🌍 From China: biochar’s biggest limitation might have a cleaner solution than anyone expected. New research from Tsinghua University identifies an approach that could simultaneously solve biochar’s biomass supply problem and make it one of the lowest-cost CDR pathways available: growing bioenergy crops on China’s abandoned agricultural land and converting them to biochar. The numbers are significant. The research estimates this approach could support approximately 25.8 million tonnes of CO₂ removal per year — roughly comparable to what biochar can currently deliver using agricultural and forestry residues, which are the conventional feedstock. This isn’t a marginal improvement; it’s a doubling of the potential. ...

🌍 Bolivia wasn’t on most CDR maps. It is now. Carbon removal financier Altitude has signed an agreement with Empacar S.A., one of Bolivia’s largest industrial companies, for the purchase of over 305,000 tonnes of biochar carbon dioxide removal. The credits will be generated via Empacar’s Bolivia-based biochar production facilities, issued under Puro.earth or equivalent methodologies, with the first credits expected in 2027. Who Is Empacar?#Empacar isn’t a climate startup. It’s a major Bolivian industrial player with decades of experience in circular materials management — the kind of company that understands supply chains, feedstock logistics, and long-term operations. It’s now launching Carbon X, a dedicated business unit focused on climate innovation and voluntary carbon market participation. ...

There’s a CDR opportunity hiding in plain sight, and it smells faintly of wood pulp. Pulp and paper mills have been industrial energy users for over a century. They burn enormous quantities of biomass — wood residues, black liquor, bark — to generate the heat and power their processes require. For climate purposes, that’s been considered roughly carbon-neutral: the trees absorbed CO₂ while growing, the mill releases it when burning. ...

The voluntary carbon removal market tends to move in increments. ClimeFi just jumped three levels at once. The Swiss CDR procurement specialist has launched the Beyond 2030 RFP — its most ambitious procurement round to date — seeking between 100,000 and 500,000 tonnes of durable carbon removal from corporate buyers acting collectively. The round is pathway-agnostic, but requires 200+ year permanence as a minimum threshold. No forestry offsets, no short-lived solutions. ...

First Microsoft, now Google. The world’s biggest tech companies are placing serious bets on biochar — and this week’s numbers are hard to ignore. Google has signed a multi-year agreement with Commonwealth Sortation LLC, an affiliate of AMP Robotics, to remove 200,000 metric tonnes of CO₂e via biochar by 2030. This is one of Google’s largest carbon removal purchases to date, and it comes just days after Microsoft’s landmark 1 million-tonne biochar deal with Liferaft — the biggest in US history. ...

Every week, CaptainDrawdown takes on one widespread misconception about carbon removal. This week: enhanced weathering. The myth: It’s just spreading crushed rock on fields. How could something that primitive ever work at gigaton scale? The reality is considerably more interesting — and more promising. What Enhanced Weathering Actually Is#Enhanced weathering (EW) accelerates a natural process that has regulated Earth’s climate for hundreds of millions of years. When silicate rocks like basalt weather, they react with CO₂ dissolved in rainwater to form bicarbonate ions. Those ions eventually wash to sea, where the carbon is effectively locked away for geological timescales — think thousands to millions of years. ...

🌍 From Japan — this story was originally published in Japanese. We’re bridging the language gap because good CDR ideas don’t care about borders. Here’s a fact that might bother you: commercial greenhouses routinely burn kerosene specifically to generate CO₂ for their plants. Not for heat. For the carbon dioxide itself. Plants grow faster with elevated CO₂ levels, so growers literally combust fossil fuels inside their greenhouses to get it. ...

One million carbon removal units. Ten years. One company in Iowa. Liferaft, a biochar producer operating out of the US Midwest, just signed the largest biochar carbon removal offtake in American history with Microsoft. The deal — facilitated by London-based marketplace Supercritical — commits Microsoft to purchasing 1 million CRUs over a decade from Liferaft’s pyrolysis operations in Iowa and Illinois. Two days ago we covered Microsoft’s $1B-range deal with Vaulted Deep. Now this. Redmond isn’t dabbling in carbon removal anymore — they’re building a diversified CDR portfolio with the kind of volume commitments that actually move markets. ...

Eight hundred thousand people flush their toilets in the Oslo region. Now, for the first time ever, the CO₂ from processing that sewage is being permanently stored 8,500 feet under the North Sea. Inherit Carbon Solutions, HoopCO2, and the Northern Lights joint venture have achieved something the CDR world has been waiting for: the first permanent geological storage of biogenic CO₂ from biogas production. This isn’t a pilot. It’s not a feasibility study. It’s operational BECCS with verified permanent storage. ...

Immediate carbon removal would eliminate all climate damages. Delay it 25 years and you only get half the benefit. That’s the headline finding from a new Stanford study published in Nature, and it’s the most powerful economic argument for CDR deployment I’ve seen. The researchers built a framework linking individual emissions to actual, quantifiable global damages. The numbers are staggering, specific, and uncomfortable. The damage ledger#Since 1990, US emissions have caused $10 trillion in global damages. Not theoretical future costs — realized economic harm distributed across the planet: ...