enables and leverages the new technologies we have to play with.”
That’s where carbon removal comes in. Cain pointed to Travertine, a Boulder-based startup working directly in the lithium mining industry. Travertine takes a unique approach to direct air capture, using captured CO2 to convert mine waste into stable minerals. The byproduct is sulfuric acid, which is then used in mining processes like metal extraction.
Their approach solves multiple problems at once for mining companies, founder and CEO Laura Lammers explained. It lowers the cost of production, reduces the reliance on sulphuric acid, and dramatically reduces the accumulation of chemical waste. And on Travertine’s side, this work with the mining industry makes the startup much less reliant on the voluntary market for success.
“If there’s a benefit to an industrial partner that can reduce costs or give them additional revenue, that’s an easier sell than pure play DAC and sequestration,” Lammers explained. And while it’s important to Lammers and the company to sell the carbon removal aspect of the technology and make it an important part of the revenue stack, she added, in the near term, industrial partnerships are more important for technology deployment.
Travertine, which spun out of UC Berkeley, has several partnerships in the U.S., including with precious metals refiner Sabin Metal and Canadian phosphate mining company Arianne Phosphate.
But there are also international CDR companies looking to capitalize on U.S. mining momentum, said Cain. He pointed to Arca Climate, a Canadian industrial mineralization startup that, like Travertine, turns mining waste into carbon-removing rock. Arca signed a 220 million-ton deal at a nickel mine in British Columbia earlier this year, and at the end of 2025, signed an offtake agreement with Microsoft to deliver nearly 300,000 tons of removal in the next decade.
All of these agreements with private industry and public utility services, Cain said, are essentially for carbon removal’s long-term work of building support that can withstand shifting political winds. “Policy works on long timelines, and our climate goals need to follow those timelines,” he added. The last year under Trump has prompted what was an “inevitable transition” for the industry, he said.
“The way we build political coalitions…is by bringing everyone in and creating a larger tent,” he added. “It’s by working within the agricultural industry to say, ‘hey, we can save farmers money,’ or working within the wastewater treatment sector to say, ‘we can increase the longevity of your water infrastructure.’”
