Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Five numbers this week point the same direction. The gating factor for a saleable tonne of carbon removal is no longer whether the technology works. It is whether the tonne fits inside a specific rulebook: ICAO’s CORSIA, the London Protocol, a registry protocol a regulator has blessed, or a corporate-claims framework built by SBTi and Gold Standard. Policy is setting price, permanence, and eligibility.
$35 million. Vaulted Deep’s new debt facility from Mediobanca, reported by ESG Dive, is underwritten against long-term offtake contracts, including from Frontier Climate (the buyer consortium, not Frontier Infrastructure). Lenders extending debt against those contracts means framework-compliant CDR revenue is starting to count as bankable collateral. That is a policy-adjacent shift: the underwriting only works because the offtake buyer’s own accounting rules treat those tonnes as durable and countable.
400,000 tonnes per year. Project Greensand in Denmark opened this week as Europe’s first full-scale cross-border CO2 storage site, per europesays.com, with initial capacity of 400 kt/yr scaling toward 4-8 Mt/yr. It only exists because parties finally operationalized the 2009 amendment to Article 6 of the London Protocol, which permits transboundary shipment of CO2 for geological storage. A treaty clause, ratified over more than a decade, is what unlocked the pipeline.
$50 million. Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE) extended Isometric’s Series A to $50M, per Isometric’s registry page. ICE runs regulated commodity markets. Its money is a bet that registry-grade CDR, tonnes issued under a written protocol with third-party verification, will become a listed commodity rather than a bespoke voluntary product. That path only exists if a registry’s rules are tight enough for an exchange to clear contracts against them.
1 CORSIA-compliant deal. Japan Airlines and Climeworks signed the first purchase agreement structured to meet ICAO’s CORSIA eligibility criteria for removals, per ESG News. CORSIA is the UN aviation body’s offsetting scheme, and its technical annex, not buyer preference, decides which removal credits an airline can surrender for compliance. One deal is small. The precedent is not: it establishes the contract template every other airline buyer will now be asked to match.
8 biochar protocols. A cross-protocol study summarized by Biochar Today, drawing on a Mukhopadhyay et al. EarthArXiv preprint, finds wide divergence in durability accounting and pricing across the eight major biochar crediting standards. A tonne of biochar CDR is not yet a standardized unit. Any regulator that adopts one protocol implicitly rejects the others, and the price gap between them will not close on its own.
The pattern. These are five different frameworks (a bank’s credit committee, a UN maritime treaty, a commodity exchange’s listing standard, a UN aviation scheme, and eight competing registry protocols) doing the same job: deciding which tonnes count. Technology readiness barely appears in any of them. As Biochar Today notes, “Gold Standard established a working group to develop practical guidelines for corporate Ongoing Emissions Responsibility under the Science Based Targets initiative.” That is another rulebook, deciding whether corporate net-zero claims must include CDR at all. And Pembina Institute (@pembina.org on Bluesky) is asking “what will shape public opinion?” on Canadian CDR, framing the next constraint after the technical rules land.
For anyone building, buying, or financing CDR over the next twelve months, the binding question is which framework your tonnes qualify under. Projects that map cleanly onto CORSIA, the London Protocol, an ICE-clearable registry, or an SBTi-recognized claim are financeable. Projects that do not are increasingly not, regardless of MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) quality. Watch the EU ETS permanence threshold debate next: whatever number the Commission picks will re-price every removal category above and below it.
Citations
- Esgdive — ESG Dive
- Europesays — per europesays.com
- Isometric — per Isometric’s registry page
- ESG News — per ESG News
- Biochartoday — Biochar Today
- Bluesky — notes — Bluesky post
- Bluesky — @pembina.org on Bluesky — Bluesky post