Carbon capture.
The money is underground.

In the first half of 2026, the world's biggest direct air capture plant pulled 675 tonnes of CO₂ out of the sky. Over the same six months, one fertilizer plant in Louisiana booked $43 million in tax credits for burying its own CO₂ underground.

Both count as carbon capture, and they're heading in opposite directions. The basic idea is the same either way: catch carbon dioxide, compress it, pipe it away, and inject it deep underground, which is why the industry calls it carbon capture and storage, or CCS. What differs is where the CO₂ comes from. The unglamorous version grabs it from the smokestacks of ammonia plants and steel mills, where it's concentrated and cheap to catch. The ambitious version, direct air capture, filters it out of ordinary air, where it's dilute and expensive.

The ambitious version has lost most of its backers. Washington has moved to claw back the money it promised for air-capture hubs, and Microsoft, which bought most of the world's carbon removal last year, reportedly paused new purchases in April. The unglamorous version kept its paycheck. The federal 45Q tax credit, worth up to $85 a tonne for CO₂ captured at industrial plants, came through last year's budget law largely intact, and it even got a raise for CO₂ used to pump more oil.

So this list of carbon capture stocks follows the credit. It starts with the companies that own the pipes and the holes, then the emitters cashing the checks, then the two removal bets and a microcap moonshot.

Every captured tonne needs a pipe and a permitted place to go. The companies that own both collect a fee on every tonne, no matter who captured it, which makes them the steadiest carbon capture stocks on the list.

ExxonMobil NYSE: XOM

ExxonMobil bought Denbury in 2023 and with it the largest CO₂ pipeline network in the U.S. It now has about 9 million tonnes a year of customer CO₂ under contract, and in September it started taking CO₂ from a Nucor steel plant in Louisiana.

The bottleneck is the hole at the end. Texas regulators approved Exxon's first dedicated Gulf Coast storage site in September by a 2–1 vote, and until it's ready, some customer CO₂ is going into oil fields to push out more crude instead. Permits are slow and contested, so whoever already has the pipe and the permit has the leverage.

Equinor NYSE: EQNR

Equinor operates Northern Lights off Norway with Shell and TotalEnergies. Factories across Europe liquefy their CO₂, ship it there and pay to have it buried under the North Sea. It started injecting in August 2025, and the largest capture plant in Europe, at Yara's fertilizer site in the Netherlands, opened in September to feed it.

The EU has since ordered 44 oil and gas producers to build 50 million tonnes a year of CO₂ storage by 2030. Equinor already has the working version. A second phase, more than tripling capacity, is due in 2028.

California Resources NYSE: CRC

California Resources injected the first CO₂ under a federal Class VI storage permit anywhere in California this May, at its old Elk Hills oil field. The site is permitted for up to 1.46 million tonnes a year. California has some of the toughest climate rules in the country and very few permitted places to put CO₂, which makes owning the first permitted hole worth a lot more than the tonnage suggests.

These are the emitters, the least obvious carbon capture stocks on the list. Their CO₂ was waste until a tax credit made it worth capturing, and now it shows up in earnings.

CF Industries NYSE: CF

CF Industries makes ammonia, a process that throws off nearly pure CO₂. Since last summer, its Donaldsonville, Louisiana plant has been sending that CO₂ to Exxon, and CF booked $43 million of 45Q credits in the first half of 2026.

It's doubling down. Construction began in August on Blue Point, a joint venture with JERA and Mitsui that will send about 2.3 million tonnes a year of CO₂ to Occidental's storage hub when it starts production in 2029.

Green Plains NASDAQ: GPRE

Green Plains is an ethanol producer that now captures the CO₂ from all three of its Nebraska plants and pipes it to storage in Wyoming. That lowers the carbon score of its ethanol and unlocks a separate federal clean-fuel credit, 45Z. In the second quarter, those credits were worth $58.7 million out of $93.3 million in adjusted EBITDA.

That's roughly 63% of the profit coming from carbon policy. Green Plains is the cleanest example of capture working as a business, and last year's budget law extended that credit through 2029.

Gevo NASDAQ: GEVO

Gevo spent years pitching sustainable jet fuel. Then it bought a North Dakota ethanol plant that came with its own capture unit and storage well, and that plant became the business. Gevo expects more than $70 million in 45Z credits this year and doubled its adjusted EBITDA outlook.

This summer it walked away from its flagship jet-fuel project and took a $176 million writedown. It's a pivot story: a small company betting it can grow by owning the whole chain, from ethanol to buried CO₂, on one site.

Pulling CO₂ from open air is still the version that could matter most for the climate, and right now it has to prove it works before the money disappears.

Occidental NYSE: OXY

Occidental is building Stratos in West Texas, the largest direct air capture plant in the world, designed for 500,000 tonnes a year. It was supposed to run in 2025. In May, management flagged a problem with parts of the plant outside the capture process, and it now targets startup at the end of 2026.

That makes 2027 the test. If Stratos captures at design rates, Oxy owns the only proven large-scale removal plant at a moment when the rest of the field is struggling. If it stalls, air capture loses its biggest proof point.

Climeworks

Climeworks runs Mammoth in Iceland, the plant from the opening line. It's built for 36,000 tonnes a year and delivered 675 tonnes of net removal in the first half of 2026. That was better than a year earlier, and the company says it halved its cost per tonne. But at roughly 4% of capacity, Mammoth is the clearest read on how far air capture still has to go.

One tiny company is betting on where the next wave of capture comes from.

Capsol Technologies OSE: CAPSL

Capsol licenses a capture process built on hot potassium carbonate, a simple chemistry suited to gas turbines and cement kilns. Holcim, one of the world's largest cement makers, became a strategic shareholder in January.

The real bet is America's gas-power boom. Capsol says it has about 150 leads on U.S. gas turbines and an exclusive U.S. project in early engineering. It also has about NOK 21 million of cash plus a credit line, against a NOK 33 million operating loss in the first half, so this is binary: one signed project changes the company, and no project ends it.

AI is building carbon capture's next big market by accident.

Utilities, data-center developers and oil companies are ordering gas plants at a pace not seen in decades to power AI. Most are going up without capture, because speed matters more than emissions right now. NET Power, a company founded on carbon capture, just confirmed its first Permian plant won't capture any carbon in its initial phase.

Those plants will run for decades, and every one of them is a candidate for a retrofit. 45Q pays $85 a tonne for 12 years, but only for projects that begin construction before January 1, 2033.

So the next wave of carbon capture won't come from climate pledges. It'll come from gas-plant owners doing the math in 2030 and 2031, racing a tax-credit cutoff. The companies holding the pipes, the storage permits and a capture process that bolts onto a turbine are the ones that rush will pay. They're the carbon capture stocks to own before it starts.