Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The critique, in the critic’s own words
“Smart Art,” wrote veteran energy journalist Peter Fairley (@peter.fairley.ca on Bluesky) this week, flagging ProPublica and Drilled’s False Promises investigation. The package’s operator-level charge is sharp: real capture installations chronically miss their design capture rates, and the industry papers over the gap with nameplate figures in press releases.
Fairley has covered capture skeptically for more than a decade. His endorsement signals this critique is now the mainstream prior among serious energy reporters, not a fringe view.
The evidence behind it
ProPublica’s reporting compiles plant-by-plant performance data showing facilities running well below the capture percentages used to justify their funding. The investigation also documents how fossil-adjacent capture narratives were industry-shaped, a thread Carbon Brief picks up in Beyond Denial. The empirical claim is narrow and testable: what percent of inlet CO2 is a given plant actually capturing, month over month, net of energy penalty?
That question is the right one to ask of every new facility. It is the question the operator community has, so far, mostly declined to answer in public.
The CDR community’s standard response
The standard rebuttal goes: ProPublica is targeting fossil CCS, not removal. Removal pathways like BECCS, biochar, ERW (enhanced rock weathering), and DACCS (direct air carbon capture and storage) have different physics, different incentives, and different verification regimes via registries like Isometric and Puro.
This is weak as currently delivered. It is weak because the same press-release vocabulary, “world’s largest,” nameplate tonnes, design capture rates, is being used by removal operators who do not yet publish operating data. This week’s BioCirc BECCS inauguration in Denmark is the textbook example. A “world’s largest” headline with no public commitment to monthly captured-tonnes disclosure is exactly the artifact ProPublica’s frame is built to puncture.
What the critique gets right
Three things, plainly.
One: nameplate is not delivery. A design capture rate of 90 percent tells you what the engineers hoped for, not what the plant did last Tuesday. Two: energy penalty matters and is often quietly excluded. Net CO2 removed per kWh is the operator-relevant number, and it is rarely published at pilot scale. Captura’s fresh $12.5M Series B for ocean capture hardware lands without a public multi-month field dataset on net removal per kWh. That is the critic’s opening, and it will be used. Three: downtime is real. Plants trip, sorbents degrade, compressors fail. Annualized availability is part of the honest number.
What the critique misses or overstates
It conflates pathways. The physics of point-source flue-gas capture on a coal plant is not the physics of mineral weathering on a basalt field or alkalinity dosing in coastal water. It also assumes scarcity where there is not yet scarcity. Carbon Middle Management’s recent post Are we CO2 storage capacity limited? answers plainly: “No we are not. At least, not anytime soon” (@carbonmiddlemanagementinc on Substack). Subsurface pore space is not the binding constraint operators should be defending. End-to-end capture rate and energy penalty are.
And the moral-hazard framing, that any capture investment delays fossil phase-out, is a policy argument, not an operator-data argument. CDR remains for hard-to-abate residual emissions. It is not a license to keep burning.
What CDR builders should actually take from this
If you operate a capture facility, the inauguration is no longer the headline. The headline is your first twelve months of monthly captured-vs-nameplate, energy penalty in kWh per tonne, and downtime hours. Publish them, with third-party verification, or expect to be lumped in with the underperformers ProPublica documented.
If you buy removal, write disclosure covenants into offtake contracts now. Require monthly operating data as a delivery condition, not a courtesy. The questions we raised in How Can Direct Air Capture Scale are the same questions every BECCS, ocean, and biochar buyer should be asking their counterparties this quarter.
Watch BioCirc and Captura. Whether either publishes verified field data before year-end will tell us if the operator community has internalized the critique, or is still betting on inauguration optics.
Citations
- Bluesky — @peter.fairley.ca on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Propublica — False Promises
- Buff — Beyond Denial
- Carbon Herald — BioCirc BECCS inauguration in Denmark
- Carbon Herald — $12.5M Series B