Microsoft is the carbon-removal market.

The numbers

Microsoft's fiscal-2025 contracted CDR volume, per its own Source feature and corroborated by ESG Today and Carbon Credits, is approximately 45 million tonnes, across 21 supplier companies, with the bulk delivering between 2030 and 2050 via long-term offtake agreements. The shape of that portfolio matters more than the headline.

The largest single-supplier counterparties in fiscal 2025 are:

• Stockholm Exergi (BECCS, Sweden). Expanded contract to 5.08 Mt across a 10-year term, with plant operational target 2028.
• Chestnut Carbon (ARR, United States). 25-year, ~7 Mt nature-based ARR offtake, an expansion of the December 2023 baseline deal.
• AtmosClear / Fidelis (BECCS, Louisiana). 6.75 Mt, the largest single CDR deal disclosed in 2025.
• CO280 (BECCS in pulp-and-paper). 3.68 Mt.
• re.green (ARR, Brazilian Amazon & Atlantic Forest). Expanded to ~6.5 Mt over the restoration of 33,000 ha.
• Agoro (soil carbon). 2.6 Mt across 12 years (June 2025).

Three observations follow.

Observation 01, BECCS dominates. Stockholm Exergi + AtmosClear + CO280 alone is more than 15 Mt of BECCS volume from three counterparties. ARR (Chestnut + re.green) adds ~13.5 Mt. Together those five contracts account for over 60% of the disclosed volume from named partners, and the methodology mix is approximately three BECCS to one nature-based.

Observation 02, Delivery dates are 5 to 25 years out. Microsoft's Brian Marrs (Senior Director, Energy & Carbon Removal) publicly states that "nearly 100 percent of the carbon removal purchases announced in our current fiscal year will be delivered between 2030 and 2050 via long-term offtake agreements." This is not a spot market. This is a sovereign-bond-like duration profile pasted onto an asset class whose physical underlying, forest, soil, geological storage, has historically been priced in spot transactions.

Observation 03, The supply-curve concentration is extreme. The 21 supplier companies disclosed for fiscal 2025 represent the bulk of buyable durable carbon removal supply globally. The supply curve is short and stiff; the demand curve is concentrated in one buyer.

What "Microsoft is the market" means concretely

The shorthand is uncomfortable but accurate. By CDR.fyi's April 2026 market-structure snapshot, Microsoft accounts for approximately 90% of all durable carbon-removal demand globally. Frontier, the Stripe-Alphabet-Shopify-Meta-McKinsey-Workday AMC, has now passed $1B in committed capital and is the next-largest buyer block. The remaining buyers (Stripe outside of Frontier, Shopify outside of Frontier, JPM, Watershed, individual government schemes) sum to a small minority of buy-side volume.

Concentration of this magnitude has three structural consequences.

Consequence 01, Price discovery is endogenous to one buyer. Microsoft's "what we are willing to pay" is, for practical purposes, the price the market clears at. The 2025 Microsoft + Carbon Direct criteria document is therefore not merely a procurement standard, it is the methodology-level cost-of-capital for the entire durable carbon-removal supply side.

Consequence 02, Supplier bankability is binary. A 2025-vintage BECCS or ARR project either has Microsoft or Frontier as the offtaker, or it doesn't. Without one of those two counterparties, project finance is, in most cases, not bankable, because the alternative offtake universe is too thin to support construction financing.

Consequence 03, Methodology drift is upstream-pressure-only. When Microsoft updates its high-quality CDR criteria (most recent: 2025 update, in partnership with Carbon Direct), the entire supply side has to update its project design. There is no countervailing buyer with enough volume to set a different methodology floor. The "criteria document" is, effectively, monopsony regulation.

The 2026 pause

In early 2026 Heatmap News reported, citing internal Microsoft communications, that Microsoft is pausing new durable carbon-removal purchases. Microsoft has not formally confirmed an indefinite halt; the company's most recent public statement on its carbon-removal programme signals continued contracting, but at a deliberately reduced cadence.

Assume Heatmap's reporting is directionally correct. What happens to the supply side?

Scenario A, Frontier absorbs. Frontier's $1B+ committed capital, plus the addition of newer members to the Symbiosis Coalition (which Microsoft co-founded), could absorb a meaningful share of the gap. The risk: Frontier's per-deal commitments are smaller than Microsoft's, and the Symbiosis RFPs are nature-based-skewed, not BECCS-friendly. The BECCS supply pipeline (Stockholm Exergi, CO280, AtmosClear-scale projects) loses its primary counterparty.

Scenario B, Sovereign / utility entry. The UK's contract-for-difference scheme for CDR, the EU's Carbon Removals Certification Framework, and individual utility commitments (Ørsted, Vattenfall) could substitute over a 24–48 month horizon. The risk: regulatory schemes pay below the Microsoft price; transition is bumpy and bankability erodes for second-tier projects in the interim.

Scenario C, Genuine market freeze. Volumes drop materially in 2026–27. Several second-tier projects fail to reach FID. Supplier consolidation accelerates; the surviving counterparties are the ones with Microsoft offtakes already in hand. The durable carbon-removal market becomes a 5–7-counterparty monopoly on the sell-side mirroring the monopsony on the buy-side.

The plausible outcome is a mix of A and C, Frontier and the new Symbiosis architecture absorb the nature-based gap; the BECCS supply pipeline takes a meaningful hit; second-tier nature-based projects without an existing AMC commitment struggle to clear.

