Carbon Herald just published Skytree Secures First Commercial Deployment Of Stratus DAC System. Carbon Herald reports that Netherlands-based direct air capture developer Skytree has secured the first commercial rollout of its Stratus DAC unit. The Stratus system is designed to pull carbon dioxide from ambient air for use in downstream applications, with the company historically targeting indoor agriculture and other CO2 utilization markets in addition to permanent removal. The outlet frames the deployment as a step from pilot stage toward commercial operation for the Stratus platform. Further details on the buyer, deployment site, capture capacity and offtake terms are covered in the original article. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 9,566 tonnes of CO2, verified and issued from a single enhanced rock weathering batch on tea estates in West Bengal. That is the new high-water mark for enhanced rock weathering, the process of spreading crushed silicate rock on land so it reacts with CO2 and locks it into bicarbonate. Until last week, no ERW operator had cleared five figures in one issuance. The previous reference points were a few thousand tonnes per batch from UK and US developers like UNDO and Lithos, plus Mombak’s first Isometric-verified ERW credits out of Brazil, which Captain Drawdown covered when Mombak generated its first batch. Alt Carbon, founded by brothers Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal, just roughly tripled the category ceiling in one shot. ...

Carbon Herald just published CCUS Industry Calls For Regulatory Clarity On EU-UK ETS Linkage. Carbon Herald reports that the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), joined by around 50 industry stakeholders spanning energy, industrial and engineering sectors, is calling on policymakers to provide clear rules on how the UK Emissions Trading System will link with the EU ETS. The signatories argue that aligned carbon markets are important for cross-border CCUS projects, shared CO2 transport and storage infrastructure, and investor confidence. The piece outlines industry concerns about regulatory fragmentation between the two jurisdictions and the risk that unresolved questions on accounting, recognition of stored CO2, and compliance could slow deployment of capture and storage projects across Europe and the UK. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The maritime decarbonization story this week is that DNV verified a 98% capture rate on a Carbon Ridge onboard unit, and shipping press, LinkedIn, and several procurement desks are quoting it as if maritime CDR just shipped. It hasn’t. The number is real. The framing is wrong. And the gap between those two facts is exactly the accounting trap that will detonate maritime MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) in 2027. ...

