Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The three biggest CDR operator moves this week share one structural feature: none of them invented a capture step. ADM, Vaulted Deep, and Exomad Green are each monetizing a CO2 or biomass stream that already existed as an industrial cost.
Start with ADM. The company entered the voluntary carbon market this week with 800,000 tonnes of removal capacity registered on Puro.earth, according to Carbon Herald. Those tonnes are not new capture. They are CO2 already being separated at ADM’s ethanol and agricultural processing facilities, now routed into a market structure that can sell them as durable removals. Puro.earth flagged the entry on LinkedIn as “Significant news for the engineered carbon removal market”, which is itself notable: the “engineered” label now stretches to cover industrial CO2 co-product streams from ag processing.
Vaulted Deep is the second data point. The company closed a $35M debt facility from Mediobanca, arranged by CFP Energy, per Pulse2. Vaulted’s feedstock is organic waste sludge, a disposal problem being repriced as a durable-storage input. Biochar Today (@biochartoday.bsky.social) flagged the deal as a facility “to Expand United States Subsurface Carbon” storage. The financing structure matters more than the dollar figure. Lenders underwrite predictable cash flows against collateral. Debt financing at this size means a waste-fed CDR operator now looks bankable to a European commercial bank.
Third: Exomad Green and Carbonfuture locked in 1.1 million tonnes of biochar removals through 2035, reported by carboncredits.com. The feedstock is Bolivian forestry and agricultural residues that would otherwise burn or decompose. A multi-year, multi-million-tonne offtake at this scale is unusual for engineered removal pathways, and the enabling condition is a standing residue flow.
Two smaller data points reinforce the pattern. Inherit Carbon Solutions describes its own model to Puro.earth as connecting “thousands of biogas plants venting pure CO2” to buyers who needed verified removal. Biochar Industrial Group raised $1.5M for biochar-as-a-service in Sub-Saharan Africa built on existing agricultural residue flows, per Carbon Herald’s coverage of the round. Different geographies, same structural setup.
The tension is that the public narrative around CDR scaling is still dominated by direct air capture and mineralization. The tonnage moving under contract this quarter is coming from operators who inherited the hard part.
So what does this mean if you actually have to run one of these systems? For operators, the shortest path to a signed offtake right now runs through a feedstock that already exists at industrial scale and is currently classified as a cost rather than a product. Technology risk on that feedstock is low. The hard problems move elsewhere: feedstock-boundary accounting, additionality (the CO2 or biomass was going somewhere anyway), and the counterfactual baseline. For buyers, that risk profile is genuinely different from greenfield DAC. Fewer unknowns on the capture side, more scrutiny required on the accounting side. Standards work is what makes those tonnes defensible, and that is where the disclosure discipline matters. I covered a related case in Climeworks integrating biochar into portfolio offerings earlier this cycle.
One caveat worth naming plainly: waste-stream CDR is not a substitute for phasing out fossil combustion. These pathways address hard-to-abate residuals and legacy CO2. If ADM’s ethanol-plant CO2 becomes an argument for continuing to expand ethanol production, the accounting is broken before the first tonne clears.
What I am watching: how ADM’s 800,000-tonne supply prices on Puro.earth relative to existing BECCS-via-biogas listings from operators like Inherit Carbon Solutions. Whether industrial-waste CO2 gets treated as commodity durable-storage supply or as a differentiated product with its own premium will show up in that price data over the next two quarters. Either outcome tells us something concrete about how the market is reading additionality on inherited feedstocks.
Citations
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- LinkedIn — “Significant news for the engineered carbon removal market” — LinkedIn post
- Pulse2 — Pulse2
- Bluesky — @biochartoday.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Carboncredits — reported by carboncredits.com
- Puro.earth — “thousands of biogas plants venting pure CO2”
- Carbon Herald — per Carbon Herald’s coverage of the round