A busy Tuesday in CDR, with policy, funding, and geography all in motion at once.
What We Covered Today
The EU Carbon Market Could Scale CDR to 60 Million Tonnes by 2050
The headline number from a new Joule paper by researchers at the Potsdam Institute: integrating carbon dioxide removals into the EU ETS could deliver around 60 million tonnes per year by 2050, primarily through DAC and BECCS. The mechanism is clean — a carbon price built into ETS provides the long-run certainty that grant-by-grant funding cannot. The authors lay out a three-phase integration roadmap, with the first phase focused on getting MRV and sustainability standards right before credits enter the market. The EU has committed to decide on ETS inclusion of removals by 2026. The timeline is real.
New Zealand’s Marine CDR Trial — And Why the Controversy Is Appropriate
Gigablue chartered a boat from Dunedin and headed out to the Bounty Trough to run a 55kg cellulose particle trial for marine CDR research. Radio NZ covered it with genuine scrutiny, which is exactly the right response. Marine CDR is an umbrella term covering approaches that vary enormously in their environmental risk profiles and measurement challenges — ocean fertilisation, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and microalgae sinking are very different things. Good public debate about governance and MRV for nascent ocean CDR technology isn’t opposition to climate action; it’s how you avoid the mistakes that plagued early land-based offset markets.
Gigablue Raised $20M to Pull CO₂ from the Ocean. Here’s the Plan.
The Series A behind the New Zealand trial: $20M led by Planet Ocean Capital. The money isn’t going toward commercial deployment — it’s funding the research needed to answer the permanence and MRV questions that determine whether ocean CDR can become a credible, high-integrity market at all. The prize is genuine: the ocean has absorbed roughly 25-30% of all human CO₂ emissions since industrialisation. If microalgae sinking can be verified and monitored, the scale potential is theoretically enormous. Gigablue isn’t there yet. The $20M is buying the chance to find out.
RepAir Carbon Opens a European HQ in Luxembourg. Here’s Why It Matters.
The Israeli electrochemical DAC company is planting its flag in the EU at a deliberate moment: the Carbon Removal Certification Framework is taking shape, Luxembourg just launched a national CCUS & CDR Taskforce, and ReFuelEU Aviation is creating demand for sustainable aviation fuel. Electrochemical DAC runs on electricity rather than heat, which makes it well-suited to renewable-heavy European grid mixes. Luxembourg isn’t a random choice — it’s a jurisdiction that has signalled it wants to be the infrastructure home for CDR in Europe.
The remove CDR Accelerator Is Coming to Latin America
The European CDR accelerator is expanding beyond its home turf. Latin America has exceptional potential for land-based CDR — biochar, enhanced rock weathering, agroforestry — and has been underserved by the existing accelerator and investment ecosystem. The eight-month program connects startups with buyers, verifiers, and investors. The geographic expansion is long overdue.
Stories Worth Your Attention
CDR job market heating up. A weekly job tracker shows rapid expansion across biomass carbon removal, enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity, DAC-to-fuels, and industrial CCUS — suggesting investor capital is translating into hiring, not just announcements.
Canada’s SR&ED changes now law. Canada’s Budget 2025 is enacted, and the R&D tax credit changes matter for CDR companies: the enhanced 35% credit now covers up to $6M in R&D (up from $3M), and eligibility has been extended to certain public corporations. Quietly significant for Canadian CDR startups doing serious science.
Knowledge preservation in CDR. A piece from Wired (via their exclusive) covered a startup focused on salvaging institutional knowledge from CDR projects before it’s lost — capturing learnings from pilots that didn’t get to commercial scale. Worth reading if you care about how the field avoids repeating expensive mistakes.
Google, Meta, McKinsey and Appalachia. A story about durable CDR credit buyers — including Frontier and its members — and the effect on Appalachian land use. The framing was interesting: tech company demand for permanence is reshaping land economics in ways that are only beginning to be understood.
Market Snapshot
Today’s CDR news skewed toward Europe and the Pacific — a useful reminder that the field is global. The EU ETS story is the most structurally significant: a carbon price pathway to 60 Mt/yr CDR by 2050 is not a proposal, it’s a research-backed roadmap. Whether Brussels follows through on the 2026 decision commitment is the question to watch.
Marine CDR continues to generate the most public debate, which reflects both the genuine scientific uncertainty and the fact that it represents the largest theoretical scale potential. The Gigablue Series A and New Zealand trial together make a useful case study: early-stage ocean CDR needs research investment before commercial deployment, and public scrutiny is a feature, not a bug.
Follow CaptainDrawdown for daily CDR coverage. The CDR company directory is at captaindrawdown.com/directory.