Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
$205 million.
That is the size of the low-interest state loan the North Dakota Industrial Commission just approved for Project Tundra, a post-combustion carbon capture retrofit on the Milton R. Young coal station (Carbon Herald).
The prior reference point matters. Compare Tundra’s loan to Mantel’s $18M round for molten-borate carbon capture, one of the week’s headline private raises for a novel capture pathway. The public loan is roughly eleven times the private equity cheque, and it goes to a mature amine-style retrofit on a fossil asset rather than to an early-stage technology that could eventually serve removal use cases like bioenergy with carbon capture (BECCS).
The measurement is straightforward. The North Dakota Industrial Commission, a three-member state body, voted to approve the loan package as reported publicly. This is concessional public capital, not a grant and not a tax credit, priced below what a merchant coal retrofit would clear in private debt markets. The counterparty is the plant operator. The commodity being subsidised is avoided emissions from a single point source, not tonnes of legacy CO2 pulled from the atmosphere.
What this implies for the sector is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly. State-level industrial commissions in fossil-heavy jurisdictions can move nine-figure concessional cheques for point-source capture faster than most durable removal developers can close a growth round. That shapes which molecules of CO2 get counted, credited, and paid for first. Meanwhile, compliance carbon markets keep growing as the largest pool of climate capital in North America, and durable CDR competes with everything else, including CCS retrofits, for a slice. Infrastructure players are already rationalising in response: Climate Impact X and Carbonplace announced a merger this week, citing the need for scale (Carbon Herald aggregator index).
Now the caveats, because the number alone overstates the case. Two hundred five million dollars in loan authority is not $205M spent. Project Tundra has been announced, restructured, and delayed for years, and prior CCS retrofits at coal plants have a poor track record of closing financing and hitting capture rates on schedule. The loan is a signal of political willingness to pay, not proof of delivered tonnes. It also does not tell us the effective subsidy per tonne once federal 45Q tax credits are stacked on top, which is the number that would let a durable CDR developer benchmark honestly against point-source CCS.
There is a moral hazard risk here I want to name directly. Carbon removal exists to address hard-to-abate residual emissions and legacy stock. Subsidising capture on a coal plant is emissions avoidance, not removal, and it should not be treated as interchangeable with durable CDR in state or federal accounting. Keeping a coal unit running longer because capture is bolted on is the exact framing the sector needs to refuse.
What to watch next: whether any other fossil-heavy state follows North Dakota with a comparable concessional loan package, and, more importantly, whether a state-level financing vehicle of similar size ever appears for durable removal. Until a nine-figure state loan closes for enhanced weathering, direct air capture, or mineralisation, the public capital story in the US stays lopsided toward preserving fossil assets. For a longer view on why removal is not a substitute for cutting emissions at the source, see my primer on enhanced weathering.
Citations
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald aggregator index