🌊 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. ...

In October 2025, the Trump administration cancelled over $1.2 billion in federal funding for the two flagship US Direct Air Capture hubs — Project Cypress in Louisiana and the South Texas DAC Hub. It was the single largest withdrawal of public capital from the CDR sector in history. The fallout is still shaping the market today. What Changed The Biden administration spent 2021-2024 building DAC as a standalone climate industry. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act provided the architecture: direct federal co-funding for first-of-a-kind commercial facilities, designed to prove that DAC can work at scale and attract private capital. ...

Just ahead of the 2026 F1 season opener, Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS has announced what may be motorsport’s most comprehensive carbon removal investment to date: 7 new CDR projects across 6 different technology pathways, bringing the team’s total portfolio to approximately 18,900 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. The technologies span the full CDR spectrum: Direct Air Capture (DAC) Biochar Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) Biomass Storage Projects are located across Brazil, Canada, the US, the UK, Denmark, and India — deliberately overlapping with regions where the F1 circus races. ...

Germany just did something it has never done before: put carbon dioxide removal into the federal budget as a standalone line item. The 2026 Bundeshaushalt includes €98 million for CDR projects and an additional €11.5 million specifically for purchasing carbon removal certificates. According to the German Association for Negative Emissions (Deutscher Verband für negative Emissionen), the pipeline extends further — with additional funding planned through 2033. Handelsblatt broke the story, profiling two approaches already operational in Germany: biochar (led by Hamburg-based Novocarbo, which won the German Sustainability Prize 2025) and enhanced rock weathering. ...

Here’s the reality check the CDR industry needs to sit with: a new paper in Communications Earth & Environment (Nature portfolio) finds that scaling negative emissions technologies to the gigatons could create serious resource and environmental bottlenecks — some of which nobody is planning for. The paper by Cobo, Galán-Martín, and Guillén-Gosálbez runs a comprehensive life-cycle assessment across the full CDR technology portfolio and identifies what the authors call “previously overlooked bottlenecks.” ...

The International Energy Agency just dropped a data point that the carbon removal industry has been waiting for: CDR is officially one of the seven emerging energy sectors that have offset the decline in EV venture funding since 2021. In its State of Energy Innovation 2026 report, the IEA maps the full innovation pipeline — from early research to commercial-scale demonstration — and carbon removal sits alongside nuclear, next-gen geothermal, and critical minerals as the new magnets for venture capital. ...

IEA: Carbon Removal Now Captures One-Third of Energy Venture Capital The International Energy Agency’s State of Energy Innovation 2026 report delivers a milestone data point: carbon dioxide removal, alongside nuclear and next-gen geothermal, now accounts for approximately one-third of all energy venture capital investment — up from less than 5% in the late 2010s. Nearly 400 companies have been founded in these emerging sectors over the past decade, with over 60% launched after 2020. ...

New Scientist highlighted a growing body of research suggesting that spreading crushed basalt on farmland could absorb up to 1 billion tonnes of CO₂. Field trials in Queensland, Australia, are among the latest to generate real data. Nations like Brazil are already deploying enhanced rock weathering (ERW) at scale, partly because crushed silicate rock also reduces fertiliser costs. Big number. Important caveat: “could” is doing a lot of work in that headline. ...

Svante Technologies just acquired Carbon Alpha, picking up a BECCS project, a CO₂ pipeline, and a geological storage hub in Western Canada. The deal also brings something rarer: a genuine co-ownership partnership with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC), which represents nine First Nations in Saskatchewan. The North Star Project Carbon Alpha’s flagship project installs carbon capture at the existing MLTC Bioenergy Centre, which generates renewable heat and electricity by burning sustainable biomass from a neighbouring sawmill. Phase 1 targets 140,000 tonnes of CO₂ capture per year from the biogenic flue gas. ...

A provincial government in the Philippines just did something no one in Southeast Asia has done before: generated verified carbon credits from biochar production. Nueva Ecija’s “Project NuevaChar” converts rice husks — an agricultural waste product — into biochar. Puro.earth audited and validated the facility, confirming net CO₂ removal. In July 2025, Governor Aurelio Umali received the first carbon revenue remittance ever paid to a local government unit from biochar-based credits. ...

The first ship-based ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) experiment just delivered results. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution poured 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine in August 2025, and the findings are cautiously encouraging: 2–10 tonnes of CO₂ removed in four days, with up to 50 tonnes estimated total. No significant impact on marine life detected. Adam Subhas and his team presented these findings at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026 in Glasgow. “We can definitely say that there was additional CO₂ uptake as a result of this experiment,” Subhas said. ...

Kenya-based direct air capture company Octavia Carbon just locked in a new offtake agreement, facilitated by Carbon Direct. It’s the latest signal that demand for DAC credits from the Global South is real — and growing. Octavia’s Hummingbird pilot in the Kenyan Rift Valley has been running 24/5 since October 2025. Their Gen 2 system captures atmospheric CO₂ and stores it permanently underground through a partnership with carbon mineralization company Cella. They recently activated a cryogenic tank for liquid CO₂ storage — a meaningful technical milestone for any DAC operation, let alone one running in East Africa. ...

