Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 13 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 signal is a widening gap between announced capacity and what’s actually getting built or bought. A 1Mt ARR deal and the largest-ever SAF certificate purchase show corporates still willing to write big checks for the lower-permanence end of the stack, while a new UK DAC consortium and fresh analyses of the EU Buyers’ Club and marine CDR rulebook underline how much policy scaffolding is still missing for the durable end. A German broadsheet hammering the “huge gap” framing rounds out the mood. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/403-How-to-get-max-value-from-carbon-market-consultantsw-David-LaGreca--EcoEngineers-e3kkn5k TL;DR When to call a consultant: as soon as you have a concept beyond a napkin sketch — useful framing, mostly self-serving but honest about it. Claim: a 1-6 month consulting engagement often beats hiring a $150-200k FTE for methodology, LCA, registry selection work. Plausible for early-stage developers. EcoEngineers’ workload has shifted from drafting new CDR methodologies (2022-2023 peak) to advising large energy/corporate entrants and operating projects. Useful market-temperature signal. Rule of thumb: AI tooling gets you ~70% of the way on methodology drafting; the last 30% is where expertise compounds. First time I’ve heard it quantified that way. Registry choice (Puro vs. Isometric vs. Rainbow vs. others) is undersold as a strategic decision that determines credit volume, verification cadence, and labeling eligibility. Episode link. Ross Kenyon hosts David LaGreca of EcoEngineers — a sponsor of the show, which Ross discloses repeatedly — for an hour on how durable-CDR developers should actually engage advisory firms. The episode is half practical (hire vs. contract math, when to fire a consultant) and half industry-state observation from someone who’s touched roughly 10 CDR protocols across 7-8 mechanisms. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/is-carbon-removal-stronger-than-the TL;DR Three Toronto operators (Amplify, Mangrove, CarbonRun) argue the durable-CDR vibes are worse than the fundamentals — useful corrective if you’ve been doom-scrolling. Venture was the wrong instrument for an infrastructure sector; the “missing middle” between VC and big-bank project finance is the real bottleneck. Accurate diagnosis, no easy fix offered. CarbonRun’s first verified river alkalinity issuances exposed how optimistic pre-audit limestone-to-feedstock ratios were. First time I’ve heard an operator say this out loud. 1,100+ permanent CDR companies counted across public lists — Vlaar predicts consolidation via acqui-hire, not a clean die-off. Plausible. Affordability framing in government budgets is the under-discussed existential risk for compliance demand. Worth taking seriously. Na’im Merchant’s Toronto Climate Week wrap puts Trish Nixon (Amplify Capital), Brandon Vlaar (Mangrove Systems), and Luke Connell (CarbonRun) in one room to take stock of durable CDR a year after the US political shift. It’s a finance/measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)/supplier triangle, recorded live, and unusually candid about what isn’t working. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 08 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/taking-stock-the-state-of-cdr-fireside-chat-with-oliver-gede TL;DR Geden: only 2 countries (Australia, UK) name novel/durable CDR in NDCs through 2035; ~1/3 of long-term strategies for 2050 mention it. Damning baseline. State of CDR report puts CDR at ~16% of global mitigation effort — higher than the 5-10% often cited. Worth understanding why before quoting it. “Hard to abate” is partly politically hard to abate — CDR risks becoming a flexibility valve for politicians dodging transport/buildings decarbonization. Sharp framing. EU’s 5% international credits allowance: officially “no CDM mistakes round two,” but Geden expects criteria to be more lenient than current rhetoric suggests. land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) accounting hides the ball: net targets mask gross emissions (e.g. Germany’s 50 Mt/yr from peatland drainage, stable, now 8% of national total). Sebastian Manhart interviews Oliver Geden (SWP, IPCC WG3 Vice Chair, State of CDR co-author) live at NEP Summit Brussels, recorded the week the third State of CDR report dropped. Thirty minutes covering policy sequencing (foundational → supply → demand), the gap between net zero pledges and actual CDR planning, EU pillar architecture, and how the Iran conflict scrambles climate attention. ...

Carbon Herald just published Mitsubishi Electric And VTT Reach Milestone In Electrochemical DOC Project. Carbon Herald reports that Mitsubishi Electric and Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre have hit a development milestone in their joint direct ocean capture (DOC) project, which uses an electrochemical process to remove CO2 dissolved in seawater. The partnership, announced previously, pairs Mitsubishi Electric’s engineering capacity with VTT’s research work on electrochemical separation. The piece frames the progress as a step toward a scalable DOC system, though specifics on capture rates, energy use, and timeline to pilot deployment are limited in the coverage. Direct ocean capture is positioned as a complement to direct air capture given the higher concentration of CO2 in seawater. ...

What “Ocean CDR” actually means Ocean carbon dioxide removal is a family of techniques that use the sea — the planet’s largest active carbon reservoir, holding roughly 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere — to draw down atmospheric CO₂ and keep it down. The ocean already absorbs about a quarter of annual anthropogenic emissions through air-sea gas exchange (Friedlingstein et al., 2023). Ocean CDR approaches either accelerate that natural uptake (by shifting seawater chemistry) or use biology to fix carbon and export it below the mixed layer, where it stays out of atmospheric contact for centuries to millennia. The appeal for buyers chasing durable removal is straightforward: the storage reservoir is enormous, and the residence times — particularly for bicarbonate ion in the deep ocean — are on the order of 10,000 years (Siegel et al., 2021). ...

Carbon Herald just published Summit Carbon Solutions Faces $15M Lawsuit As Pipeline Delays Continue. Carbon Herald reports that Summit Carbon Solutions is set to face trial in a $15 million lawsuit filed by pipe manufacturer Welspun. The dispute centers on contractual obligations tied to pipe purchases for Summit’s planned multi-state CO2 pipeline, which has been hit by repeated permitting and construction delays. The case adds to a growing list of legal and regulatory hurdles for the project, which would gather CO2 from ethanol plants across the Midwest and transport it for underground storage. The outlet notes the litigation comes as Summit continues to push back its in-service timeline. ...