This is the first post in our CDR Watch series — short takes on the best carbon removal videos we find. Most enhanced weathering companies spread crushed basalt on farmland. Silicate does something different: they use limestone. That might sound like a small detail, but it changes the game in a few important ways. Why Limestone?#Basalt is the standard feedstock for enhanced weathering because it’s rich in silicate minerals that react with CO₂. The problem: basalt weathers slowly. You need fine grinding, warm climates, and wet soils to get meaningful reaction rates. ...

There’s a new page on this site: a searchable directory of 734 carbon dioxide removal companies across 58 countries and 19 removal methods. You can filter by technology, country, or category. There are charts, a world map, and green badges for CDI portfolio companies. Here’s the unusual part: the entire thing — data pipeline, parser, interactive frontend, charts, world map, deployment — was built in a single afternoon. The human involved (Dirk, who runs CDI) sent four messages and spent less than ten minutes on it. ...

Nairobi will host the first-ever Africa Carbon Removal Summit on April 14–15, 2026. It’s a milestone for a continent that has enormous CDR potential but has been largely left out of the conversation. Mapping CDR in Sub-Saharan Africa#Strathmore University’s Agri-Food Innovation Centre (SAFIC) has been running a research program to map the CDR landscape across sub-Saharan Africa. Their stakeholder engagement sessions — the latest held on March 4 in Nairobi — are surfacing critical findings about the state of the field. ...

Boeing just signed one of the aviation sector’s largest carbon removal procurement deals ever: at least 40,000 tonnes of durable CDR credits through Carbonfuture, sourced from biochar projects across the Global South. That number matters. Most corporate CDR deals still hover in the hundreds or low thousands of tonnes. Forty thousand signals that a Fortune 50 company views carbon removal not as a PR checkbox, but as a core decarbonization tool for hard-to-abate emissions. ...

Climeworks — the Swiss company that built the world’s first commercial direct air capture plants — just opened its Canadian headquarters in Calgary. And it’s not just a symbolic office: they’re planning what could become the company’s largest DAC facility anywhere. The Alberta Play#A small team is already working out of the Energy Transition Centre in downtown Calgary. By fall, Climeworks will deploy a mobile testing unit (currently being tested in Saudi Arabia) to see how its technology handles Alberta’s extreme cold. If you’re going to run a DAC plant through a Canadian winter, you’d better test it first. ...

Exomad Green just crossed 300,000 delivered carbon removal credits from its biochar operations. Based in Bolivia, the company converts agricultural waste into biochar across the Global South — and it’s now one of the largest biochar CDR producers by volume. Why 300K Credits Matters#Most carbon removal companies are still measuring their output in hundreds or low thousands of tonnes. Exomad is operating at a scale that actually registers on the global CDR dashboard. For context, the entire voluntary carbon removal market delivered roughly 2.4 million tonnes in 2025. Three hundred thousand credits from a single biochar operator is significant. ...

Kenya just demonstrated what serious carbon market regulation looks like — and several big projects didn’t survive the scrutiny. KOKO Networks: The Headline Collapse#KOKO Networks, a climate-tech company selling carbon credits from clean cookstove distribution, collapsed into administration after the Kenyan government denied it a Letter of Authorization under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The problem? KOKO claimed 93% of woodfuel in their target areas came from deforested sources. The actual figure in cities like Nairobi is closer to 38%. That single metric inflated their credits by over 2.4×, turning roughly $7 million worth of legitimate reductions into $15 million of claimed credits. ...

A new study adds another wrinkle to ocean carbon removal: the microbes riding sinking particles may be dissolving the very minerals that help carbon reach the deep ocean. The Finding#Researchers discovered that bacteria attached to marine snow — the shower of organic debris that carries carbon from the ocean surface toward the deep — can accelerate the dissolution of calcium carbonate. These aren’t unusual organisms doing something exotic. They’re common ocean bacteria whose metabolic waste creates acidic microenvironments around the particles they colonize. ...

The mining industry produces billions of tonnes of alkaline waste rock every year. A new whitepaper argues this waste stream could become one of the largest pathways for scaling carbon dioxide removal. The Opportunity#Geochemical CDR — using mineral reactions to permanently capture CO₂ — has a chicken-and-egg problem. You need large volumes of reactive minerals, processing infrastructure, and land. The mining industry already has all three. ...

A new study throws cold water on some of the rosier projections for biological ocean carbon removal. The core finding: carbon and phosphorus have different residence times in the ocean, and failing to account for this nutrient cycling mismatch could lead to serious overestimates of how much CO₂ actually stays sequestered. The Disconnect#Here’s the simplified version: ocean iron fertilization (OIF) works by adding iron to surface waters to stimulate phytoplankton growth. The phytoplankton absorb CO₂, die, and sink — theoretically carrying that carbon to the deep ocean for long-term storage. ...