Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
The CDR market got new public plumbing this month, and it counts tonnes far better than it counts cleared prices. Of the deals I looked at, only one, Frontier Climate’s purchase from 44.01, published a firm dollar figure and a firm tonnage in the same breath.
The new tools show supply, maturity and indicative price, not what buyers actually paid
Nasdaq and Relae launched a Carbon Issuance Calendar that Puro.earth describes as a centralised view of upcoming durable CDR offtake, bringing together delivery timelines, indicative pricing and project maturity assessments in one place. That is more than a volume list. But indicative pricing is a seller’s forward signal, not a record of what a buyer agreed to pay, and the gap between the two is exactly the number developers and lenders need.
Carbon Curve Intelligence, a free database launched in the same window, aggregates projects, deals and market updates. It does carry price data, including published weighted-average per-tonne figures from secondary sources. What it cannot do is record contract terms the parties never disclosed, so the deal rows are only as rich as the press releases behind them.
Carbon Gap’s free, open-access toolkit took two years of work with local partners and lets any country estimate how much removal it could realistically deliver. National potential becomes public. The unit economics of the transactions that would unlock it mostly stay private.
One deal lets you do the division cleanly, one gives a ceiling, the rest give tonnes
Frontier Climate buyers, including Google, disclosed $11.7 million for 20,932 tonnes of 44.01’s in-situ mineralisation, which locks CO2 into rock underground rather than spreading crushed rock on fields as in the enhanced rock weathering approach I covered in Captain Drawdown’s primer on enhanced weathering. Divide one number by the other and you get about $560 per tonne. That is the only firm, cleared, pathway-specific price point in this set.
Jain Irrigation’s exchange disclosure of up to 19,000 tonnes of biochar credits by 2027 for Supercritical gives a volume ceiling and a delivery date. Other reporting on the same filing puts the deal value at, at most, around 2.5 million euros over two years. If the full 19,000 tonnes deliver, that works out to roughly 130 euros per tonne; deliver fewer tonnes and the per-tonne figure rises. So the public gets a range with an open top, not a price.
Outside removal proper, the pattern repeats. Biochar Today (@biochartoday.bsky.social on Bluesky) reported that “Salesforce has committed to purchasing 500,000 satellite-verified rice methane” credits over five years. Those are avoided-emission credits, not CDR, but the disclosure shape is identical: a big round tonnage, no unit price in the post.
Meanwhile the cost numbers that circulate most freely are modelled. The Kelvin Report piece on Europe matching global rivals on DAC costs draws on a preprint from an ETH Zurich group, not yet peer reviewed, for DACCS (direct air carbon capture and storage). Models are published. Contracts, mostly, are not.
The tension: public tooling is racing ahead of the disclosures that feed it
The industry now has a calendar, a database and a national toolkit, two of them free, all built to make the future supply of removal legible. Yet the field that decides whether any of that supply gets financed, the cleared price per tonne, is firmly knowable for one deal here, bounded for a second, and absent for the rest. Trackers can display indicative prices and survey averages. They cannot conjure terms that buyers kept private.
So what: a thin price series gets stretched across pathways it does not describe
A developer pitching a biochar plant and a buyer benchmarking a bid are both anchoring on a sparse public record. The $560 per tonne mineralisation figure says nothing about biochar, and the roughly 130 euro Jain ceiling says nothing about DAC. The open question is what fills the gap when cleared prices are missing: indicative calendar entries, survey averages, or preprint cost curves. Each is a weaker signal than a disclosed contract, and none of them tells a lender what a tonne of a specific pathway actually sold for.
What to watch: whether disclosed cleared prices start landing next to indicative ones
The specific signal I am watching is whether Carbon Curve Intelligence or the Nasdaq and Relae calendar begins to distinguish disclosed transaction prices from indicative or survey prices in a way a reader can filter, and whether the Jain Irrigation and Supercritical deal ever publishes a firm per-tonne figure rather than a value cap. If buyers who want a functioning market keep their prices private, the free tools will keep counting tonnes nobody can finance.
Citations
- LinkedIn — Carbon Issuance Calendar — LinkedIn post
- Substack (carboncurve) — Carbon Curve Intelligence — Substack post
- Carbongap — free, open-access toolkit
- ESG News — $11.7 million for 20,932 tonnes
- Equitypandit — up to 19,000 tonnes of biochar credits by 2027
- Bluesky — @biochartoday.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
- Kelvinreport — Kelvin Report piece on Europe matching global rivals on DAC costs