Carbon Herald just published Louisiana Lawmakers Prevents Parishes From Banning Carbon Capture. Carbon Herald reports that Louisiana legislators rejected a package of bills aimed at giving parishes the authority to prohibit carbon capture and storage activities locally. The proposals had been driven by parish-level concerns about CCS pipelines, injection wells, and pore space rights, particularly in areas targeted by industrial decarbonization projects. By stopping the measures, the state preserves a centralized permitting framework in which CCS approvals remain primarily a state and federal matter rather than a local one. The outcome is a notable signal for developers planning sequestration hubs in Louisiana, which is among the most active US states for proposed CCS infrastructure. ...

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 Louisiana’s legislature just killed the bills that would have let parishes ban carbon capture and storage projects inside their borders. The Louisiana House Natural Resources Committee blocked the parish-veto measures, which means Allen, Vernon, and Livingston parishes, all of which had been pursuing local moratoria, no longer have that tool. Siting authority for CCS now sits entirely with the state and, for the underground injection wells themselves, with the federal Class VI permitting program. ...

The gap between models and machines just got harder to ignore Today’s stories share one uncomfortable thread: the distance between what climate models assume carbon removal will deliver and what the actual industry can build. One skeptic, one labor-force number, and one essay on stalled progress all point at the same problem from different angles. If you only have time for one takeaway from today, it is this: the modeled CDR future and the operational CDR present are roughly three orders of magnitude apart, and almost nobody is pricing that gap into their plans. ...

This violin plot sorts every pure-play CDR company in the Directory by its pathway (columns) and its headcount (vertical axis, log scale from 1 to 100+). Each dot is one company, coloured by its current liveliness tier — Active, Moderate, Suspect, or Likely Dead. The grey shape behind each column is the size distribution: where it bulges, that’s where most companies in that pathway sit. The value here is comparative. A raw company list tells you who exists; this view tells you where the weight sits. Pathways with most dots stacked at the bottom are dominated by sub-10-employee firms — many small entrants, few that have grown. Pathways with dots reaching up the column have produced operators that scaled past the founder-and-a-few-engineers phase. Colour (not vertical position) is what tells you the health story: red dots high up the column mean a sizeable operator went quiet; red dots on the floor are the long tail churning as it always has. ...

Carbon Herald just published Foundation Opens Consultation On CCS EACs Methodology. Carbon Herald reports that the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation has launched a 60-day public consultation seeking stakeholder input on a draft methodology for carbon capture and storage Environmental Attribute Certificates (EACs). The framework is intended to standardize how captured and stored CO2 can be tracked and credited through tradable certificates, similar in concept to renewable energy attribute systems. The consultation invites feedback from industry, researchers, NGOs and policy groups before the methodology is finalized. The piece situates the effort within broader work to build credible market infrastructure for CCS deployment and accounting. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,000×. That is the gap between durable carbon removal we are actually delivering today and what the median IPCC 2°C scenario quietly assumes we will be removing each year by 2050. The prior reference point most CDR boosters cite is purchases, not deliveries. CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 market update puts cumulative durable purchases near 10 Mt and calls Q1 the largest quarter on record. That framing flatters the sector. Switch the denominator to tonnes physically delivered and verified, and the annual run rate sits under 1 Mt/yr. IPCC scenarios consistent with 2°C require 5 to 10 GtCO₂/yr by 2050. One million versus five to ten billion. Three orders of magnitude on the delivery line, four on the cumulative line. ...

The pathway Enhanced weathering (EW) accelerates a chemical reaction that the Earth already runs at geological pace: the dissolution of silicate rocks by carbonic acid in rainwater. When fast-weathering rocks like basalt, olivine, or wollastonite are crushed to fine particles and spread — usually on cropland, sometimes in rivers, forests, or mine pits — the surface area available for reaction increases by orders of magnitude. CO₂ dissolved in soil water reacts with the minerals, producing dissolved bicarbonate ions that drain through soils to groundwater and eventually the ocean, where the carbon is stored on timescales of 10,000 to 100,000+ years. That long-tailed durability is why EW sits alongside direct air capture and mineralization in most “durable CDR” portfolios, even though it borrows infrastructure (quarries, ag spreaders) from existing industries. ...

Carbon Herald just published Caravel Bio Advances Low-Cost Carbon Capture Technology. Carbon Herald reports that US startup Caravel Bio has made gains in stabilizing the enzymes it uses for carbon capture, a step the company frames as central to lowering the cost of biologically assisted CO2 removal. Enzymatic approaches typically rely on carbonic anhydrase or similar biocatalysts to accelerate CO2 absorption into solvents, but degradation under industrial conditions has been a long-standing barrier. The outlet positions Caravel’s work as part of a wider push to bring biological capture methods closer to commercial deployment alongside conventional amine-based systems. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three biochar papers landed this week that, read together, expose a fork in the road the credit market is pretending isn’t there. Pyrolysis temperature, not feedstock or region, is becoming the variable that decides what biochar actually is: a durability-first carbon sink, or a functional soil and industrial input. You cannot have both at full strength, and current credit methodologies price them as if you can. ...

The CDR industry is still tiny, and that shapes everything else Today’s three stories point to one underlying fact: pure-play carbon dioxide removal is a very small industry trying to deliver very large promises. Across 569 pure-play CDR companies, total headcount sits at just 9,499 people. That is fewer employees than a single mid-sized refinery operator. It explains why durable tonnes are increasingly shipping from facilities the seller does not own, and why Alberta thinks it can rewrite its carbon market without much pushback from removal buyers. ...