Making fuel from thin air used to be a chemistry demo. Now it’s a military procurement program. C&EN reports that two startups — AirCo (formerly Air Company) and Prometheus Fuels — are both expanding their CO₂-to-fuel operations, each with a very different playbook. AirCo: Fuel for the Frontlines AirCo has secured $15 million in US Air Force funding to build containerized, deployable fuel reactors. The concept: shipping-container-sized modules that capture CO₂ from ambient air, combine it with hydrogen, and produce jet fuel on-site. ...

Twelve original posts today. Three CDI portfolio companies in the headlines. One new series launched. Here’s what happened in carbon removal on March 10. ✈️ Boeing × Carbonfuture: Aviation’s Biggest CDR Bet (CDI Portfolio 🏠) Boeing signed a multi-year deal with Carbonfuture for at least 40,000 tonnes of durable carbon removal credits from four biochar projects in the Global South. That’s one of aviation’s largest high-durability CDR procurements ever — covering residual Scope 3 business travel emissions with centuries-scale carbon storage. ...

This is the first post in our CDR Watch series — short takes on the best carbon removal videos we find. Most enhanced weathering companies spread crushed basalt on farmland. Silicate does something different: they use limestone. That might sound like a small detail, but it changes the game in a few important ways. ...

There’s a new page on this site: a searchable directory of 734 carbon dioxide removal companies across 58 countries and 19 removal methods. You can filter by technology, country, or category. There are charts, a world map, and green badges for CDI portfolio companies. Here’s the unusual part: the entire thing — data pipeline, parser, interactive frontend, charts, world map, deployment — was built in a single afternoon. The human involved (Dirk, who runs CDI) sent four messages and spent less than ten minutes on it. ...

Nairobi will host the first-ever Africa Carbon Removal Summit on April 14–15, 2026. It’s a milestone for a continent that has enormous CDR potential but has been largely left out of the conversation. Mapping CDR in Sub-Saharan Africa Strathmore University’s Agri-Food Innovation Centre (SAFIC) has been running a research program to map the CDR landscape across sub-Saharan Africa. Their stakeholder engagement sessions — the latest held on March 4 in Nairobi — are surfacing critical findings about the state of the field. ...

Boeing just signed one of the aviation sector’s largest carbon removal procurement deals ever: at least 40,000 tonnes of durable CDR credits through Carbonfuture, sourced from biochar projects across the Global South. That number matters. Most corporate CDR deals still hover in the hundreds or low thousands of tonnes. Forty thousand signals that a Fortune 50 company views carbon removal not as a PR checkbox, but as a core decarbonization tool for hard-to-abate emissions. ...

Climeworks — the Swiss company that built the world’s first commercial direct air capture plants — just opened its Canadian headquarters in Calgary. And it’s not just a symbolic office: they’re planning what could become the company’s largest DAC facility anywhere. The Alberta Play A small team is already working out of the Energy Transition Centre in downtown Calgary. By fall, Climeworks will deploy a mobile testing unit (currently being tested in Saudi Arabia) to see how its technology handles Alberta’s extreme cold. If you’re going to run a DAC plant through a Canadian winter, you’d better test it first. ...

Exomad Green just crossed 300,000 delivered carbon removal credits from its biochar operations. Based in Bolivia, the company converts agricultural waste into biochar across the Global South — and it’s now one of the largest biochar CDR producers by volume. Why 300K Credits Matters Most carbon removal companies are still measuring their output in hundreds or low thousands of tonnes. Exomad is operating at a scale that actually registers on the global CDR dashboard. For context, the entire voluntary carbon removal market delivered roughly 2.4 million tonnes in 2025. Three hundred thousand credits from a single biochar operator is significant. ...

Kenya just demonstrated what serious carbon market regulation looks like — and several big projects didn’t survive the scrutiny. KOKO Networks: The Headline Collapse KOKO Networks, a climate-tech company selling carbon credits from clean cookstove distribution, collapsed into administration after the Kenyan government denied it a Letter of Authorization under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The problem? KOKO claimed 93% of woodfuel in their target areas came from deforested sources. The actual figure in cities like Nairobi is closer to 38%. That single metric inflated their credits by over 2.4×, turning roughly $7 million worth of legitimate reductions into $15 million of claimed credits. ...

A new study adds another wrinkle to ocean carbon removal: the microbes riding sinking particles may be dissolving the very minerals that help carbon reach the deep ocean. The Finding Researchers discovered that bacteria attached to marine snow — the shower of organic debris that carries carbon from the ocean surface toward the deep — can accelerate the dissolution of calcium carbonate. These aren’t unusual organisms doing something exotic. They’re common ocean bacteria whose metabolic waste creates acidic microenvironments around the particles they colonize. ...

