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. ...

This chart plots every pure-play CDR company in the Directory as a single dot. The horizontal axis is the company’s founding year (estimated from its primary domain registration), the vertical axis is its current headcount on a log scale, and the colour codes the company’s pathway. The shaded blue background traces overall company density — darker patches mark where the crowd of pure-plays sits. The value here is shape, not ranking. A bar chart would tell you how many companies exist in each pathway; this view tells you the entire industry’s growth contour at one glance — when did the wave of small startups hit, where are the rare big older operators, what cluster sits on the floor of “still under five people”. Outlier dots near the top of the chart are the names everyone already knows; the dense low band is where most of the industry actually lives. ...

Carbon Herald just published New Alberta Carbon Market Deal Could Clear Path For Pacific Oil Export Route. Carbon Herald reports that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith have agreed to overhaul Alberta’s industrial carbon pricing system. The deal links carbon market reforms to a broader package that could pave the way for a new oil pipeline carrying Alberta crude to the Pacific coast for export. The arrangement is positioned as a compromise between federal climate policy and provincial energy ambitions, tying continued carbon pricing stability to infrastructure approvals. Details on credit pricing floors, compliance timelines, and the specific pipeline route are part of the negotiated framework outlined in the article. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Within 90 days, at least three more durable-CDR suppliers will announce “industry-integrated” deployments. By that I mean CDR equipment bolted onto an existing industrial host site - wastewater plant, data center, refinery, cement kiln, fermentation tank - rather than a greenfield capture plant on bare ground. The reason is operational: the host already has permits, power, a CO2-bearing stream or a heat sink, and often a balance sheet willing to share capital costs. That cuts the time from term sheet to delivered tonne, which is what buyers and public funders now score on. The Q1 2026 Durable CDR Market Update makes the metric shift explicit: deliveries, not announcements. ...

The buyer concentration problem is now structural Durable carbon removal logged a record 2.3 million tonnes of purchases in Q1 2026. That is real growth. But one buyer, Microsoft, drove 43% of it. Strip Microsoft out and the market looks roughly flat. Every other piece of today’s news, from a Climeworks pitch to AI hyperscalers to the slow grind of EU rulemaking on credit substitution, traces back to this same fact: durable CDR still has one anchor customer, and the field’s near-term survival depends on widening that base before the next funding winter. ...

CDR.fyi just published 2026 Q1 Durable CDR Market Update - From Promise to Proof. CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 update finds 2.3 million tonnes of durable CDR contracted, roughly 5.6x Q1 2025 volume. Microsoft anchored the quarter with a single 1-million-tonne deal, while 112+ other buyers contracted 1.3 million tonnes between them, the third-highest non-Microsoft quarterly figure on record. Biochar dominated, making up 93% of contracted volume and all top five transactions. Deliveries reached 145K tonnes and retirements just over 100K tonnes, both second-highest on record, with deliveries up 67% year over year. Intermediaries facilitated 74% of contracted tonnes, a record share. ...

Heatmap News just published The AI Boom Needs Carbon Removal. In an opinion piece for Heatmap News, Climeworks CEO Christoph Gebald contends that the rapid buildout of AI data centers is locking in new fossil fuel emissions, since natural gas is the power source that can be deployed fast enough to meet demand. He cites IEA projections that global data center electricity use could more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, roughly equal to Japan’s current demand. With a five-year backlog for combined-cycle gas turbines, some operators are turning to more carbon-intensive single-cycle units. Gebald argues that carbon removal, including direct air capture and nature-based methods, should be priced into digital infrastructure as a complement to clean energy. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique, plainly stated “CDR governance gaps in treaty frameworks let credit substitution happen without consent or liability.” That is the spine of a recent legal analysis in CDR Approaches: Friends or Foes? on Völkerrechtsblog. Translated out of treaty language: today’s rules let a buyer in one jurisdiction discharge a climate obligation by paying for a ton stored in another, and the people who host the storage often had no seat at the table. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 20 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 connective tissue is infrastructure quietly being rebuilt around CDR — Frontier and Cascade Climate setting de facto methodology standards, Canada and the EU bolting compliance scaffolding into place, and the AI-data-center narrative hardening from talking point into actual capital allocation logic. Underneath that, a bankruptcy and a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) warning paper offer useful counterweights to the build-out story. ...

Carbon Herald just published CREW Carbon Secures $25M To Scale Its Wastewater Treatment Optimization Technology. Carbon Herald reports that CREW Carbon raised $25 million in an oversubscribed Series A round aimed at scaling its technology for optimizing wastewater treatment operations. The approach targets emissions reductions and efficiency gains at municipal and industrial treatment facilities, a sector that is often overlooked in climate discussions despite its energy intensity and process emissions. The funding is expected to support commercial deployment and team growth as the company works with utility partners. Specific investor names, deployment timelines, and measured CO2-equivalent reductions per facility are detailed in the original article. ...