What “soil carbon” means in a CDR context Soil carbon as a removal pathway is the deliberate addition — or protection — of organic carbon in agricultural and grassland soils so that atmospheric CO₂ ends up stored as soil organic matter rather than circulating in the air. In practice, almost every commercial project in the directory today is doing this through biochar: pyrolysing biomass into a stable, carbon-rich solid and burying it in farmland. A smaller share of projects pursue management-based sequestration (cover crops, no-till, compost, agroforestry) where the carbon gain comes from shifting the balance between plant input and microbial decomposition. The two approaches share a destination — carbon in soil — but the durability profiles and the science behind them are very different, which is the single most important thing for a buyer or journalist to internalise before going further. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now California just rewrote the rules of the largest US carbon market, and the rewrite quietly weakens the compliance demand that durable carbon removal was supposed to inherit. On May 29, Governor Newsom signed a reauthorization extending cap-and-trade (now rebranded cap-and-invest) through 2045, but the package increases free allowance allocation to refineries and utilities, softening the price ceiling that residual emitters would have hit. In the same week, the SEC moved to eliminate Biden-era climate disclosure requirements. The carrot and the stick for US corporate CDR procurement both got smaller at once. ...

Today’s three stories all point at the same uncomfortable truth: the gap between where CDR needs to be and where it actually is keeps widening, and the reasons are increasingly structural rather than technical. A new capacity assessment finds the gap between planned CDR supply and what climate goals require is growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile a snapshot of the company landscape shows 377 of 969 tracked CDR firms are in biochar, a heavy concentration in one of the lower-permanence pathways. And Captain Drawdown’s own CDR Log #153 examined two assessments that both circle back to a geography problem: the rocks suitable for enhanced rock weathering and mineralization sit in jurisdictions whose rules are not built for them. ...

Heatmap News just published The Sorry State of Carbon Removal. Heatmap News covers the third State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report, a collaboration among researchers at Wisconsin-Madison, Maryland, Oxford, the Potsdam Institute, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. The report estimates that humans intentionally remove about 2.2 billion tons of CO2 per year, roughly 5% of annual emissions, almost entirely through conventional methods like tree planting, forest management, soil sequestration, and wetland restoration. Novel approaches such as direct air capture, BECCS, enhanced weathering, and biochar account for less than 1%, growing from 1.4 million tons in 2023 to 2 million in 2025. To stay on a 1.5C path, novel removal would need to reach 70 million tons by 2030 and 360 million by 2035. ...

Each dot on this scatter is a single CDR pathway - direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, mineralization, and the rest. The horizontal axis counts how many companies are working that pathway; the vertical axis sums the employees across those companies. Linear scales on both, so distance on the page matches distance in the numbers. What this view reveals that a headcount table cannot is the shape of the industry. A pathway sitting high and to the right is crowded with firms and staffed deeply. One sitting high but to the left is a pathway dominated by a few large companies. Low and to the right means many small teams chasing the same idea. The spread between these corners is the story of where capital and talent have actually landed, versus where the field is still a cottage. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Where does the EU’s 2030 carbon storage target break down geographically? Not in Brussels, where the rules are written, but in the member-state capitals where the pore space actually sits unbuilt. Two assessments published this autumn map the same problem from opposite ends. Read them together and the geographic mismatch becomes the story. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Stockholm Exergi’s 750,000-tonne, 15-year permanent BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) off-take to the City of Stockholm is the new European price floor for permanent removal, and within six months it will lock in a two-tier price curve that Brussels has not authored. The deal is the largest non-corporate permanent removal contract on record (onestopesg), and it was signed while the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation methodologies remain unwritten after CRCF Days 2026. That vacuum hands pricing power to private registries, Isometric and Puro.earth, for every deal that closes before the end of 2026. The buyer archetype has also shifted. A municipal government, not a tech corporate, just set the benchmark. Other European cities will price their next budget cycles against it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 21 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. The week’s signal sits at the intersection of policy retrenchment and methodological maturation: U.S. disclosure rules are being unwound just as Europe and Asia tighten market plumbing, and the science community is sharpening the question of what “permanent” actually buys you. Two large buyer deals also landed, both shaped less by climate ambition than by procurement strategy and portfolio engineering. ...

Carbon Herald just published LSB Moves Toward Full Ownership Of El Dorado Carbon Capture Project. Carbon Herald reports that LSB Industries has signed an agreement with Lapis Carbon Solutions that sets a pathway for LSB to assume full ownership of the planned carbon capture project at its El Dorado, Arkansas ammonia facility. The arrangement restructures the partnership originally formed to develop the capture and sequestration infrastructure at the site. The El Dorado project is intended to capture CO2 from ammonia production and store it underground, with the captured volumes potentially qualifying for 45Q tax credits. The outlet frames the move as LSB consolidating control over project economics and timing as it advances toward a final investment decision. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR registry stack is bifurcating. Project developers are building their own pre-issuance integrity tools, while traditional registries quietly retreat to scheduling and certification. This week made the split impossible to miss. Three launches, read together, tell the story. Mati Carbon released a free app for stress-testing enhanced rock weathering data. The tool sits upstream of any registry. It is open-sourced. It is built by a developer answering the integrity question before a methodology asks it. EW (enhanced rock weathering, the practice of spreading crushed silicate rock on fields to accelerate natural CO2 mineralization) has a measurement problem, and Mati is solving it on its own terms. For background on the pathway, see our primer on enhanced weathering. ...