Buyers have contracted 46.4 million tonnes of durable carbon removal since 2020 — and one company, Microsoft, accounts for 78.5% of that volume. Every other buyer combined holds roughly 8 million tonnes. Carbon Direct's 2026 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market report states the corollary plainly: most organisations with 2030 climate targets have yet to begin buying removals at all.

The usual explanations are price, policy, and permanence, and each one matters. But a more ordinary constraint sits inside every transaction and gets far less attention: diligence.

What does the diligence problem look like?

A developer shares a data room. It holds hundreds of documents, organised around the developer's logic rather than the buyer's questions. The buyer's team — often one or two people — spends weeks working out what matters before deciding whether the project is even a fit. Often it isn't, and those weeks are gone.

The pattern comes from the founders of Residual, a company launched to fix it. "Before Residual, my co-founder and I worked on the other side of the table," the author writes. "I co-founded Oka, a carbon insurer, and Ted came from BeZero, a carbon ratings agency. From both seats we saw the same pattern."

Hyperscalers absorb this cost. They have dedicated teams, specialist advisers, and the volume to justify both. A consumer goods company buying its first 1,000 tonnes has none of these.

What should developers publish by default?

If the market is to grow beyond a few dominant buyers, the cost of getting comfortable with a project has to fall — and developers are best placed to bring it down. Residual argues that means publishing three things by default:

• A consistent structure for every project. Today every developer presents projects differently, so every review starts from scratch. A buyer who has read one project in a standard structure reads the next faster — they already know where additionality sits, where the baseline is, and where the delivery schedule lives. Slower for the developer, faster for the buyer.
• Price. Pricing usually arrives last, after a buyer has spent weeks earning a quote. "The sequence is backwards," the piece argues. A buyer cannot screen a project without a number, and cannot take a number to an internal committee until someone has produced it. Modelled prices that move with volume, published alongside available vintages, let a buyer test a purchase against their internal cost of carbon before anyone commits time.
• Risk, including what is unresolved. This is the one developers resist most. Yet a buyer's reviewers will find open risks anyway; the only question is when. "Found in week six, after both sides have invested time, an unresolved risk kills deals and erodes trust in the category. Found in the first few minutes, it is simply information, and it can be priced, mitigated, or accepted."

None of this replaces ratings, insurance, or independent verification. What it changes is the buyer's starting point: an organised account of the project instead of an unsorted data room.

Has anyone tested this in practice?

Residual launched its Buyer Portal in October. Every project the company develops is published in the same structure, with modelled pricing, delivery schedules, and its own risk assessment — and every claim sits beside the document that supports it.

Twenty-five buyers subscribed at launch, spanning technology, banking, consulting, and commodities. The takeaway, per the company: buyers are not asking for more data. They want data organised around the questions they have to answer.

Does transparency weaken developers' negotiating position?

Some developers will argue that publishing price and risk undercuts their leverage. Residual argues the opposite. Opacity favours whichever party has the most time and advisers — which, in this market, is almost always the largest buyer. Transparency widens the pool of buyers who can transact at all, and a wider pool is what every developer needs.

The category does not need to persuade more companies that removals matter; the 2030 climate targets are already set. It needs those companies to be able to act on them. The developers who make their projects easiest to understand will be the ones buyers can actually buy from, and the market will scale at the speed they set.

The milestone to watch: whether the 25-buyer portal cohort converts into repeat offtake from first-time buyers — and whether competing developers adopt the same disclosure standard before regulators or buyers force it on them.