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I still hear it in meetings. Usually early. Sometimes with a smile.
“So this is basically offsets, right?”
It is not a hostile question. It is an honest one. The carbon market has spent years blurring its own language, and carbon removal has often been pulled into debates it fundamentally does not belong to.
If we keep treating carbon removal as just another form of offsetting, we misunderstand both the climate problem and the type of market needed to solve it.
What Carbon Removal Is. And Why It Is Not Offsetting.
Carbon removal means physically removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and storing it for the long term.
Not avoided. Not reduced elsewhere. Removed.
The storage can happen in the biosphere or the geosphere. Through nature-based approaches such as peatland or mangrove restoration. Or through engineered pathways like biochar, BECCS, DACCS, or enhanced rock weathering.
The methods differ. The risk profiles differ. The costs differ.
What does not differ is the core outcome. A molecule of CO₂ is taken out of the atmosphere and placed somewhere it stays for decades, centuries, or longer.
Permanence is not a feature. It is the point.
What offsets traditionally meant
Historically, offsets were designed to compensate emissions by funding emission reductions or avoidance elsewhere.
Renewable energy replacing fossil generation. Clean cookstoves improving efficiency. Avoided deforestation projects designed around counterfactual baselines.
Some of these interventions delivered real climate and social value. Many did not. Almost none involved permanent carbon storage.
Offsets were built on assumptions. What would have happened without the project?
Carbon removal is built on mass balance. What happened to that tonne of CO₂?
This is not a moral distinction. It is a physical one.
Avoidance, reduction, and why they are not interchangeable with removal
Avoidance and reduction lower future emissions. They are essential. They are also finite.
Once a power grid is decarbonised, it cannot be decarbonised again. Once an industrial process is optimised, marginal reductions become harder and more expensive.
Removal addresses a different problem. Residual emissions from agriculture, aviation, shipping, cement, and legacy CO₂ already warming the system.
Every credible pathway consistent with limiting warming well below 2°C assumes large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal.
There is no net zero scenario without CDR.
Why mixing CDR with offsets breaks the market
When carbon removal is treated as “just another offset,” the consequences are not theoretical.
First, price signals collapse. High-integrity removals with durable storage are compared to low-cost avoidance credits that solve a different problem. Buyers see cost. Developers see no path to scale.
Second, contracting logic fails. CDR projects require multi-year development timelines, upfront capital, storage infrastructure, and robust MRV systems. Spot-market logic cannot finance assets with 20–30 year lifetimes.
Third, trust erodes. Buyers hesitate over reputational risk. Financiers hesitate over demand certainty. Projects stall before Final Investment Decision.
The result is delay. And delay is the one thing carbon removal cannot afford.
Carbon removal is infrastructure, not accounting
Offsets were largely used for annual carbon accounting.
Carbon removal is about building capacity over decades.
Transport. Injection. Monitoring. Long-term liability. Contracts that banks understand and regulators can integrate over time.
This is why long-term offtake agreements matter more than spot purchases. Offtake creates revenue certainty. Revenue certainty unlocks project finance. Project finance turns concepts into operating assets.
This is also why carbon removal increasingly resembles infrastructure finance rather than a traditional commodity market.
What carbon removal is not
Carbon removal is not a license to delay decarbonisation. It is not a cheap substitute for reduction. It is not interchangeable with avoidance.
Used correctly, CDR neutralises residual emissions after reduction has been maximised. Used incorrectly, it becomes a distraction.
The difference lies in structure, integrity, and intent.
Carbon removal addresses the part of the climate equation that efficiency, electrification, and optimisation cannot eliminate.
Once that distinction is clear, the noise around offsets fades away. What remains is a practical challenge: building enough durable removal capacity, fast enough, to meet a demand that climate science already assumes will exist.
Published: January 2026
Author: Thomas Munch, CEO at Pure Carbon Partners
Follow Thomas on LinkedIn
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