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. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance The EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF) is a voluntary EU-wide certification scheme for four categories of removals: permanent storage, carbon farming, soil emission reductions, and carbon stored in products. It binds certified operators to a Commission-approved methodology, applies across the bloc, and is meant to feed downstream uses (corporate claims, possible future ETS interaction, Member State procurement). The framework is in force. The methodologies that decide what a “CRCF tonne” actually represents are not. ...

Carbon Herald just published Linde And Valmet Partner On Electric Carbon Capture For Pulp And Paper. Carbon Herald reports that industrial gas company Linde and pulp and paper technology supplier Valmet are joining forces to develop electric carbon capture solutions tailored to the pulp and paper sector. The collaboration aims to combine Linde’s experience in CO2 separation and processing with Valmet’s footprint in mill engineering and process integration. The focus on electrically driven capture is intended to align with mills that have access to low-carbon power, potentially reducing reliance on steam-based regeneration. The outlet frames the move as targeting an industry with significant biogenic CO2 streams that are increasingly viewed as candidates for capture and storage or utilization. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week point at the same thing. Named individuals are now the rate-limiting step in CDR scale-up. The gaps between what each of them pledged and what they have actually wired matter more than any tech roadmap update. 28%. That is roughly how much of Jeff Bezos’s $10B climate pledge the Bezos Earth Fund has disbursed six years in, per Bloomberg reporting surfaced by Amanda Kolson Hurley ([@amandakhurley.bsky.social on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/amandakhurley.bsky.social/post/3mmway5qaic2z)). Roughly $2.8B out against a 10-year clock that is more than half elapsed. CDR grantees who modeled Earth Fund money into their 2026-2028 runway are now repricing that assumption. Hurley also flagged that “the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is winding down its climate work” while “Sergey Brin’s foundation and Steve Ballmer - and especially, MacKenzie Scott - are giving a lot of climate dollars.” The seat is rotating. Which human is in it this quarter decides which CDR pipelines survive. ...

Today’s stories share a common thread: the gap between CDR’s narrative and its actual mass. A widely circulated Nature Reviews paper is being read as a breakthrough it does not claim to be. The global pure-play CDR workforce fits inside a mid-size tech company. And buyers, from Terraset to the seven-buyer coalition we covered, are still teaching suppliers how to pitch them. The field is small, the signals are loud, and the discipline to tell those apart matters more every quarter. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Fri, 15 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/399-How-to-Pitch-Terraset-and-other-carbon-removal-buyersw-Taylor-Insley--Terraset-e3jd1gr TL;DR Taylor Insley (Terraset) says ~75% of developer interactions at Carbon Unbound are bad pitches — ambush style, no social grace. Believable and useful. Terraset claims 6-8x leverage per dollar deployed via its revolving fund model. First time I’ve seen that ratio cited publicly for them. Terraset gets ~450 projects in its intake pipeline against a team of three. Diligence bandwidth is the binding constraint, not capital appetite. Insley’s actual advice: relationship-building beats first-impression perfection; she discounts bad early pitches if the project matures. Ross’s “minor leagues” framing — Milky Wire/Terraset before Frontier/Microsoft — is the most operationally useful frame in the episode. Episode link. Ross Kenyon interviews Taylor Insley, Director of Strategic Growth at Terraset, the tax-deductible philanthropic CDR buyer. The episode is essentially a sales-craft conversation for developers pitching small-to-mid catalytic buyers, anchored on a Carbon Unbound Vancouver panel Insley did earlier this year. There’s also a long Ross monologue on status and in-group dynamics that you can safely skip. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 24 Ma. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/lulucf-carbon-farming-and-the-crcf-review-with-asger-strange TL;DR Carbon farming side of the CRCF (Carbon Removal Certification Framework) lacks the buyer momentum permanent removals have — no offtake equivalent of the Buyers Club in sight. Olesen pushes “performance certificates” as the right instrument for land that stays in production: an inventory-aligned reporting unit, not a credit. Useful framing. Strong claim: leakage and permanence have no role in this tool, and only simple stock-change additionality applies. Will be controversial but internally consistent. EU bottom-up inventory logic vs SBTi FLAG’s top-down benchmark is a real collision course — first time I’ve seen it spelled out this cleanly. Wishlist for Q4 national targets & flexibilities proposal: shift the buy-side obligation from member states to sectors/companies, keep Article 6 out, give CSRD↔CRCF a legal hook. The CDR Policy Scoop, hosted by Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme, brings back Asger Strange Olesen (International Woodland Company, EU Carbon Removal Expert Group) to walk through where the carbon-farming half of the CRCF actually sits after the recent CRCF Days. It’s a policy-mechanics conversation: methodologies adopted (soil, peatlands, afforestation), why credits are the wrong tool for most European farmland, and what the upcoming CRCF review and Q4 flexibilities proposal need to deliver. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 16 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/seven-buyers-in-a-trench-coat TL;DR Microsoft pausing new durable CDR purchases isn’t the story — the story is they were ~80-90% of the market to begin with. Correct framing. Governments committed $45M to CDR purchases, spent ~$0; private sector spent $10.5B. Striking number, worth citing. Jack’s case: voluntary buying was always a house of cards; policy has to take over. Hard to argue with at this point. Defense of enhanced oil recovery as a legitimate scaling pathway for direct air capture. Will annoy some, but the argument is coherent. Dream policy: low-carbon-intensity product standard embedded in trade, with CDR compliance pathways. Interesting, underdeveloped here. Naim Merchant interviews Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, who runs the Carbon Management Program at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy and previously led carbon management policy at Breakthrough Energy. The episode is a reaction to Heatmap’s reporting that Microsoft is pausing new durable carbon removal purchases, and Cavanaugh’s weekend piece arguing the real failure is governmental, not corporate. It’s the cleanest articulation I’ve heard of “the voluntary market was always structurally fragile” — read the episode post if you don’t have an hour. ...