Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Five numbers landed this week that, read together, form a coherent critique of how the CDR sector is talking about itself. The headline figures are real. They are also small enough that the canonical sector report now calls the gap “hard to fathom.” The critics are no longer on the outside.
9,499 people. That is the combined headcount of 569 pure-play CDR startups worldwide, per Captain Drawdown’s CDR Company Directory FTE analysis. It is smaller than a single mid-tier oil services firm. The sector is being asked to scale to gigatonnes on a workforce the size of a regional hospital system. Steel-manning the critique: capital, not labor, is the binding constraint. Weighing it honestly: you cannot permit, build, and verify gigaton infrastructure without people, and the hiring curve is not bending fast enough.
1 billion+ allowances. The EU ETS surplus has now topped a billion permits, triggering auction cuts reported by Carbon Herald. This is the price signal CDR developers actually compete against. The $200 to $600 per tonne price decks for durable removal assume a compliance market that punishes emissions. A billion-ton overhang of cheap allowances does the opposite.
9,566 tonnes. Alt Carbon’s issuance, listed on Frontier Climate’s portfolio page, is being called the world’s largest enhanced rock weathering (ERW) delivery. The critique writes itself. The single biggest verified ERW issuance in history is under 10,000 tonnes, against an IPCC-aligned need measured in billions of tonnes per year by 2050. For context on why ERW matters at all, see our primer on enhanced weathering.
61,500 tonnes and $20M. JPMorgan’s expanded Charm Industrial deal, announced this week, adds 61,500 tonnes of bio-oil sequestration and $20 million in financing. One of the largest bank CDR commitments of 2026 moves tonnage equivalent to roughly 13 seconds of global fossil emissions. The deal is good. The framing as a milestone is the problem.
41 Gt vs. under 0.01 Gt. Heatmap’s read of the new State of CDR report puts 2025 emissions near 41 Gt CO2 against novel CDR deployment in single-digit megatonnes. The authors themselves call the gap “hard to fathom.” When the canonical sector report writes that sentence, the critique is no longer external.
The budget math hardens the picture. Pierre Friedlingstein (@pfriedling.bsky.social) notes that the central remaining budget from IPCC, IGCC and Global Carbon Budget is “about 1000 GtCO₂. That’s net zero by 2075 globally assuming linear decrease.” A 1,000 Gt budget and a sub-10,000-tonne flagship ERW issuance are not on the same planet. Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf.bsky.social) sharpens it: “Even with a moderate future emissions scenario, global temperature will still be elevated by 3-4°C in the year 3000! Lifetime of our CO2 in the air is that long.” Legacy CO2 persistence is the variable nobody’s pricing into per-tonne offtake. And Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social) reminds us that even Norway’s celebrated 1.2% drop in 2025 was mostly “maintenance, not policy.” Both sides of the net-zero ledger are being narrated faster than they are being delivered.
The pattern is this. Workforce in the thousands. Surplus permits in the billions. Flagship deliveries in the thousands of tonnes. Bank commitments measured in seconds of global emissions. A delivery-to-need ratio that the sector’s own canonical report calls hard to fathom. CDR remains essential for residual, hard-to-abate emissions, and nothing here changes that. But pitching milestones in the low thousands of tonnes, against a billion-permit ETS surplus, will get harder to defend in front of CFOs and regulators through H2 2026. Watch for buyers to start disclosing tonnage as a percentage of their own residual emissions. That is the benchmark the data is now demanding.
Citations
- Carbon Herald — auction cuts reported by Carbon Herald
- Frontier — Frontier Climate’s portfolio page
- LinkedIn — announced this week — LinkedIn post
- Heatmap News — Heatmap’s read of the new State of CDR report
- Bluesky — @pfriedling.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @rahmstorf.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @glenpeters.bsky.social — Bluesky post