Carbon Removal Hits Record Quarter as Study Probes Pricing

The price of a carbon credit depends more on who is buying it than on the benefit it delivers, according to new research from MIT Sloan School of Management. Analysing more than 7,200 transactions between 2018 and 2024 — around 11% of the global secondary market by value — the study found that buyer identity alone accounted for 62% of price variation.

Experts discussing carbon removal innovation as industrial technology with a forest ecosystem in the background. AI generated picture.

Prices ranged from a few cents to more than $100 per tonne for credits representing the same volume of emissions reductions. The 20 largest buyers paid 16% to 23% less than the rest of the market, and financial services and consumer goods companies paid 9% to 22% more than industrial manufacturers. Firms with public sustainability commitments paid in line with everyone else, including for higher-quality credits.

Credits from less reliable technologies that carry other benefits, such as forest protection and clean cookstoves, sold at two to four times the price of more dependable routes such as waste management and industrial efficiency. Florian Berg, the MIT Sloan principal research scientist who led the study, said that “super pollutants are traded for much less because the story is not as nice.”

Demand for durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) reached new levels over the same period. A market review from ClimeFi reports that buyers beyond Microsoft committed to a record 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO₂) in the second quarter, 136% more than in the same quarter of 2025, across 14 deals, the most it has recorded in a single quarter. The City of Stockholm became the first public authority to buy at scale, agreeing 750,000 tonnes from Stockholm Exergi.

ClimeFi values the quarter’s commitments at $676 million and puts cumulative commitments at 45.9 MtCO₂, an increase of 83% on the previous quarter. Three large deals lifted bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (Bio-CCS) to a 60% share of commitments, up from 2% in the first quarter, and biochar again passed 1 MtCO₂. The quarter also saw the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) publish Version 2.0 of its Corporate Net-Zero Standard, which introduces an Ongoing Emissions Responsibility (OER) programme recognising high-integrity carbon credits for the first time.

Taken together, the market data and the research point to buyers placing growing weight on the characteristics of individual projects. The study’s authors argue that publicly available price benchmarks, supported by a requirement to report transaction prices after a short delay, would help the market set prices more efficiently.