If you told me a climate startup was using autonomous rovers and microwaves to turn mining waste into a carbon sink, I’d assume it was a pitch deck fever dream. But Arca Climate is actually doing it — and the pilot data is impressive. The Vancouver-based company, born from UBC research, is led by a team with serious geological credentials. Co-founder Greg Dipple has spent 20+ years at UBC studying ultramafic rocks — the magnesium-rich minerals that naturally pull CO₂ from the air and lock it away for thousands of years through mineral carbonation. Co-founders Peter Scheuermann and Bethany Ladd round out the leadership. ...

Every few months, another study adds a line to biochar’s already impressive resume. But this one is different — it’s not a single experiment, it’s the whole picture. A new meta-analysis published in Carbon Research, led by Mbezele Junior Yannick Ngaba, synthesized 78 peer-reviewed studies from across the globe to quantify biochar’s impact on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The headline numbers: CO₂ emissions: reduced by 24% Methane (CH₄): reduced by up to 36% Nitrous oxide (N₂O): reduced by up to 39% And at high application rates (40 tonnes per hectare), the global warming potential reduction reached 83% on a 100-year timescale. ...

While the US is busy cancelling DAC hub funding, Canada just quietly did something no national government has done before: it launched a dedicated procurement program for carbon dioxide removal credits. The program, structured as a Request for Standing Offer, commits at least CAD $10 million (~$7M USD) to purchasing CDR credits generated within Canada. Federal departments can buy credits from five eligible pathways: direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS), bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), biochar, biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS), and enhanced mineralization. Each CDR stream gets its own competitive process, evaluated on technical merit and price, with contracts running through March 31, 2029. ...

The name says it all. Ctrl-S — the keyboard shortcut for save — is a new company doing exactly that for the direct air capture sector: saving the work before it’s lost. Here’s the context. DAC investment has dropped more than 60% from its 2022 peak. The Trump administration cancelled tens of millions in federal DAC funding. Companies that raised on the 2021-2022 climate hype cycle are running out of runway, and when a deeptech startup dies, its IP, experimental data, and hard-won engineering knowledge often die with it. Papers in drawers. Lab notebooks in storage units. Sorbent formulations that took years to develop, gone. ...

Everyone talks about trees when they talk about forest carbon. But the real story is underground. A new study published in Science by researchers at Lund University and Stanford finds that old-growth forests in Sweden store 72% more carbon per acre than managed forests — even when you give managed forests credit for the carbon locked in harvested wood products like lumber and furniture. Without that generous credit? The gap widens to 83%. ...

Tuesday’s lineup hit five stories across three continents — a potential billion-dollar CDR contract, European infrastructure that’s actually being designed properly, two different flavors of DAC innovation, and a Swiss rodent that might outperform your favorite carbon removal startup. What We Covered Today Microsoft’s CDR Bet: The Vaulted Deep Deal Could Be Worth ~$1B — Microsoft agreed to store 4.9 million tonnes of CO₂ with Houston-based Vaulted Deep. That’s more than the entire global CDR industry (excluding forestry) removed in 2023. The estimated price tag: roughly $1 billion. While the federal government freezes DAC hub funding, Microsoft is single-handedly creating a market. Impressive and deeply concerning in equal measure — one company’s climate commitment shouldn’t have to substitute for industrial policy. ...

A 30-kilogram rodent with orange teeth might be one of the most cost-effective carbon removal technologies on the planet. A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment provides the first detailed carbon accounting of beaver-modified wetlands — and the numbers are genuinely surprising. Researchers studied a stream system in northern Switzerland that beavers have been reshaping for over a decade. Their finding: if you scaled beaver-created wetlands across suitable habitats in Switzerland, they could offset 1.2–1.8% of the country’s annual carbon emissions. ...

Here’s the problem with most direct air capture: you spend enormous amounts of energy releasing the CO₂ you just captured. Heat the sorbent to 900°C (solid sorbents) or boil a solvent (liquid systems) — either way, the energy cost dominates the economics. That’s why DAC still costs $400–$1,000 per tonne. But what if you could release captured CO₂ by just… making the air humid? Researchers at Arizona State University, led by doctoral researcher Gayathri Yogaganeshan, have published new work explaining exactly why certain commercial polymers can capture CO₂ from dry air and release it when exposed to moisture. No heat. No pressure. Just wet/dry cycling. And for the first time, they’ve mapped the structural differences that make some materials dramatically better at it than others. ...

Microsoft just signed what might be the largest carbon removal contract in history — and nobody in Washington had anything to do with it. E&E News reports that Microsoft has agreed to store 4.9 million tonnes of CO₂ with Vaulted Deep, a Houston-based startup that uses geological storage. Neither party confirms the price, but industry experts estimate the deal could be worth approximately $1 billion. Vaulted Deep CEO Julia Reichelstein called the deal’s impact “Revolutionary.” ...

While the US spent 2025 freezing $3.5 billion in DAC hub funding, the Netherlands quietly started building the kind of CDR infrastructure that actually scales. Platform Zero just organized a CDR strategy session in South Holland with an attendance list that tells you everything about how Europe does industrial policy differently. At the table: Skytree (DAC), SeaO2 (ocean alkalinity enhancement), TNO (the Netherlands’ heavyweight national research organization), Provincie Zuid-Holland, Gemeente Rotterdam, the Port of Rotterdam, InnovationQuarter, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, Paebbl, Carbyon, everox, Zero Emission Fuels, EBN B.V., and Division Q. ...

