Honestly, this upsets people?
If demand were x+100, and theoretically some company wouldn't be able to afford to buy the offsets, it wouldn't somehow have ended up with the blame of Shell, they would just have found no one to solve their problem for them and would have to fix it themselves.
Of course this is assuming that whoever is selling the offsets is actually performing the task of carbon offsetting effectively, something that many believe is not actually happening so that puts things into even more murky waters.
Except there are limits which the demand, for the most part, can't overcome.
> Im lumping in things like direct air capture, bioenergy carbon capture and storage,
All of these things are energy intensive, aren't they? So as energy becomes more expensive, so do they. Demand never gets quite so high that it's worth it to pay for this, because the price is always rising. There's another alternative in such situations... "just don't buy carbon offsets". The PR hit's cheaper after all.