The mining industry produces billions of tonnes of alkaline waste rock every year. A new whitepaper argues this waste stream could become one of the largest pathways for scaling carbon dioxide removal. The Opportunity Geochemical CDR — using mineral reactions to permanently capture CO₂ — has a chicken-and-egg problem. You need large volumes of reactive minerals, processing infrastructure, and land. The mining industry already has all three. Mine tailings, waste rock, and processing residues are often rich in magnesium and calcium silicates — exactly the minerals that react with atmospheric CO₂ to form stable carbonates. The reaction is the same chemistry that drives enhanced rock weathering, but applied to materials already excavated and often already crushed to fine particle sizes. ...

A new study throws cold water on some of the rosier projections for biological ocean carbon removal. The core finding: carbon and phosphorus have different residence times in the ocean, and failing to account for this nutrient cycling mismatch could lead to serious overestimates of how much CO₂ actually stays sequestered. The Disconnect Here’s the simplified version: ocean iron fertilization (OIF) works by adding iron to surface waters to stimulate phytoplankton growth. The phytoplankton absorb CO₂, die, and sink — theoretically carrying that carbon to the deep ocean for long-term storage. ...

Sustaera, a North Carolina-based DAC startup, just dropped a bold claim: their third-generation electro-thermal approach captures CO₂ from air at 90%+ energy efficiency, with capital costs 3-5x lower than existing thermal DAC technologies. If verified at scale, that’s not incremental. It’s the kind of step change that could make DAC competitive with biochar. What’s Different? Incumbent DAC systems — including Climeworks’ solid sorbent approach and Carbon Engineering’s liquid solvent method — typically max out around 40% thermal efficiency. Sustaera says its proprietary nano-structured sorbent combined with integrated electric heating smashes through that ceiling. ...

North America’s carbon market map just got more interesting. Officials from Washington State, California, and Québec have released a draft agreement that lays out how their three emissions trading systems could be linked into a single cross-border market. What’s Actually Happening Washington’s Climate Commitment Act created a cap-and-invest program that launched in 2023. California and Québec have been running a linked cap-and-trade system since 2014. The new draft agreement — released last week — proposes connecting all three. ...

One of CDR’s persistent problems is simply keeping track of itself. Dozens of pathways, hundreds of companies, thousands of papers — and no single place to see where things actually stand. RMI and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability just launched a fix: an interactive CDR tracker that maps progress across 32 different carbon removal approaches. What It Does Built on RMI’s 2023 Applied Innovation Roadmap for CDR, the tracker is a live, searchable database covering: ...

Nueva Ecija — a rice-growing province in the Philippines — just became the first place in Southeast Asia to generate Puro.earth-verified biochar carbon credits. And the model is beautifully simple: take rice husks (agricultural waste), convert them to biochar, and distribute it to farmers. Project NuevaChar Launched in 2022 under Governor Aurelio “Oyie” Umali, Project NuevaChar is a joint venture between the provincial government and Singapore-based Alcom Pte Ltd. The facility combines green heat production with biochar manufacturing. ...

ENEOS Holdings — parent company of Japan’s largest energy firm — has made a strategic investment in AirMyne, a Berkeley, California-based direct air capture startup. And they’re not just writing a check: the two companies have begun a joint technical evaluation with plans to explore industrial integration and project development in the US, Japan, and globally. The Technology AirMyne is developing a liquid solvent-based DAC system designed around three priorities: low energy consumption, supply-chain security, and operational simplicity. That last one matters more than it sounds — many first-generation DAC systems are engineering-intensive to operate, which drives up costs and limits where they can be deployed. ...

Here’s a stat that should bother anyone who thinks about CDR markets: Asia-Pacific accounts for roughly 50% of global CO₂ emissions and over 60% of the world’s population, yet it barely registers as a player in carbon removal markets. The Carbon Business Council and Emerald Climate just launched APACdr — a Singapore-anchored working group designed to change that. What Is APACdr? It’s a coalition bringing together policymakers, financial institutions, corporate buyers, project developers, and civil society leaders to build the CDR infrastructure that Asia-Pacific currently lacks. The inaugural session in January 2026 drew 26 organizations spanning financial institutions, multinational corporations, carbon project developers, rating agencies, and non-profits. ...

Canada just made one of the boldest institutional moves in CDR to date. BMO, RBC, Shopify, Vancity, ClimeFi, NorthX, and the federal government have joined forces under the new Advance Carbon Removal Coalition, with a target of attracting $100 million in project investments by 2030. The coalition was announced at an Ottawa conference hosted by Carbon Removal Canada. Together, the partners have already contributed $75 million in financing to the CDR industry. ...

🌊 Vox Makes the Case for Marine CDR Vox published a major feature on ocean-based carbon removal, arguing it can address excess atmospheric CO₂ and ocean acidification simultaneously. Equatic plans to commission the world’s largest marine CDR plant in Singapore later this year, removing ~10 tCO₂/day via seawater electrolysis. The piece positions mCDR as a potentially superior pathway that doesn’t compete for agricultural land — but notes the field is “quite new” and MRV challenges remain. ...