Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Puro.earth says its median time from carbon removal supplier submission to credit issuance dropped to 22 days in 2026, down from 40 days in 2025, per its own LinkedIn announcement. That figure is self-reported and not independently audited, so treat it as a claim, not a verified statistic. But if it holds, my forecast is this: by Q1 2027, time-to-cash, not price per tonne, becomes the primary axis of competition among durable CDR registries, and registries that cannot clear issuance in under 30 days will lose material share of new biochar and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) supplier registrations. The reason is arithmetic. Every day a verified tonne sits unissued is a day of working capital a thin-margin operator must finance. Cutting median latency from 40 to 22 days shortens the cash conversion cycle by nearly three weeks per batch. On a simple 12 percent annual cost of capital, that is roughly 0.6 percent of credit value saved per cycle, illustrative math on my part, and it compounds across every batch a facility ships.
The 30-day window. Watch for defensive disclosure. Isometric has built its brand on protocol rigor, and its public registry lists projects and methodologies in detail, but publishes no time-to-issuance benchmark. If speed is becoming a supplier-acquisition lever, the first signal will be a competing registry quietly adding issuance-latency data to its transparency materials. The second signal: Puro backing its LinkedIn claim with an auditable dataset. If neither happens within 30 days, the thesis weakens.
The 90-day window. The spot market decides whether this matters. Mordor Intelligence, in a press release, projects the voluntary carbon market reaching $7.06 billion by 2031 and estimates spot transactions at 53.6 percent of 2026 volume. Vendor projections deserve skepticism, but the directional point stands: in a spot-weighted market, only issued credits are sellable inventory, and days-to-issuance directly caps how many inventory turns a supplier can finance per year. By the 90-day mark, I expect at least one durable supplier to publicly cite issuance speed as a reason for registry choice. Buyers assembling diversified portfolios, like the Climeworks biochar integration I covered earlier, will start asking suppliers about latency in due diligence.
The 180-day window. The EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming framework, whose first technical certification methodologies the Commission has adopted, creates a sovereign-grade certification path. Sovereign processes move on regulatory timelines, not commercial ones. If EU-certified units take months per cycle while Puro clears in weeks, the market bifurcates: a premium slow lane for compliance-adjacent buyers, and a fast lane where growth-stage suppliers register by default. The stakes are sector-wide. As I noted on Bluesky, “CDR.fyi maps 40 certified durable carbon removal projects in the US, together representing about 850,000 tonnes of verified CO2.” That is a small base. Freeing three weeks of receivables financing per tonne across it is modest in absolute dollars today, which is exactly why the effect will show up first in registry choice, not in headlines.
What would falsify this. Four things. Puro fails to publish auditable issuance data, or its median regresses above 30 days. Supplier registration flows to slower registries at unchanged rates through 2026. A competitor matches sub-30-day issuance within six months, making speed a commodity rather than a differentiator. Or price data shows buyers paying a durability-rigor premium large enough to swamp the carrying-cost saving, in which case integrity, not latency, still sets the competitive axis.
The bet. By August 2026, at least one durable CDR registry other than Puro.earth will publish a public time-to-issuance metric, and Puro will report a higher share of new biochar and BECCS project registrations than it held in 2025. Check both in six months. If neither happens, the back-office number I am betting on was never the number that mattered, and price per tonne keeps its crown for another cycle.
Citations
- LinkedIn — per its own LinkedIn announcement — LinkedIn post
- Isometric — its public registry
- Co — a press release
- Europa — first technical certification methodologies the Commission has adopted
- Bluesky — on Bluesky — Bluesky post