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Captain's CDR Log #283: Norway's projected land carbon uptake to 2100 fell from about 20 to 5 Mt a year

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Norway’s projected average net carbon uptake from its land sector to 2100 is now about 5 MtCO2 a year. The 2019 projection for the same quantity was about 20 MtCO2 a year. Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky) set the 2019 and 2026 projections side by side, and the expected sink shrank by three-quarters, roughly 15 Mt a year of removal that national carbon accounting could pencil in seven years ago and cannot now. His summary: “Successive projections of Norwegian Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) emissions lead to smaller net uptake… These are big changes, with big policy implications.” LULUCF is the inventory category for land use, land-use change and forestry. ...

Swiss wastewater body tenders biogas upgrade; Carbon Herald calls it a Europe trend

Carbon Herald just published Swiss Biomethane Tender Highlights European Shift Toward Biogenic Carbon Capture. Carbon Herald reports that EBBV, an intermunicipal wastewater association serving the Basse-Broye and Vully area of Switzerland, has opened a public procurement process for a complete biogas upgrading facility. The plant would separate methane from the raw biogas produced during sewage sludge digestion so it can be injected as biomethane, with the CO2 fraction becoming a potential feedstock for capture rather than a vent stream. The outlet frames the tender as one example of a broader trend among European utilities and waste operators to treat biogenic CO2 from anaerobic digestion as a resource for storage or utilization. The piece does not give a project budget, timeline, or confirmed capture volume, and the tender itself appears to cover upgrading rather than a dedicated capture unit. ...

Captain's CDR Log #282: Buyers are lining up, but few projects get through the diligence gate

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus is that durable carbon removal is demand-limited. Buyers, advocates, and most market commentary repeat it. Kevin Lee Caster (@kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky) puts it in one line: “Millions of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide Removal are being purchased. Millions more tonnes of CDR need to be purchased in order to help the industry grow to the scale necessary.” More tonnes bought, more plants built. That is the model. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-08

All four of today’s stories come down to one question: which tonnes count. The physical limits on carbon removal are not the binding constraint right now. The accounting rules are. That shows up in the EU, where a plan for 250 Mt of removals inside the Emissions Trading System depends entirely on eligibility definitions. It shows up in the UK, where the government’s answer to its greenhouse gas removal (GGR) review is mostly a set of rules about what qualifies for support. It shows up in the science, where the honest answer to “how much can enhanced rock weathering remove” is “it depends on what you can measure.” And it shows up in Klaus Lackner’s long-running argument that scale is a manufacturing and policy problem, not a chemistry problem. The ceiling on CDR this decade is a definitions problem. ...

Take: Debunking the Myths: Why Carbon Removal Can Scale with Klaus Lackner

Take on a podcast episode from Climate Chat, originally published Tue, 29 Se. Listen: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnI-2ckIDMQ TL;DR Thermodynamic minimum for direct air capture is ~20 kJ/mol CO2 vs ~700 kJ/mol released burning gasoline; current DAC runs 10–20x above that floor. Useful framing. Lackner’s practical cost floor: $10–30/t (materials, water, electricity only); $100/t is the “economy survives” threshold. Cost-floor argument is the episode’s strongest section. Learning rate is the make-or-break variable: 20% per doubling scales to gigatons, 10% fails. Rarely stated this bluntly. Policy ask: certificate of sequestration at the wellhead plus a reverse auction for government buying of historical emissions. Coherent, not new. Arcusa (ASU) finding cited: roughly half of Microsoft’s carbon certificates are “orphaned” after 30 years. First time I’ve seen this number on a podcast. Dan Miller hosts Klaus Lackner — the physicist who published the first technical direct air capture paper in 1999 and co-founded Global Research Technologies — for a structured walk through what he calls the myths about carbon dioxide removal. Episode: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnI-2ckIDMQ. Topics are energy balance, cost floors, storage capacity, fossil-company moral hazard, scaling precedents, and the policy design Lackner wants. It’s a long interview with a live Q&A; the substance is front-loaded. ...

