Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The critique, in the critic’s own words
“Sometimes the future-tech is used as excuse to do nothing in the present.” That is Aurel Wünsch (@aurel.indoorco2map.com on Bluesky), applying the mitigation-deterrence argument to DAC. The market news that gives his line new teeth this week: Spiritus has signed its first three letters of intent with US oil and gas producers for on-site CO2 supply for enhanced oil recovery (Carbon Herald).
Chris Bataille (@chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky) sets the accounting frame from an adjacent argument about e-SAF: “unless you’re pulling down more CO2 from the atmosphere than is burnt as fuel, it’s not negative emissions because the CO2 is being returned to the atmosphere.” He was talking about synthetic aviation fuel. But the ledger question is the same one Spiritus’s LOIs will have to answer.
The evidence the critics are reading correctly
The economics really do bend this way. In the US, 45Q pays more per tonne for saline storage than for EOR, but EOR comes with a buyer already at the wellhead, an existing pipeline, and no need to develop a Class VI injection well. For a DAC developer burning cash, an oil producer with an offtake contract is the fastest path to revenue. That is what Spiritus signed.
The bifurcation is visible elsewhere. Sirona’s decision to pause a Gulf-region DAC project and refocus on a Norwegian DACCS site, reported in Carbon Herald this week, shows that “DAC plus dedicated geological storage” pencils in some geographies and not others. Where it does not pencil, EOR is the fallback.
The community’s standard response, and why it is weak
The industry defense is a funding-gap argument. Heatmap’s Climate Week carbon removal dispatch captures the mood on the buyer side as “cautiously optimistic.” The steelman goes: no DAC firm reaches meaningful scale without early revenue, EOR is a bridge, and the learning curve gets you to storage-only tonnes eventually.
The weakness is that the bridge is rarely time-limited in writing. An LOI to supply CO2 for EOR is a multi-year commercial relationship, not a one-quarter stopgap. If the bridge has no sunset clause, it is just the business model.
What the critique gets right
Two things. First, the atmospheric ledger. If a captured tonne is injected to lift incremental barrels that are then combusted, the net removal depends entirely on lifecycle boundaries most public LOI announcements do not disclose. Bataille’s point about e-SAF, that CO2 returned to the atmosphere is not a removal, is a general accounting principle, not a DAC-specific claim, and it applies to any use case that recirculates the molecule.
Second, the optics-to-substance gap. When a DAC developer’s first announced customers are oil producers, the burden of proof on “this is climate action” shifts to the developer.
What the critique misses or overstates
Wünsch’s framing implies DAC is a substitute for present-day decarbonization. In corporate procurement, it is not. The 2026 Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal from Relae and Microsoft, which added delivery-risk provisions this edition, treats removals as a complement to abatement inside a corporate portfolio, not a license to keep emitting. The critique also flattens the DAC field. Vaulted Deep, whose $35M debt raise for waste-to-storage removals was covered in Carbon Herald this week, is a removal operator whose unit economics rest entirely on permanent geological sequestration with no fossil-sector offtake. That is a real counter-example inside the same industry.
Synthesis
CDR is for hard-to-abate residual emissions. It is not a license to delay fossil-fuel phase-out, and a DAC tonne routed through an oil well needs to prove it is not the latter. The specific, answerable question Spiritus’s LOIs put on the table: publish full lifecycle accounting for the incremental barrels, or accept that these tonnes will be categorized as industrial CO2 utilization, not removals. Buyers writing the 2026 criteria will decide which. Developers who want the removals label should welcome that decision being made in public, on the numbers. For the broader question of why portfolio composition matters here, see Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees.
Citations
- Bluesky — @aurel.indoorco2map.com on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Carbon Herald — its first three letters of intent with US oil and gas producers for on-site CO2 supply for enhanced oil recovery
- Bluesky — @chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Heatmap News — carbon removal dispatch
- Relae — 2026 Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal — PDF
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald this week