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. ...

This chart is a stacked bar count of every company in the CDR Directory, grouped along the x-axis by removal pathway (direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, and so on), with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play producers, brokers and marketplaces, and firms where CDR is a side business bolted onto a different core model. The total height tells you which pathways are crowded with company formation. The segment mix tells you something a raw count hides: whether a pathway’s apparent size is built on operators actually delivering tonnes, on intermediaries reselling them, or on incumbents whose CDR line is a minor adjunct. Two pathways with identical totals can have very different underlying economies once you see the split. ...

This chart takes the same founding-year history view and splits each yearly bar by CDR pathway, so you can see not just how many companies were founded in a given year but which kinds of companies. The x-axis is the founding year; bar height is the count of companies started that year; the stacked colors in each bar are the pathways, keyed in the legend. The reason this split matters is that the field did not grow as one thing. Direct air capture has an older cohort, with companies appearing well before the recent funding wave. Biochar, enhanced weathering, and marine pathways cluster much later, riding the 2020-2023 surge. A raw founding-year total hides that staggering; the stacked view makes the sequencing legible. ...

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. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why does one industrial CO2 project on the North Atlantic rim get a $2.6 billion sovereign check while another, on the opposite shore, gets sued by its pipe supplier? Same capture chemistry. Same decade. Same broad climate logic. Different geography, and the geography is doing almost all the work. ...

The day’s signal: CDR is being financed, sized, and priced like a real industry now Today’s four stories share one through-line. Carbon removal is moving from “interesting science” to “financeable infrastructure,” and the people doing the financing, the headcount math, and the price-discovery work are starting to sound like grownups. We got a banker’s rent-versus-buy framework, a headcount reality check, a structured debt-plus-offtake deal from a major bank, and a grounded look at village-scale biochar. Different corners of the field, same maturation curve. ...

Take on a YouTube video from ShekruTV, originally posted 2026-06-08. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1YlrZJoxyI TL;DR Naved Ahmad of Ecosis pitches village-scale biochar via modified drum kilns costing ~₹2,000–3,000 ($25–35) per unit. Useful datapoint on the floor of distributed kit cost. Frames carbon finance as debt relief for Indian farmers carrying ~3x annual income in debt. Reasonable framing, not new. Cites Verra-style methodologies as a dead-end for smallholders: ~$100K project costs, 3–4 year waits, no payouts. Matches what other practitioners report. Pivot point: Carbon Standards International’s 2022 biochar methodology is what made Ecosis viable. Worth knowing if you’re tracking registry choice for smallholder projects. Heavy on personal journey, light on production numbers, yields, or carbon volumes. Skip if you want hard data. A long-form interview on ShekruTV’s biochar series with Naved Ahmad, founder of Ecosis, a Bangalore-region biochar outfit working with smallholder farmers. The substantive claim: distributed, drum-kiln biochar at the village level — financed via Carbon Standards International (CSI) credits — is the only carbon-market structure that actually reaches Indian smallholders, because the Verra-track methodologies price them out and pay too late. ...