Take: How Much CO₂ Can Enhanced Weathering Really Remove? - Derry

Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Mon, 28 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/How-Much-CO-Can-Enhanced-Weathering-Really-Remove----Derry-e3pgntl TL;DR Derry’s whole-system argument: shallow-soil cation depletion (top 10–30 cm) measures the first step, not alkalinity export. Direct challenge to current ERW measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). Three sinks consume alkalinity downstream: ion exchange in acidic soils, secondary clay precipitation (generates acidity), carbonate precipitation. “Not delayed, it’s been consumed.” Water budget check: ~250 mm/yr runoff in US corn belt would need 25–30 mmol/L alkalinity to move 5 t CO₂/ha/yr; real streams run 1–3. Useful framing. Natural basalt catchments max out near 1 t CO₂/ha/yr (wet tropics), typically ~0.2. Global basalt weathering ~0.1–0.15 Gt CO₂/yr. First time I’ve seen this benchmark set against ERW claims. Host tone is snarky; guest is measured and explicitly open to rebuttal. Take the substance, discount the wrapper. Andrew of Reviewer 2 does geoengineering hosts Louis Derry, Cornell geochemist (30 years, also affiliated with IPGP Paris), on a new Nature paper with Kate Maher and Oliver Chadwick arguing that critical-zone processes cap alkalinity export from basaltic systems. The episode is essentially a mechanistic case for why enhanced rock weathering (ERW) removal claims of 5–10 t CO₂/ha/yr are physically implausible in row-crop agriculture. ...

Take: Inside the UK’s Answer to the GGR Review - with James Screen

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 06 Oc. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/the-uk-governments-answer-to-the-ggr-review-with-james-scree TL;DR UK government’s GGR review response is a “staging post,” not a strategy; hard questions deferred to the Carbon Budget 7 delivery plan (expected 2026). Geological net zero rejected mainly for political reasons: no appetite to reopen what net zero means. Candid, and worth knowing. UK ETS removals integration slips from “end of 2028” to “as soon as practicable” — Screen says don’t over-read it, but UK-EU linking is a live variable. Carbon contracts for difference (CCfDs) can serve both voluntary and ETS sales, but the taxpayer subsidy implied doesn’t scale. Honest framing. GGR business model still has no financial close; the transport & storage network model does (Liverpool Bay). The CDR Policy Scoop hosts Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart interview James Screen, who until recently ran the greenhouse gas removals (GGR) team at the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). Recorded 29 September, the episode dissects the government’s response to Alan Whitehead’s independent GGR review — what was accepted, what was parked, and why — from someone who drafted it and can now speak personally. ...

Captain's CDR Log #281: The EU ETS plan for 250 Mt of removals hinges on which tonnes count

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The 250 Mt figure settles how much, not which tonnes or whether they arrive Carbon Gap’s explainer on the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) puts a single number in front of European removal suppliers: the European Commission plans to fund 250 million tonnes of carbon removal through the ETS by 2040 (Carbon Gap on LinkedIn). The plan itself traces back to the Commission’s July legislative proposal for the ETS review, so the volume is not new. What Carbon Gap adds is the framing. The post says the rules now have to answer two questions: will they make sure the removals happen, and which removals will count (same post). I think that framing is right, and it changes how suppliers should read the number. 250 Mt is a ceiling on possible demand. It is not a commitment to any method. ...

Google deal pushes September 2026 durable CDR past 1M tonnes — but it's lumpy

CDR.fyi just published Durable CDR Market Recap: September 2026 — Key Deals & Trends. CDR.fyi’s monthly recap reports that more than 1 million tonnes of durable carbon removal were contracted in September 2026. The bulk comes from Google’s agreement with enhanced weathering developer Terradot for 1 million tonnes, paired with a separate 1 million tonne CO2e methane elimination purchase by 2030. Smaller deals include Granitor buying 5,000 tonnes from Stockholm Exergi for delivery starting in 2030, Milkywire closing eight Salesforce-backed pre-purchases totalling 3,661 tonnes across DAC, alkalinity enhancement and biomass storage, and Japan Airlines signing a CORSIA-oriented agreement with Climeworks. The partnerships section covers Exomad Green and Carbonfuture expanding biochar supply by 1.1 million tonnes through 2035, Whirlpool’s multi-supplier portfolio via ClimeFi, Supercritical’s India distribution deal with Ground Up, Dotz Nano’s sorbent supply contract with Soletair, and Euroclear’s portfolio through CUR8. ...

Captain's CDR Log #280: Why the same alkalinity removes different amounts of carbon in different seas

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) credits are sold by the tonne, but the removal behind each tonne is set by the water the alkalinity goes into. Last week, on 1 and 2 October, three open data deposits and one preprint landed that each treat location as the variable rather than the footnote: a global coastal efficiency study with its figure data and code on Zenodo, a lab dataset on how flow affects hydroxide dissolution, and a 20-day microcosm study from the upwelling system off northwest Spain. Read together, they say an OAE project’s address decides its carbon math. ...