Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The smallest carbon removal number this week is 1,049. The largest is 350,000,000. Both describe real places, and most of the gap between them is the difference between a model and a registry. Place decides the feedstock and the storage rock, but it also decides, for now, which stage of the pipeline a number has reached.
350 Mt a year is a ceiling for China’s farmland, not a delivery
350 million tonnes of CO2 a year is what a study covered by CarbonCredits.com estimates enhanced rock weathering could remove on China’s cropland. Enhanced rock weathering, or ERW, spreads crushed silicate rock on soil so it reacts with CO2 and rainwater (I cover the basics in What Is Enhanced Weathering? A Primer). The figure is an upper bound on a national land area, and the source gives no delivered tonnes, no publication date I can verify, and no breakdown of how much rock, crushing energy, or trucking it would take. It tells you why China matters: the farmland is already there. It does not tell you a single tonne has been weighed.
Iceland’s rock sits next to 800,000 tonnes of its own emissions
About 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year come out of the industrial plants at Grundartangi, one of Iceland’s largest industrial areas, and research is now under way into whether Carbfix can stop those emissions, per Iceland News. Carbfix built its reputation turning dissolved CO2 into rock in Icelandic basalt, so the geology is the reason this test is happening here and not elsewhere. One caveat worth stating plainly: capturing a plant’s stack gas is emissions reduction, not removal, unless the carbon came from air or biomass. Chris Bataille (@chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky) makes the same point about place and history from a different continent: “The Sasol Fischer Tropsch plant in South Africa is I think still the largest point source of CO2 on the planet, but it’s a sunk cost legacy of apartheid, not growing much, but not shrinking.” Sasol is a far bigger and older case, and the Iceland source says nothing about whether Grundartangi’s output is rising or falling. The shared lesson is narrower. Point sources are anchored to a spot, and any storage project has to match that spot’s rock.
Sweden’s CO2 has to cross a border to find storage
200,000 tonnes is the size of the storage agreement Northern Lights JV signed with the Swedish energy company Öresundskraft, reported by Carbon Herald. CCS here means carbon capture and storage: CO2 captured at the plant, shipped, and injected under the Norwegian seabed. Whether these tonnes count as removal depends on whether the CO2 is biogenic, and the Carbon Herald piece does not say. What it does show is that Sweden’s lack of accessible storage turns Norway’s offshore geology into an export service. The feedstock is Swedish, the sink is Norwegian, and the contract is the bridge.
The UAE deal is contracted tonnes at roughly $560 each
20,932 tonnes is what Frontier Climate’s buyers have contracted from 44.01, paying $11.7 million for CO2 removed and stored as solid rock in the UAE between 2028 and 2031, per ESG Dive. That works out to about $560 a tonne, and none of it is delivered yet. 44.01 was founded in Oman and the deal depends on reactive rock in the host country, so the Gulf’s geology is doing the work a registry would otherwise have to prove. It is a five-figure contract set against a nine-figure modelled potential elsewhere.
Namibia’s 1,049 credits are the only certified tonnes on the list
1,049 certified removal credits came out of Tivano’s first phase on the Puro.earth registry under its Terrestrial Storage of Biomass standard, using Namibia’s invasive bush, and the startup has raised $606K to continue, per Innovation Village. The feedstock exists because of a local land problem: bush encroachment on Namibian rangeland. Other dry regions have invasive woody biomass too, so this is not a Namibia-only model, but it is the one place on this list where a third party has already signed off on tonnes. Biomass storage is one of the pathways I argued for in Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees, and this is what its early stage looks like.
Five places, four pipeline stages
Lined up, the numbers sort by stage: 350 Mt modelled, 800,000 t emitted, 200,000 t and 20,932 t contracted, 1,049 t certified. That ordering is my reading of five items, not a finding any single source makes, and five data points cannot show whether it holds across the sector. What the five do show is that the certified and contracted volumes in every location are a small fraction of both the local potential and the nearest local point source. The research into whether Carbfix can handle Grundartangi’s 800,000 tonnes, and whether Tivano’s second Namibian phase clears its first 1,049, are the two results that would move a place up a stage. Until then, compare registries to registries and models to models, not one to the other.
Citations
- Carboncredits — CarbonCredits.com
- Icelandnews — Iceland News
- Bluesky — @chrisbataille.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Esgdive — ESG Dive
- Innovation Village — Innovation Village