Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The forecast: operating retrofits, not new builds, will supply most durable tonnes buyers can actually receive through March 2027
Durable CDR volume over the next six months will come mostly from plants that already run. ADM’s Nebraska bioethanol capture operation, now offering credits through Puro.earth at 800,000 tonnes per year, is the clearest case. Its Columbus facility opened in 2025 on more than a decade of ADM capture experience, so the operator risk (does the compressor run, does the well accept CO2, does the meter agree with the model) is largely behind it. New-build developers face all of that risk ahead of them. The practitioner’s question is not who has the best process. It is who can hand a registry verified tonnes this year. And the answer is retrofit plants.
In 30 days, watch for first Puro paperwork on ADM and the first VM0049 filings
The leading indicator is registry activity, not press releases. Puro.earth already lists an industrial biochar site, Aperam BioEnergia, at roughly 70,000 tonnes of removals per year with expansion plans, which shows the registry can handle incumbent industrial suppliers. Whether an ADM facility page appears alongside it within a month tells you how fast bioethanol capture moves through Puro’s process.
The second indicator is Verra. Its CCS methodology VM0049, which covers both emission reductions and removals, has received ICVCM approval from that integrity body. A second registry route for already-operating capture projects now exists. First project registrations under it should show up before verified issuance does.
In 90 days, the verification queue decides whether volume is real or announced
The bottleneck for biomass-based removals is throughput at the verifier, not project count. Rainbow reports 40-plus biomass removal projects registered, with 8 holding validation and verified issuance. Roughly one in five of the announced pipeline has become something a buyer can retire. That ratio is the number to watch at the 90-day mark. If it climbs toward one in three, verification capacity is scaling. If it stays flat, announced supply is stuck behind MRV, meaning measurement, reporting and verification, and buyers will keep paying for tonnes that do not arrive on schedule.
Capital is already pricing this. Galvanize is leading $70 million in project financing for AMP’s waste infrastructure, with the biochar output supporting AMP’s 200,000-tonne removal agreement with Google. That is project debt against a physical plant with contracted offtake, not venture equity against a slide deck. The lenders’ bet matches mine.
In 180 days, buyers split their purchases into two explicit tiers
Salesforce’s pre-purchases through Milkywire cover eight early-stage suppliers as part of its $100 million First Movers Coalition pledge, including Cowboy Clean Fuels recording its first-ever durable credit sale. Those deals are meant to create future supply. ADM’s single plant can offer more annual tonnage than that whole set. I expect buyers to name this difference out loud by spring: “catalytic” purchases that fund proof, priced high per tonne and small in volume, and “volume” purchases from operating retrofits, priced lower and contracted in bulk. Developers who pitch a first-of-a-kind plant at volume pricing will lose to sunk-cost plants with known performance. That is my read of the incentives, not a reported trend.
One operator constraint cuts across both tiers. Storage. The CDRmare research programme (@cdrmare.bsky.social on Bluesky) relays Klaus Wallmann’s point on the North Sea: “Vor allem den Umstand, dass diese Kapazitäten begrenzt sind,” which translates as “Above all, the fact that these capacities are limited.” If retrofit capture fills early pore space and early buyer demand, DAC newcomers and BECCS developers (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) will compete for both. I flagged a related portfolio shift when Climeworks added biochar in Climeworks Integrates Biochar to Diversify CDR Portfolios, and the logic there was the same: buyers want tonnes they can count on.
What would prove me wrong
Three specific outcomes falsify this forecast. First, no ADM facility page or issuance on Puro.earth by roughly the end of March 2027. Second, no project registrations under VM0049 in Verra’s pipeline over the same window. Third, a new-build durable supplier, DAC or otherwise, verifying more tonnes in that period than any single retrofit plant. Any one of these would mean the retrofit wave is slower than its capacity numbers imply, and the market is more willing to wait on new builds than I think.
None of this changes the residual-only rule. Bioethanol capture and industrial biochar are removals against emissions that cannot otherwise be cut, not cover for continued fossil combustion.
The bet
By the end of March 2027, Puro.earth will show issued or pending removal credits from ADM’s Nebraska operation, and at least one project will be registered under Verra’s VM0049. Check both registries on that date. If both are empty, this Log was wrong, and the durable market is a pre-purchase market for longer than its plant capacity suggests.
Citations
- Gasworld — 800,000 tonnes per year
- Cleanthesky — opened in 2025
- Puro.earth — 70,000 tonnes of removals per year
- Carboncredits — ICVCM approval
- LinkedIn — 40-plus biomass removal projects registered, with 8 holding validation and verified issuance — LinkedIn post
- Financialcontent — $70 million in project financing
- ESG Today — eight early-stage suppliers
- Bluesky — @cdrmare.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post