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

Three carbon capture and storage (CCS) announcements landed this week, and together they answer a question the industry has been dodging. The variable that decides whether a project survives is no longer capture cost or reservoir geology. It’s who sits on the cap table. Projects with a sovereign or a First Nation holding equity moved forward. Projects built on private balance sheets alone died.

Start in Canada. The federal government advanced the West Coast Pipeline and Pathways CCS project with government equity and Indigenous partnership built into the structure from day one. The Pembina Institute (@pembina.org on Bluesky) read the fine print: “The 10% figure comes from the ownership breakdown included in the Gov’t of Canada’s announcement. According to the release, the private proponent would hold a 10% stake.” Read that again. The private developer holds ten percent. Public and Indigenous partners hold the rest.

Now cross the border. The same week, Air Products cancelled its $4.5 billion Louisiana Clean Energy CCS hub, the largest US blue-hydrogen-plus-CCS project of this cycle. It was structured entirely on a private balance sheet, underwritten against 45Q, the US federal tax credit for stored carbon. When that credit’s future got murky and no state co-investment arrived, the project had nothing to stand on.

Then ExxonMobil, the balance sheet best positioned to warehouse offshore storage acreage on the planet, surrendered 850,000 acres of Gulf carbon storage leases. Federal leases with no anchor offtaker and no sovereign backstop turned out to be options not worth holding, even for Exxon.

The pattern extends past North America. Spain allocated $364 million for cement-sector carbon capture and hydrogen this week. The European projects moving forward are the ones with direct sovereign money attached. That mirrors the Canadian structure and inverts the American one.

And here’s the control case that sharpens the whole argument. In Alberta, a proposed rewrite of the province’s industrial carbon pricing system is threatening a $400 million CCS facility. Even inside Canada, the projects at risk are the ones underwritten to a policy-set carbon price with no sovereign equity behind them. As we put it this week (@captaindrawdown on Bluesky): “Every CCS and engineered CDR project underwritten to a carbon-price forward curve carries this sovereign-rewrite risk. Contracts-for-difference and floor-price guarantees are now the only bankable structures.” Equity beats price signal. A government that owns the pipeline cannot rewrite the rules against its own asset.

The tension is stark. In one week, on one continent, Canada launched a sovereign-anchored CCS backbone with First Nations equity while America’s largest private CCS hub was cancelled and its largest offshore storage position was handed back. The market is not sorting projects by pathway or by geology. It is sorting them by ownership model, and private-only is losing.

We flagged this logic earlier on a Manitoba DAC deal (@captaindrawdown on Bluesky): “The notable part here: bank financing and First Nations support arriving together. DAC projects live or die on two things, capital and community consent.” That was a template for DAC. This week proved the same logic governs gig

Citations

  1. Carbon Herald — advanced the West Coast Pipeline and Pathways CCS project
  2. Bluesky — @pembina.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  3. Carbon Herald — cancelled its $4.5 billion Louisiana Clean Energy CCS hub
  4. Carbon Herald — surrendered 850,000 acres of Gulf carbon storage leases
  5. Carbon Herald — allocated $364 million for cement-sector carbon capture and hydrogen
  6. Carbon Herald — is threatening a $400 million CCS facility
  7. Bluesky — @captaindrawdown on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  8. Bluesky — @captaindrawdown on Bluesky — Bluesky post