S4 #8 | CDR Buyers Deep Dive - Part 1: Why The £$€¥ is Anyone Buying This?

In the first part of our buyers deep dive, Tom and Emily start with a deceptively simple question: why is anyone buying carbon removal at all? In a market with no universal mandate, high prices, and a dash of reputational risk, the real surprise is not that buying is hard. It’s that any company manages to do it in the first place.

In this episode:

💸 Why Buying CDR Can Look Completely Irrational: From a CFO’s perspective, carbon removal can look expensive, risky, hard to explain, and suspiciously like something that arrived in their inbox before the budget meeting. So what gets a purchase over the line?

🌱 Belief, Conviction, and Backing the Market Early: For some buyers, the motivation starts with a simple premise: carbon removal will be necessary, so the industry needs support now. 

🏢 From Climate Values to Corporate Strategy: Conviction matters, but no market scales on vibes alone. We explore how CDR gets translated from ‘the planet needs this’ into something that can survive contact with a spreadsheet and at least one sceptical colleague from finance.

⏳ Buying Early as a Competitive Advantage: What if carbon removal is not just a climate gesture, but a strategic hedge? We unpack the argument that early buyers are not simply purchasing tonnes for today, but locking in future relationships, terms, and access to supply before the market tightens.

⚖️ Responsibility, Risk, and the Long-Term Licence to Operate: As climate regulation evolves, investors pay closer attention, and supply chain pressures grow, will carbon removal start to look less like a nice-to-have and more like part of how some businesses are preparing for the future?

🔀 Putting It All Together: No one wakes up one morning, points at a carbon removal contract, and says: yes, this alone will save the quarter. This episode traces the messy mix of motives that gets a purchase over the line.

👥 Featuring

Guest insights from:

• Alexander Farsan (Klarna)
• Adam Fraser (Terraset)
• Caroline Corbett-Thompson (Wise)
• Paolo Piffaretti (ClimeFi)
• Leila Toplic (formerly of Carbonfuture)

Hosts: Tom Previte and Emily Swaddle

Producer: Ben Weaver-Hincks