397: Should Carbon Dioxide Removal Rejoin the Mainstream Carbon Market?—w/ Martin Freimüller of Octavia Carbon

Martin Freimüller is the co-founder and CEO of Octavia Carbon, a direct air capture company in Kenya. He's been listening to this show since 2020 and credits it, generously, with pulling him into carbon removal in the first place.

He's also someone who thought I'd taken a wrong turn lately with grim prognostications, and he had an idea he wanted to talk through.

His pitch: carbon dioxide removal is the prodigal son, and it's time to come home. We've spent the last few years building CDR as a separate category, defining ourselves against the "legacy" voluntary carbon market, trashing clean cooking credits and REDD+ and Verra and basically everyone who came before us.

Martin thinks that was a mistake, and he includes himself in the indictment. He was on stage a year ago telling investors about DAC's explosive growth. Now he's calling clean cooking founders and asking who their buyers are.

He shared some numbers that caught my attention: there are roughly 200 corporates that have ever bought carbon removal. There are about 35,000 buying carbon credits more broadly, and about 3 million individuals. Article 6.2 bilateral deals and 6.4-based transactions are quietly channeling tens of millions of tons of demand per year. The broader VCM is growing. CDR is not, at least not in real revenue recognized terms. Martin's argument is that instead of fighting over the tiny pot of dedicated CDR buyers, we should be figuring out how to sell into the market that actually exists and is expanding.

I found this conversation genuinely moving. Martin is doing something rare in this industry: admitting in public that he was wrong about how he positioned his company and his sector, and sharing an idea that benefits everyone, not just Octavia. That's leadership, and I told him so.

If you're a carbon removal founder who's tired of hearing that bad startups blame their customers, this one's for you.

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⁠⁠391: How Carbon Removal Loses: The End of "Pre-Compliance"

Octavia Carbon

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