Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Global underground CO2 storage reached 43.6 million tonnes in 2024, while a maize plot in Shenyang received biochar at 2.63 tonnes per hectare per year, a ratio of roughly seventeen million to one. Both numbers are real and both matter for CDR, but neither converts into the other. This week’s figures each arrive in the unit their host geography can produce: a basin, a plant, a field, a mine, or a national treasury.
Storage hits 43.6 Mt where the rock and the injection wells already exist
43.6 million tonnes of CO2 went underground in 2024, an annual record, with the United States leading, according to Carbon Herald. This is a storage figure, not an atmospheric-removal figure, and the report does not split out how much of the CO2 came from the air versus from industrial flue gas. The megatonne unit shows up where pore space, wells and a permitting track record are already in place. In 2024 that means the US.
Jalgaon’s 19,000 t is one plant, and that plant is the whole contract
Up to 19,000 tonnes of biochar credits will go from Jain Irrigation’s Jalgaon facility to Supercritical during 2026-27, per The Hindu BusinessLine via 5paisa. One Indian agri-processing site sets the full volume. Biochar supply gets counted factory by factory because feedstock, production unit and credit volume are all tied to one address, so the deal size is a site capacity number before it is a market number.
Shenyang’s 2.63 t/ha plots show biochar holds while stover cycles
2.63 tonnes per hectare per year of biochar went onto plots at Shenyang Agricultural University, compared with plots where maize stover was returned, in a study in Carbon Research covered by bioengineer.org. Biochar locked carbon in the soil long term; stover kept it cycling back out. That durability result is anchored to one field site’s soils and climate, so it is strong evidence for that ground and no evidence yet for anyone else’s. The same per-region logic appears in the United States, where Biochar Today (@biochartoday.bsky.social on Bluesky) reports that “University of Nebraska–Lincoln researchers evaluated locally produced eastern redcedar biochar across Nebraska field trials in the United States, demonstrating increased soil carbon.” Feedstock, trial and adoption case all scoped to one state. I covered why biomass that cycles back out is a weak removal in Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees.
Mine-site mineralization runs $80-$300/t, and the range is as wide as the mines
$80 to $300 per tonne of CO2 is the cost range AZoMining cites for removal at mine sites, a spread it calls favorable against many other durable methods. Mineralization here means reacting CO2 with crushed mine waste, called tailings, so it ends up as stable carbonate mineral. AZoMining does not say what pushes a project toward the low or high end, only that the economics depend on the specific mine and its tailings. A near fourfold spread is a per-site number, not a technology number.
Malmö’s removal funding is national money, counted in kronor
On 15 October Sysav announced further public funding for permanent removals in Malmö, as flagged by the Negative Emissions Platform. The money is not municipal. The Swedish Energy Agency awarded SEK 72.7 million through its Industrial Leap programme, and Sysav had already secured SEK 6.3 billion (EUR 560 million) in operating support through Sweden’s national reversed auction for bio-CCS, meaning CO2 captured from burning biomass and stored underground, for its SkyZero project. The unit is currency and the scale is set by national policy design. It lands in Malmö because that is where the municipal operator’s plant and its CO2 stream sit.
Five numbers, five units, zero conversions
Storage megatonnes are a national geology figure. Biochar tonnes are a plant figure, biochar durability is a per-hectare figure, mineralization cost is a per-mine figure, and the Swedish support is a national-auction figure that happens to arrive in one city. Adding them into a single CDR supply curve is a category error, and a buyer weighing Jalgaon tonnes against basin megatonnes is weighing geography, not just volume. Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky) supplies the ruler all five should be held against: “Emissions need to drop radically in the short term. Overshoot, IMO, distracts from that, and focuses people on unnecessary details 100 years in the future.”
Two things to watch. Whether Jain Irrigation’s Jalgaon plant actually delivers its credited volume across 2026-27, and the 10 November Global Carbon Budget release Peters flagged, which resets the emissions baseline every one of these place-bound numbers is measured against.
Citations
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- 5Paisa — The Hindu BusinessLine via 5paisa
- Bioengineer — bioengineer.org
- Bluesky — @biochartoday.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Azomining — AZoMining
- LinkedIn — Negative Emissions Platform — LinkedIn post
- Bluesky — @glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post