Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Three policy events this week did more to define CDR demand than any buyer coalition announcement. Heidelberg shelved a $1.36B cement capture project in Canada. The UK closed a consultation on domestic CO2 supply. Bangladesh issued its first Article 6 authorization. Read together, they say the same thing: credit-buyers alone cannot make a market when state procurement rules are absent, ambiguous, or auctioned to the highest political bidder.
Start with the cement plant. Heidelberg walked away from a 95%-capture facility not because the capture technology failed but because Canada’s carbon-pricing framework did not guarantee a credit floor sturdy enough to underwrite the capital stack (Carbon Herald). Chris Bataille named the mechanism directly (@chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky): “This is huge disappointment for Canadian climate policy. If there’s one sector that will need CCS in the medium to long-term it’s limestone calcination (eg for cement). And it’s not an issue of technology but of cost and policy certainty.” The rulebook killed the project, not the reactor.
Bataille goes further in a follow-up (@chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky): “Demand will have to be invented for all low GHG industrial inputs and commodities - it just doesn’t naturally exist. But we did that for the first zero emission vehicles, and it can be done for industrial commodities.” That is the through-line. Demand for durable CDR is a policy artifact. It does not fall out of a cost curve.
Julian Smart’s project-finance model on Zenodo makes the same argument with numbers (Zenodo): DAC and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) cannot reach bankable status through cost reduction alone. They need policy-backed offtake. And Nordahl et al. on CDRXIV show that accounting method choice determines whether a credit behaves like durable removal or like a decarbonization offset (CDRXIV preprint 514). Both preprints landed the same week Heidelberg walked. The theory and the failure are the same story.
Now the second front. The UK just closed a consultation on domestic CO2 supply resilience after industrial shortages (Carbon Herald). The framework choice matters upstream of every CDR project in the country. If captured CO2 is classified as a commodity input, it flows to food and beverage buyers who will always outbid a storage well. If it is classified for storage priority, the CDR unit economics change. Same molecule, different rulebook, different market.
The third front is Bangladesh’s first Article 6 authorization, issued to ATEC for clean cooking (Carbon Herald). Not a CDR pathway, but the mechanism matters. Host-country authorization creates a sovereign-backed class of demand outside the voluntary market. When governments start picking winners at the authorization stage, “bankable” gets redefined by who holds the letter of authorization, not by who has the lowest cost per tonne.
The tension is this: the CDR field talks about scaling technology and stacking buyer coalitions, but three simultaneous rulemakings show that neither matters without a rule that manufactures durable demand. And every jurisdiction is writing that rule differently.
The split-screen sharpens when you notice Pembina Institute released a corporate CDR primer the same week Canada’s own carbon-price rulebook failed a flagship capture project (@pembina.org on Bluesky): “Some emissions can’t be cut. That’s where carbon removal #CDR comes in.” True, and the primer is useful. But corporate guidance cannot substitute for the sovereign rule that would have kept Heidelberg building.
So what for practitioners. Your project timeline is now downstream of a rulemaking calendar you do not control. Voluntary buyers can bridge. They cannot substitute for the state as demand-of-last-resort. If you are underwriting a project on a five-year credit price forecast, the biggest variable in your model is a regulator’s next draft, not your capture rate. I wrote earlier this year about why durable removal needs more than trees (Captain Drawdown). The corollary is that durable removal also needs more than voluntary buyers.
What to watch. Three signals will tell us whether 2027 is the year sovereign demand arrives or the year it stalls: the outcome of the UK CO2 supply consultation, Canada’s response to the Heidelberg shelving, and the next three Article 6 host-country authorizations. If any one of them binds CDR procurement to a compliance obligation with an enforcement mechanism, the buyer coalition era ends and the sovereign era begins. If none do, projects will keep walking.
Citations
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Bluesky — @chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- DOI-resolved paper — Zenodo
- Cdrxiv — CDRXIV preprint 514
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Bluesky — @pembina.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post