🔑 Key Takeaways Multi-year DAC offtakes are becoming the norm. Sirona Technologies’ deal via Patch follows a pattern: buyers are moving from exploration to long-term procurement with multi-year contracts securing permanent removals. The shift matters — it signals genuine market maturation, not just pilot-stage experimentation. Aviation’s CDR paradox deepens. Boeing is buying 40,000+ tonnes of quality CDR via Carbonfuture, while the SASHA Coalition argues that CORSIA lets the sector avoid harder decarbonization — leaving 1.1 billion tonnes unregulated since 2012. The gap between voluntary ambition and compliance reality is widening. ...

Boeing just signed one of the aviation sector’s largest carbon removal procurements ever: at least 40,000 tonnes of durable CDR through Carbonfuture, sourced from four biochar projects across the Global South. Full disclosure: Carbonfuture is a Carbon Drawdown Initiative portfolio company. We’ve been tracking their progress closely, and this deal validates exactly the kind of infrastructure the CDR market needs. Why This Matters Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize. Planes can’t run on batteries (not yet, anyway), and sustainable aviation fuels are still scaling up. So for residual emissions — particularly Scope 3 business travel — durable carbon removal is the only honest answer. ...

Your daily scan of what’s moving in carbon dioxide removal — markets, policy, science, and the companies building the industry. Quick Numbers Metric Value Source Total CDR market spend $787.7M cdr.fyi Total CDR tonnes sold 44.1M tCO₂ cdr.fyi Delivery rate 2.8% cdr.fyi Active purchasers 1,013 cdr.fyi Active suppliers 721 cdr.fyi Market Tone Bullish demand signals across geographies. Canada launched its biggest demand-side CDR initiative yet, backed by government and major banks. Boeing committed to 40,000 tonnes of durable removals through Carbonfuture. Climeworks chose Calgary for its Canadian HQ and could build its largest plant in Alberta. Meanwhile, the EU locked in its 90% emissions cut target — with a 5% carbon credit provision that explicitly opens the door for CDR. The demand side of the market is growing faster than the supply side can build. ...

China released its 15th Five-Year Plan this week. The headline number: a 17% reduction in carbon intensity (CO₂ per unit of GDP) from 2026 to 2030, with a 3.8% cut targeted for this year alone. Sounds ambitious. It’s not. The Math Problem Carbon intensity drops even if absolute emissions rise — you just need your economy to grow faster than your emissions. And that’s exactly what analysts expect to happen. ...

New research from Cornell University modelled the global adoption potential of enhanced rock weathering and landed on a striking number: 1.1 billion tonnes of CO₂ removed per year by 2100. That’s roughly 3% of current annual fossil fuel emissions — meaningful at planetary scale. The headline is exciting. The fine print is where the real story lives. What the Study Actually Shows The Cornell team did something most ERW projections skip: they modelled adoption rates rather than just theoretical capacity. Using historical data on how fast farmers adopt new practices (like irrigation), they estimated a range of 350 million to 750 million tonnes per year by 2050, scaling to 700M–1.1 Gt by 2100. ...

The European Commission just did something no other jurisdiction has managed: it adopted the world’s first voluntary standard specifically for permanent carbon removals. Under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation, the Commission published certification methodologies covering three pathways: direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS), biogenic emissions capture with storage (BioCCS), and biochar carbon removal (BCR). What This Means in Practice Until now, permanent CDR projects in Europe operated in a regulatory grey zone. Buyers had no common framework for evaluating project quality. Developers had no certification path to demonstrate they met EU standards. That changes now. ...

One of the persistent questions about biochar as a carbon removal pathway is permanence. Spread charred biomass on a field — does it actually stay there? A new study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems provides some of the longest field data yet: a single biochar application in 2013 still shows significant soil carbon and pH benefits ten years later. The Study Researchers tracked biochar applied once at rates of 11.2, 22.4, and 44.8 tonnes per hectare on dryland wheat fields in eastern Oregon. No reapplication over the entire decade. They measured soil organic carbon (SOC), pH, labile carbon, cation exchange capacity, and nutrient dynamics. ...

🔬 Top Story: Cornell Study Puts ERW at Up to 1.1 Billion Tonnes/Year by 2100 A new study in Nature Communications Sustainability by Cornell’s Chuan Liao and colleagues models realistic adoption scenarios for enhanced rock weathering (ERW) — the practice of spreading crushed silicate rocks (like basalt) on agricultural fields to accelerate natural CO₂ drawdown. The findings: 350M–750M tCO₂/yr by 2050 and 700M–1.1B tCO₂/yr by 2100. That’s far below earlier theoretical ceilings of 5 Gt/yr but still a massive contribution to climate mitigation. A key takeaway: the Global South would eventually surpass the Global North in ERW deployment as supply chains mature, making the technique a potential equity lever for global carbon markets. (New Scientist · Nature) ...