Dumping alkalinity into the ocean works. The chemistry is straightforward — add dissolved minerals, shift the carbonate equilibrium, pull more CO₂ from the atmosphere into the water. But where you dump it might matter more than how much you dump. A new study presented at the EGU 2026 General Assembly puts hard numbers on the regional cost variation, and the spread is enormous. The research, titled “Carbon Dioxide Removal via Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement: Uneven Costs and Optimal Regions,” models OAE deployment across different coastal environments. The core finding: geography dominates the economics. Water temperature, mixed layer depth, existing pCO₂ levels, hydrodynamic mixing patterns, and proximity to alkalinity sources all compound to create wildly different cost curves depending on where you deploy. ...

DAC’s dirty secret isn’t the fans or the contactors — it’s the regeneration step. Heating sorbents to 900°C (for solid sorbents) or boiling caustic solutions (for liquid systems) to release captured CO₂ consumes enormous amounts of energy. It’s the single biggest reason DAC costs $400–600/ton today. What if you could just… skip it? A new paper in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering proposes exactly that. Researchers developed FeNi-modified CaZr dual-functional materials (DFMs) that capture CO₂ directly from ambient air and convert it into useful products via the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) reaction — in the same reactor, on the same material, in a single integrated process. ...

Today was a DAC day—and not in a good way. The US political stall is real: $3.5 billion in DOE funding frozen for 500+ days, and three companies (Climeworks, Heirloom, Occidental) are locked in limbo. Meanwhile, a rigorous new paper from Politecnico di Milano and ETH Zurich quantifies what DAC actually costs ($200–330/tCO₂ in sustained subsidies), and Australia and Japan just quietly announced a hydrogen-plus-DAC partnership that suggests the real action is moving to Asia-Pacific. ...

At the CUR8 Carbon Removal Summit, British Airways laid out what might be the most concrete airline carbon removal strategy we’ve seen to date. The numbers are striking: BA anticipates needing 5-10 million tonnes of carbon removals annually by 2050, representing one-third to half of the airline’s entire net-zero target. That’s not a hedge — it’s an admission that efficiency gains and sustainable aviation fuel alone won’t get aviation to net zero. Removals aren’t the cherry on top; they’re a structural pillar. ...

Project Cypress — the most ambitious direct air capture hub ever proposed in the US — hasn’t received a meaningful update from the Department of Energy in over 500 days. That’s not a typo. Five hundred days. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $3.5 billion for four regional DAC hubs, each designed to capture 1 million tons of CO2 per year. It passed with Republican votes. It was, genuinely, a bipartisan climate win. Two of those hubs are now trapped in an indefinite DOE review that started in May 2025 and shows no signs of ending. ...

While America’s $3.5 billion DAC hub program sits in bureaucratic limbo, Australia’s climate minister Madeleine King was in Kobe meeting with Kawasaki Heavy Industries executives about direct air capture and hydrogen. No audits. No 500-day review. Just two countries making plans. Why KHI matters#Kawasaki Heavy Industries isn’t a climate startup hoping to survive its next funding round. It’s a $15B+ industrial conglomerate that builds gas turbines, LNG carriers, ships, aerospace components, and rolling stock. When KHI shows up at a DAC meeting, it means heavy industry — the kind that actually builds infrastructure at scale — sees a business case. ...

A biochar composite laced with carbon nanotubes and iron carbide (Fe₃C) removes over 90% of common antibiotics from wastewater within hours. That’s 15 times better than conventional treatment materials. Every time biochar proves useful for something beyond carbon removal, the CDR business case gets stronger. This one’s a big deal. The problem it solves#Antibiotics like enrofloxacin and amoxicillin are everywhere in wastewater — from hospitals, farms, and households. Conventional water treatment doesn’t remove them well. They persist in the environment, driving antibiotic resistance, which the WHO calls one of the top ten global health threats. We need better tools. ...

Subsidies for direct air capture must exceed $200–330 per ton of CO2 and be sustained for decades. That’s not an activist estimate — it’s the central finding of the first rigorous uncertainty analysis of DACCS scaling, published by researchers at Politecnico di Milano and ETH Zurich. The total public bill? Between $900 billion and $3 trillion. Before you close this tab: the investment pays back by mid-century. But only if — and this “if” is load-bearing — we simultaneously cut emissions hard. ...

Five original posts today — anchored by a Princeton study that challenges one of CDR’s most relied-upon pathways, and bookended by a fashion-industry-first DAC deal and new soil science that matters for enhanced weathering. ⚠️ BECCS May Emit More Than Natural Gas for Decades#BECCS May Emit More Than Natural Gas for Decades, Princeton Study Finds A preprint from Princeton, Hong Kong University, and WRI drops a bomb on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Their analysis: when you account for land-use change, supply chain emissions, and the decades-long carbon payback period of growing new biomass, BECCS could produce higher net emissions than just burning natural gas — for decades. That’s a problem, because BECCS underpins a large share of IPCC scenarios that keep warming below 2°C. The paper doesn’t say BECCS can never work, but it argues that the conditions under which it delivers net-negative emissions are far narrower than most models assume. ...

Enhanced weathering sounds simple in theory: spread crushed rock on farmland, let it dissolve in soil water, and the chemical reactions pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere. In practice, the soil has opinions. New research presented at EGU 2026 — the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna — digs into one of the field’s most important open questions: what happens when you combine enhanced weathering with organic carbon amendments? The answer appears to be “it depends” — which in soil science means “it’s complicated.” ...