Sustainable aviation fuel currently makes up less than 1% of global jet fuel consumption. A new paper in Nature Energy from MIT might explain how to change that — without touching a single crop. Dr. Anya Sharma’s team at MIT has developed an electrochemical cell that takes two inputs — CO₂ (captured from air or industrial sources) and water — and produces jet fuel hydrocarbons. The only energy source: renewable electricity from solar or wind. No biomass. No farmland. No food-vs-fuel tradeoff. ...

Saturday’s coverage stretched from Dutch greenhouses to Houston conference halls — five pieces that together tell the story of a field maturing faster than most people realize. Our Coverage Today Biochar + Basalt: Wageningen Shows Co-Deployment Changes the Weathering Game — A Wageningen University study in Geoderma found that mixing biochar into enhanced weathering plots boosts mineral dissolution by raising soil pH and reactive oxide formation. The catch: soil respiration spiked too, temporarily outpacing inorganic carbon sequestration. Stacking CDR pathways works, but the math isn’t simply additive. CDI’s own lysimeter data shows the same pattern — soil type determines everything. ...

Ninety-five percent. That’s the share of CDR credits issued in the voluntary carbon market in 2025 that came from nature-based approaches — tree planting, soil carbon, mangroves. Only 5% came from high-durability pathways like biochar or BECCS. According to Carbon Direct’s 2026 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market Report, published February 10, this isn’t just a gap. It’s a structural failure. The numbers paint a grim picture across the board. CDR represents just 5-6% of total VCM retirements. Credit retirements fell 7% in 2025 compared to 2024, landing at 157 Mt total. Corporate climate commitments surged 227% — and the market still shrank. Five consecutive years of stagnation. The VCM isn’t growing into its potential. It’s treading water while the planet warms. ...

Mixing biochar into your enhanced weathering plot doesn’t just add carbon — it changes the entire soil chemistry playing field. That’s the headline from a new Wageningen University study in Geoderma, and it has real implications for how we think about stacking CDR approaches. The researchers deployed dunite (an ultramafic rock, rich in olivine) with and without biochar on two different soil types. What they found: biochar co-deployment boosted reactive (hydr)oxide mineral formation and raised soil pH — both factors that accelerate silicate weathering. In clayey soils specifically, biochar slightly enhanced dunite dissolution rates. Two CDR methods working together, each making the other more effective. Sounds great, right? ...

Five years ago, carbon removal at CERAWeek would have been a hallway conversation between three people and a potted plant. This week, it has its own Innovation Agora track. When the world’s largest energy conference — 8,000+ attendees, every major oil company, every energy minister who matters — gives CDR dedicated stage time, something has shifted. CERAWeek 2026 runs March 23-27 in Houston. Among the speakers at the #CWAgora: Jessica Hinojosa, Senior Carbon Removal Program Manager at Microsoft. She joined Microsoft from Shell in September 2024, which is itself a telling career arc — from one of the world’s largest oil companies to one of the world’s largest CDR buyers. That pipeline of talent moving from fossil energy into carbon removal is becoming a pattern, not an anomaly. ...

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. ...

New EGU 2026 research: adding organic carbon (compost, biochar) alongside crushed rock changes how fast enhanced weathering works. Metal slags and inorganic fertilizers react differently depending on what organic matter is present.

Shanghai startup Carbonology claims synthetic fuel from air and water at market-competitive prices. Co-founded by a former Tesla VP. Big claims, thin on details.

Tapestry — parent of Coach and Kate Spade — signs a 10-year DAC partnership with Climeworks. First North American fashion company to buy direct air capture removal.

The Myth “Direct air capture consumes insane amounts of energy. It’ll never work at scale — we’d need entire power grids just for DAC.” This is probably the most common objection to DAC. And unlike last week’s misconception, there’s a kernel of truth here. DAC is energy-intensive. But the conclusion — that it can never scale — doesn’t follow. Here’s why. The Energy Numbers (Real Ones) Current DAC systems use roughly 2,000–3,000 kWh of combined thermal and electrical energy per ton of CO₂ captured. That’s a lot. For context, it’s about what two American households use in a year. ...

Researchers from Princeton, Hong Kong University, and WRI find BECCS is ’likely to produce higher emissions for decades than natural gas without carbon capture.’ The IPCC’s favorite CDR pathway has a serious accounting problem.

Five stories today — ranging from a serious accounting warning for biomass credits to the EU putting rules on paper for carbon removal certification. ⚠️ Biomass Carbon Credits Face an Accounting Crisis Biomass Carbon Credits Face Accounting Crisis Before They Even Scale 88% of all carbon removal credits sold involve biomass. A new CATF report examined 25 certification protocols for biomass-based CDR — and found nearly all have significant accounting flaws. The voluntary carbon market already crashed once from sloppy accounting in the offset era. CDR can’t afford a repeat. Getting biomass carbon accounting right now, before the market scales further, isn’t optional. ...