The CO₂ in your beer probably came from an ammonia plant. Or an ethanol refinery. Or — if you’re drinking Almanac Beer Company’s new “Flow – Clean Air Edition” — straight from the sky above a parking lot in Alameda, California. Almanac just launched what appears to be the world’s first commercial beer carbonated entirely with CO₂ captured from ambient air via direct air capture. Their partner, Berkeley-based Aircapture, installed a modular DAC unit in the brewery’s parking lot — it looks like an oversized HVAC unit with a chimney — that pulls CO₂ from the air and liquefies it to beverage-grade purity (99.999%). The beer is already available at 800+ retailers across California, including Safeway, Whole Foods, Total Wine, and BevMo. ...

📊 v2 Update (March 23, 2026) This census now uses LLM classification (Gemini Flash) instead of keyword-based search. Every paper was re-classified by title + abstract across our 7 CDR pathways. Starting from 37,133 candidate papers, we filtered 12,384 as NOT_CDR, leaving 24,749 high-confidence CDR papers. Researcher count updated to 122,674. Pathway assignments recalculated. Full methodology below. This is more rigorous but catches different papers — earlier keyword searches found 21,804. ...

📊 v2 Update — LLM-Based Reclassification This post updates v1 with fresh census data (80,382 researchers, 24,749 papers). The methodology has shifted from keyword-based to LLM-based classification of research papers — meaning we’re now using AI to understand semantic context instead of just matching terms. This catches CDR research that traditional keyword methods miss. Country and institution assignments use ORCID self-reported affiliations where available, falling back to OpenAlex’s “last known institution” otherwise. Still not perfect, but significantly more accurate than before. Your corrections still make v3 better. Bluesky · X ...

⚠️ Updated for v2 (2026-03-23) This post now uses LLM classification (title + abstract) instead of keyword search. That’s a major upgrade — but it exposed a real problem with DAC data that I need to flag transparently. Rankings are based on number of CDR papers found in our classification. Institution and country data uses ORCID self-reported affiliations where available (66% coverage), with OpenAlex as fallback. ORCID links let you verify every name. If you see errors, tell me — I’ll fix them. Bluesky · X ...

Update: V2 Data (March 2026) We’ve reclassified 122,674 researchers using an LLM-based methodology instead of keyword-only matching. 42,292 researchers lost their CDR designation because their papers weren’t actually about CDR — they were tangentially related but didn’t cross the threshold. This leaves 80,382 researchers with a genuine CDR pathway. The dabbler percentage dropped from 69% to 52.8%, which at first looks like bad news. But the real story is subtler — and slightly more hopeful. Previous version: first shot · Feedback? ...

⚠️ v2 Update — Improved Methodology This analysis now uses LLM classification instead of keyword filtering, which reclassified ~2,945 papers and shifted author trajectories. The core finding holds: CDR science is growing, but the talent retention story remains fragile. Bluesky · X This is Part 5 of the CDR Researcher Census series — the synthesis. This entire census project started with a question: Is CDR science growing fast enough to deliver gigaton-scale removal by 2050? ...

If you’ve published anything related to carbon dioxide removal, you’re probably in here. The CDR Researcher Lookup lets you search 122,674 researchers by name. Each profile shows: Your CDR pathway — which removal method your work maps to Commitment level — dabbler, part-time, focused, or dedicated Trajectory — is your CDR output growing, stable, or declining? Career stage — early career through eminent, based on h-index and career span Institution and country — verified via ORCID where available Your CDR papers — the specific publications that put you in this dataset Why This Exists When Lück et al. (2025) mapped 53,000 CDR papers in Nature Communications, they answered “how much CDR research exists?” I wanted to answer the next question: who are the people doing it? ...

Monday’s lineup covers three continents — a research breakthrough from Cambridge, a national strategy from Berlin, a new carbon market from Delhi, and a Formula 1 team putting real money behind six different removal pathways. Our Coverage Today MIT Turns CO₂ and Water Into Jet Fuel Using Only Renewable Energy — A Nature Energy paper describes an electrochemical cell that converts CO₂ and water directly into jet fuel hydrocarbons using renewable electricity. No biomass, no Fischer-Tropsch. Aviation is responsible for ~3% of global emissions and notoriously hard to decarbonize — batteries are too heavy for long-haul, and sustainable aviation fuel supply is nowhere near demand. If this electrochemical approach scales, it sidesteps the feedstock bottleneck entirely. ...

📊 v2.1 Collaboration Atlas This is the collaboration layer of our CDR Researcher Census. The data reflects v2.1 paper classifications (31,234 papers). Co-authorship is a proxy for collaboration, not a perfect measure of it. Some edges are noise (250-author mega-papers), some real collaborations happen without shared papers. I’m publishing because the patterns are too interesting to sit on. Tell me what I’m getting wrong — Bluesky or X. CDR research looks like 122,674 individuals. It isn’t. ...

Global durable carbon removal today stands at roughly 0.1 million tonnes per year. Germany alone could be doing 95 million tonnes annually by 2045 — if it gets serious. That’s the headline finding from a new Carbon Removal Readiness Assessment (CRRA) published by Sweco Finland and Carbon Gap. The report is the most comprehensive analysis yet of what CDR deployment could actually look like in Europe’s largest economy. The Numbers Germany’s climate targets are among the world’s most ambitious: climate neutrality by 2045, net-negative emissions by 2050. The theoretical CDR potential is enormous — approximately 258 MtCO₂ per year by 2045. But “theoretical” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. ...