Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.

Three contracts crossed three different borders this past week, and together they tell a story the tonnage debate keeps missing. CDR’s binding constraint is no longer chemistry or capture cost. It is the legal pipework for moving and storing CO2 across boundaries that were never designed to be crossed.

Start with the maritime layer. The Baltic and International Maritime Council just published the first standard charterparty contract for liquefied CO2 cargo. Until now, every CCS or CDR project shipping captured CO2 across a coastline had to negotiate bespoke terms from scratch. A standard contract is what insurers, port authorities, and project finance lenders need before they will underwrite a route. It is the difference between a one-off voyage and a shipping lane.

The geological layer hardened the same week. Colorado and Wyoming signed the first US interstate agreement coordinating Class VI permitting for CO2 plumes that cross state lines. Storage formations don’t respect political boundaries, but until this compact, regulators did. Treating the Rocky Mountain basin as a single storage asset was geologically obvious and legally impossible. Now it is becoming both.

Then the sovereign accounting layer. Singapore and the Philippines signed a bilateral Article 6.2 implementation agreement that formalizes how credits, including removal credits, flow across ASEAN borders with corresponding adjustments. Three frameworks. One week. Maritime, geological, and sovereign. They lock together.

The molecules these frameworks will carry are already lining up. The Trudvang CCS partnership in the North Sea is exactly the kind of project that only becomes financeable once BIMCO-style shipping contracts and London Protocol export rules are settled. And Captura’s deal to supply California-captured ocean CO2 to a French e-SAF plant is the cross-jurisdictional flow that needs all three layers - shipping standards, sovereign accounting, and utilization rights - to actually settle on the books.

The plumbing is not finished. CDRmare (@cdrmare on Bluesky) is publishing scenario foresight on ocean alkalinity enhancement deployment in Germany alone, asking “what range of plausible future scenarios experts consider regarding the potential deployment and use of ocean alkalinity enhancement in Germany.” The fact that this is still an open question inside one country tells you how unsettled the regulatory geography of marine CDR remains. The transatlantic and ASEAN flows being contractualized this week are running ahead of single-jurisdiction rulemaking, not behind it.

There is also a registry leg to this stool. CarbonPlan (@carbonplan.org on Bluesky) just added Isometric and Cercarbono to OffsetsDB, noting “we added two new offset registries to our open database that standardizes information about offset projects and their credits.” Bilateral agreements and shipping charters only work if a public ledger can reconcile what was moved, stored, and adjusted. The contractual frameworks implicitly assume that ledger exists. Someone has to build it.

The tension is straightforward. Project developers and journalists are still arguing about price per ton and capture efficiency, while the actually-binding constraint quietly moved to maritime law, interstate compacts, and bilateral sovereign accounting agreements that almost no one in the CDR conversation reads.

And the source-and-sink map is shifting underneath all of this. Glen Peters (@glenpeters on Bluesky) flagged that “India’s economy expanded 7.5% in 2025, but India’s fossil CO2 emissions rose by just 1.1%, far lower than the 4.1% average over the previous decade.” If major emerging emitters bend their curves, the cross-border CDR routes being contractualized today will need to connect different source and sink jurisdictions than the current architecture assumes.

So what does this mean if you are building. If your project moves CO2 across a state line, a national border, or an exclusive economic zone, your bottleneck is no longer capture cost. It is whether the contractual and regulatory plumbing exists in your specific corridor. The teams that win the next three years will hire shipping lawyers, state-level Class VI regulatory specialists, and Article 6 sovereign accounting consultants before they hire their next process engineer. This is also why portfolio-level intermediation, like the CUR8 and Isometric 2030 portfolio CDR offering, increasingly means corridor selection as much as method selection. CDR remains for hard-to-abate residual emissions only, but residual molecules still have to physically and legally travel.

What to watch: the next Article 6.2 bilateral that explicitly names engineered removals rather than only avoidance, and whether Brussels publishes a cross-border CO2 transport rulebook to sit alongside BIMCO’s industry-led standard. If both happen inside six months, the legal pipework is no longer the bottleneck. The molecules are.

Citations

  1. Carbon Herald — the first standard charterparty contract for liquefied CO2 cargo
  2. Carbon Herald — the first US interstate agreement coordinating Class VI permitting for CO2 plumes that cross state lines
  3. OneStopESG — a bilateral Article 6.2 implementation agreement
  4. Carbon Herald — Trudvang CCS partnership in the North Sea
  5. Carbon Herald — Captura’s deal to supply California-captured ocean CO2 to a French e-SAF plant
  6. Bluesky — @cdrmare on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  7. Bluesky — @carbonplan.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  8. Bluesky — @glenpeters on Bluesky — Bluesky post