The operator stack is finally visible Today’s stories share one thread: carbon removal is becoming an industry with a defined shape. We can see who builds, who measures, who buys, and how many people actually work in it. That picture is smaller than the press cycle suggests, but it is more legible than it was a year ago. The Graphyte-Sumitomo deal, paired with Graphyte’s listing on Isometric, shows the stack snapping into place. Graphyte does the carbon casting. Sumitomo brings industrial offtake and capital. Isometric certifies the tonnes. Three roles, three companies, one delivered tonne. That separation of duties is what a real industry looks like. It is also what buyers have been asking for: an operator they can contract with, a registry they can audit, and a balance sheet behind both. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 02 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/the-state-of-cdr-2026-the-cdr-policy-scoop-verdict TL;DR Third edition of the State of CDR report drops: 300 pages, 75+ authors, two-year cadence now established as the canonical reference doc. Global novel CDR sits at 2.1 Mt gross — but the report finally shows per-pathway net/gross gaps (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) net is 68–98% of gross, DACCS 23–90%). Material for anyone quoting headline tonnages. 2025 reality check: first edition projected 11 Mt novel by 2025; actual is ~2 Mt. Hosts flag 2030 announcements (42 Mt) vs estimated delivery capacity (8.4 Mt) as the next gap to watch. Across IAM scenarios that actually reach net-zero CO2, CDR averages 16% of mitigation effort — higher than the 10% figure often cited in corporate target-setting. CDR captures 2.6% of climate-tech funding. Low enough to puncture the “CDR is eating climate’s lunch” narrative. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme got an embargoed copy of the third State of CDR report and spent 30 minutes pulling out what surprised them rather than re-reading the executive summary. It’s a useful filter episode if you don’t have time for 300 pages this week. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Fri, 15 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/Viridas-Pressurised-DAC--El-Sayed-e3jct2c TL;DR Viridas pitches “pressurized DAC”: compress incoming air to ~70 bar so CO2 partial pressure jumps from ~400 ppm to ~2.8%, shrinking contactors ~70x. Sorbent is a cheap aqueous ammonia + alkali carbonate mix (carbamate formation + bicarbonate buffer), regenerated thermally at ~90–110°C. Sensible chemistry, nothing exotic. Core thesis: solvent R&D is hitting thermodynamic limits; the real lever is CAPEX, attacked by retrofitting gas-turbine turbomachinery as compressor/expander. Claimed round-trip efficiency target: ~97–98% (vs ~70% for current compressed-air energy storage). That’s the whole ballgame and it’s not demonstrated. No technoeconomic assessment shared, no pilot, no funding disclosed, Gmail contact address. Treat as concept-stage. The host of Reviewer 2 Does Geoengineering interviews Ahmed El-Sayed, co-founder of Viridas Technologies, about a pressurized DAC concept built around retrofitted gas-turbine machinery. The episode is recorded walking through a Cambridge park, which means a non-trivial fraction of the runtime is ice cream and hawthorn commentary — the substantive technical content is maybe 35 minutes. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Wed, 25 Ma. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/why-carbon-removal-needs-a-new-story TL;DR Höglund argues CDR should shift from “speed and scale” to “prove and learn”: drive down costs, nail measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), demonstrate at relevant scale. Useful reframing. Voluntary demand likely exceeds compliance demand through ~2040. EU ETS + UK ETS maybe a couple hundred million tons total by mid-2030s. First time I’ve seen the number stated that bluntly. Aviation and shipping legislation (ReFuelEU, FuelEU Maritime) effectively locks CDR out as a compliance pathway. Advocacy gap, not science gap. “Last resort” framing was a self-own. CDR is rate-limited, not stock-limited — building capacity today doesn’t deplete future capacity. High-profit/low-emission buyers (tech, finance) sustain the beachhead market; heavy industry won’t buy voluntarily and shouldn’t be expected to. Reflects reality, not aspiration. The Carbon Curve, Ep. 62 — Na’im Merchant interviews Robert Höglund (Milkywire, CDR.fyi co-founder, Marginal Carbon) for a state-of-the-sector check-in. The conversation is essentially Höglund’s argument for retiring the “we need 6–10 Gt by 2050, scale now” narrative and replacing it with a more sober “prove the methods, drop the costs, serve future decision-makers a credible menu” frame. ...

This chart plots every pure-play CDR company in the Directory as a single dot. The horizontal axis is the company’s founding year (estimated from its primary domain registration), the vertical axis is its current headcount on a log scale, and the colour codes the company’s pathway. The shaded blue background traces overall company density — darker patches mark where the crowd of pure-plays sits. The value here is shape, not ranking. A bar chart would tell you how many companies exist in each pathway; this view tells you the entire industry’s growth contour at one glance — when did the wave of small startups hit, where are the rare big older operators, what cluster sits on the floor of “still under five people”. Outlier dots near the top of the chart are the names everyone already knows; the dense low band is where most of the industry actually lives. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story Graphyte locked in two operator-grade milestones in a single week. Sumitomo, a Japanese trading house with infrastructure-scale capital and offtake reach into Asian utilities and steel, took a backing position in the company. At the same time, the project landed a public listing on the Isometric registry with an inspectable file, prj_1J4P33N6W1S0RKE2. That combination, a sovereign-adjacent industrial balance sheet plus a registry-grade MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) record, is what direct air capture pure-plays have been trying and largely failing to assemble at this scale. It matters because durable removals still sit under 1% of delivered volumes per the 3rd State of CDR report, and the operators who break that ceiling will be the ones with cheap physical processes, a public audit trail, and an anchor buyer. Graphyte now has all three. ...