Why this matters for nature-based underwriting

Nature-based CDR is roughly 30% of Microsoft's fiscal-2025 disclosed volume by named-counterparty share. The Symbiosis Coalition (founded May 2024 by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce; expanded to include McKinsey, Bain and REI Co-op) is structurally nature-based-only. The Microsoft pause is therefore disproportionately a BECCS / DAC problem, but the nature-based supply side is not insulated. Three knock-on effects.

Effect 01, Symbiosis becomes the primary nature-based buyer. Symbiosis's volumes are smaller (20 Mt by 2030 ambition) but its criteria-aligned diligence stack, Pachama for intake, Carbon Direct and Xilva for project diligence, becomes the substantive methodology for the entire nature-based AMC space. The first-round offtakes (Mombak in the Brazilian Amazon, Living Carbon in the U.S.) are the proof-of-concept deals.

Effect 02, Methodology floor stays high. Microsoft pulling back does not relax the methodology floor on nature-based; it stays at the Microsoft + Carbon Direct 2025 criteria level because Symbiosis explicitly aligns to that floor. Project developers cannot down-spec.

Effect 03, Underwriting becomes the differentiator. For a nature-based project to clear the Symbiosis (or post-Symbiosis) RFP cycle, it needs a Carbon Direct-grade project pack. That is currently a 6-figure consulting engagement at the developer level. Compressing that production cycle is the work, for developers, for diligence vendors, for the supplier pipeline.

What this means for nature-finance underwriting

For underwriting teams at farmland funds, principal carbon buyers and DFIs, the Microsoft-monopsony market structure has direct portfolio implications.

For farmland and natural-capital funds. Any nature-capital strategy that priced its carbon-side option value against the historical 2024–25 Microsoft / Frontier offtake market needs to re-mark that option. The expected offtake price is lower, the time-to-offtake is longer, the buyer-list is shorter. Update investment-committee models accordingly.

For principal carbon buyers outside Microsoft. The 2026 pause is a buying opportunity. Second-tier projects with strong fundamentals and weak access to advance-market-commitment capital are looking for credible counterparty interest. Symbiosis-aligned diligence is now the price of entry.

For DFIs. Project-finance underwriting for BECCS and ARR projects in tropical jurisdictions needs an explicit "offtake-counterparty-risk" line item. A project that names Microsoft as offtaker has a different risk profile in 2026 than in 2024. The credit risk runs through Redmond's procurement cadence.

The disclosed counterparty list, in full

For deal teams modelling the durable carbon-removal market structure, here is the disclosed counterparty list across Microsoft's fiscal 2025, with named projects:

• BECCS: Stockholm Exergi (5.08 Mt), AtmosClear / Fidelis (6.75 Mt), CO280 (3.68 Mt), plus additional partners not individually disclosed.
• ARR / Nature-based: Chestnut Carbon (~7 Mt), re.green (~6.5 Mt), plus reforestation partners in Latin America not individually named.
• Soil carbon: Agoro (2.6 Mt over 12 years).
• DAC / Other engineered: Disclosed in aggregate; named partner-level disclosure varies.
• Total counterparties: 21 supplier companies for fiscal 2025 per Microsoft Source.

The Brian Marrs read

Brian Marrs's public statements on the 2025 portfolio are worth quoting at length, because they signal the procurement philosophy underlying the 45 Mt number.

On portfolio shape: "Nearly 100 percent of the carbon removal purchases announced in our current fiscal year will be delivered between 2030 and 2050 via long-term offtake agreements."

On methodology: "The 2025 criteria reflect our accumulated experience evaluating hundreds of carbon removal projects."

The implied procurement philosophy: Microsoft is building a durable carbon-removal portfolio with a 5-to-25-year delivery horizon, indexed to a continuously-revised internal quality standard. This is the procurement profile of a strategic buyer building a portfolio it will hold to net-zero, not a market participant providing liquidity.

What to watch over the next 12 months

Q2 2026 onward. Whether Microsoft's reported pause is real, partial or directional. The first formal public statement on procurement cadence will be the read.

Q2–Q4 2026. Symbiosis's second RFP, already announced, and the offtakes it produces. The volume signed by Symbiosis in 2026 is the substantive nature-based-advance-market-commitment market for the year.

Q4 2026 onward. Sovereign and utility entry. The UK CfD-for-CDR results; the EU CRCF first certifications; large utility offtake announcements. These signal whether the buyer base structurally diversifies.

Continuously. Each new Microsoft + Carbon Direct criteria update. The methodology-floor effect propagates through the entire supply side.

Sources and reading list

Microsoft Source · "From farms to oceans: How Microsoft is working to scale carbon dioxide removal," 2026. Primary disclosure.

ESG Today · "Microsoft Doubles Carbon Removal Agreements to 45 Million Tonnes in 2025."

Carbon Credits · "Microsoft More Than Doubles Carbon Removal Deals to 45 Million Tonnes in 2025."

CDR.fyi · "Durable CDR Demand Structure Snapshot: Microsoft, Frontier, and the Rest of the Market," April 2026.

CDR.fyi Microsoft buyer profile. The named counterparty register.

Heatmap News · "Scoop: Microsoft Is Pausing Carbon Removal Purchases," early 2026. The pause reporting.

Microsoft + Carbon Direct · "2025 Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal." The methodology floor document.

ESG Today · "Microsoft Signs Largest-Ever 3.3 Million Tonne Carbon Removal Deal with Stockholm Exergi," 2025.

ESG News · "Microsoft Secures 7 Million Tons of Carbon Removal Credits in 25-Year Deal with Chestnut Carbon."