“DAC removes 1.3 million tonnes per year. A single good year of global forest growth removes 10 gigatonnes. Why are we spending billions on machines when we could just plant trees?” This framing shows up constantly, and it’s wrong in a specific way that’s worth unpacking — because the people making the argument often genuinely care about climate outcomes. Afforestation and DAC don’t compete for the same slot in the climate portfolio. They address different risk profiles, operate on different timescales, and fail in different ways. The question isn’t which one to choose. The question is how to use each where it actually works. ...

Drax just reported record renewable generation — and is now exploring data centre colocation on the same site where it’s trying to build one of the world’s largest BECCS installations. Sit with that combination for a second. Drax is the UK’s largest renewable generator by output. Its North Yorkshire plant burns biomass to generate electricity, captures the CO₂ from combustion, and plans to store it permanently — bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. If BECCS works as advertised, every unit of electricity generated is carbon-negative: you pulled CO₂ from the atmosphere (as trees grow), burned it for power, and buried the emissions. Net negative. ...

🌍 From Germany: Climate backsliding isn’t just a Washington story. Felix Schenuit at Liberale Moderne is watching it happen in Europe, and his new policy paper makes an uncomfortable argument about what that means for CDR. The core thesis: if net-zero commitments erode under political pressure, carbon dioxide removal loses its entire investment rationale. CDR exists, in the current policy architecture, as the tool that handles the residual emissions that can’t be zeroed out any other way. Remove the net-zero target and you’ve removed the demand signal. The market for CDR disappears before it ever properly forms. ...

The number that gets thrown around to dismiss tech CDR goes like this: forests and soils remove roughly 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year. Direct air capture removes about 1.3 million tonnes. That’s less than 0.02% of what natural systems do. So why bother? The people making this argument have the data right and the logic backwards. Natural carbon sinks doing 10 gigatonnes of work annually isn’t an argument against tech CDR — it’s a testament to how much biological infrastructure we’ve built up over millions of years, and a reminder of how catastrophically we’re undermining it. Net deforestation continues. The Amazon has regions that have flipped from carbon sink to carbon source. The 2023 fire season in Canada alone released more than a billion tonnes of CO₂. These aren’t anomalies; they’re a trend. ...

A press release landed claiming direct air capture at $30/ton by retrofitting 120,000 US gas stations. The company is PlanetWEST, the technology is called MIDAC G2, and the pitch is genuinely clever: while you pump gasoline in, the machine pumps captured carbon out. Solid carbon output, no CO₂ pipelines needed, zero water consumption, no chemical byproducts. For context on those numbers: Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland is running at roughly $1,000/ton. The DOE’s Earthshot program has a target of $100/ton by 2030 — an ambitious goal that the field is working hard to hit. PlanetWEST is claiming $30/ton now, from a press release. ...

DAC’s biggest cost isn’t the fan. It isn’t the building or the sorbent material. It’s the heat — specifically, the heat required to release the CO₂ you just captured so you can regenerate your sorbent and do it again. Standard amine-based systems need north of 100°C for that regeneration step. Which means you’re burning energy — often natural gas — to run a machine designed to remove carbon. The irony writes itself. ...

While one North American government is busy dismantling climate infrastructure, the other is quietly becoming a meaningful player in carbon dioxide removal. Three data points from Canada tell a coherent story. Climeworks chose Calgary for its Canadian headquarters. The Swiss direct air capture company — operator of the Mammoth facility in Iceland and one of the most credible DAC companies in the world — looked at North America and picked Calgary. That’s not a symbolic choice. It reflects real assessment of Canada’s regulatory environment, talent pipeline, and long-term policy stability. ...

Sunday, March 29, 2026. Five original posts today, and today’s data deserves the attention. Our Coverage#Over 1 Million Tonnes of CDR Purchased in a Single Week The CDR market hit a milestone that would have been unthinkable three years ago. More than a million tonnes of carbon dioxide removal changed hands in a single week — driven by biochar scaling globally, BECCS coming online in Stockholm, and big buyers getting serious. The Hemingway quote about bankruptcy applies here: markets change slowly, then all at once. ...

One of the most persistent arguments against direct air capture is the energy one: DAC is too energy-intensive, too greedy, to be a serious climate tool. It’s repeated often enough that many people have accepted it as settled wisdom. It isn’t. A study published in Environmental Research: Energy modeled exactly how much additional primary energy demand a serious CDR buildout would require to hit a 1.0°C temperature target. The answer: 12.0–37.5% additional primary energy compared to a baseline scenario without ambitious CDR. ...

Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal has long carried a reputation for being conceptually promising but empirically vague. New lab results from a study on Equatic’s electrolysis process push things in a more concrete direction. The study tested seawater alkalinization via two methods — direct and sequential carbonation — using Equatic’s electrolysis approach. Both methods achieved 96–98% CO₂ removal efficiency. Both sequestered approximately 3.5 grams of CO₂ per liter of treated seawater. ...