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

The forecast

Stockholm Exergi’s 750,000-tonne, 15-year permanent BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) off-take to the City of Stockholm is the new European price floor for permanent removal, and within six months it will lock in a two-tier price curve that Brussels has not authored. The deal is the largest non-corporate permanent removal contract on record (onestopesg), and it was signed while the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation methodologies remain unwritten after CRCF Days 2026. That vacuum hands pricing power to private registries, Isometric and Puro.earth, for every deal that closes before the end of 2026. The buyer archetype has also shifted. A municipal government, not a tech corporate, just set the benchmark. Other European cities will price their next budget cycles against it.

The 30-day window

Watch for sell-side analysts to publish the Stockholm price-per-tonne as the implied European permanent floor. The contract’s disclosed structure, 15 years at fixed annual tonnage, is exactly the contract shape a forward curve gets built from, and carbonmeld is already arguing the voluntary market needs one. The leading indicator is registry behaviour. Puro.earth’s new Audit Booking Calendar compresses time-to-issuance, and suppliers who can guarantee an issuance window will quote higher in the next round of off-takes. Audit throughput is now a pricing input, not back-office plumbing.

Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social) recently joked about energy projections that lurch year to year: “Do we really have any idea?” The honest answer for CDR pricing has been no. Stockholm is the first data point hard enough to anchor against.

The 90-day window

By end of August 2026, at least two more European municipal or sovereign buyers, most likely Nordic or Dutch, will sign comparable multi-year permanent removal contracts in the $300 to $450 per tonne band. The supply side is converging on the same geography. Sirona’s Furu DACCS project in Norway entered the conversation at CRCF Days, and Carbon Gap has flagged Polish projects in the same window. If Copenhagen, Oslo, or a Dutch province discloses a comparable contract by end of August, the municipal-buyer thesis is validated and the floor hardens. Developers should be papering 10 to 15 year off-takes now, before new supply compresses the curve.

The 180-day window

The CRCF methodology will still not be operational, and Europe’s largest permanent removal contracts will have priced exclusively against Isometric and Puro.earth standards. That entrenches a two-tier curve. Tier one, private-registry permanent tonnes under long-dated municipal and corporate contracts. Tier two, whatever EU-issued units eventually arrive, which will have to discount or premium against the private benchmark rather than set it. The political consequence is that Brussels writes its rulebook into a market that has already chosen its referees.

A secondary wildcard: D-CRBN just closed a €17.5M Series A for plasma CO2-to-chemicals (onestopesg) note, this is the only aggregator source in this post. If utilization tonnes start appearing inside permanent off-take frameworks within 180 days, the “permanent only” pricing thesis cracks. I do not expect it to in this window, but it is the cleanest falsification signal on the supply side.

One reminder. None of this is a license to slow fossil phase-out. Permanent removal at municipal scale matters because residual emissions are real, not because emitting more is now acceptable.

What would falsify this forecast

  • No second European municipal or sovereign permanent CDR contract is disclosed by end of August 2026. Stockholm becomes an outlier and corporate buyers remain the only liquid demand side.
  • The Commission publishes operational CRCF methodologies for permanent removal before end of Q3 2026, collapsing the private-registry pricing window faster than expected.
  • A signed deal lands materially below $300 per tonne for permanent BECCS or DACCS in Europe, breaking the implied floor downward rather than confirming it.
  • Utilization tonnes get bundled into a permanent off-take frame inside 180 days.

The bet

By 22 May 2027, at least two additional European municipal or sovereign buyers will have publicly signed multi-year permanent CDR contracts priced between $300 and $450 per tonne, verified against Isometric or Puro.earth rather than an EU-issued CRCF unit. Check me in six months.

Citations

  1. OneStopESG — onestopesg
  2. Europa — CRCF Days 2026
  3. Carbonmeld — carbonmeld
  4. Bluesky — @glenpeters.bsky.social — Bluesky post
  5. OneStopESG — onestopesg