The lesson from today’s three stories is the same one, told three ways: in carbon removal, the rock is more reliable than the rules. Geology does not renegotiate. Governments and corporations do. Two of today’s stories show the ground shifting under carbon storage, one through a provincial policy rewrite and one through a corporate retreat from 850,000 acres of seabed. The third reminds us that the underlying chemistry of removal has been teaching the same lessons for a century, whether or not anyone was listening.
If your removal project’s economics depend on a carbon price staying put or a lease position staying held, today was a reminder to reread the fine print.
Alberta’s TIER rewrite: the risk that was always there
Alberta is rewriting TIER, its Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction system. TIER is the industrial carbon pricing framework that generates the credits many carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in the province depend on for revenue. Change the rules and you change the cash flows.
The uncomfortable part is that financiers modeled these projects as if the policy were fixed. It never was. A carbon price set by regulation can be revised by regulation. That is not a scandal, it is how policy works. But project models that assumed a stable credit price for 20 years were making a bet on political continuity, not a bet on engineering.
This matters beyond Alberta and beyond point-source capture. Direct air capture projects, biomass-based removal, and any pathway that relies on regulated carbon credits carries the same exposure. Underwriting a removal project means underwriting the durability of the policy behind it. The Alberta case is a live demonstration of what happens when that assumption gets tested.
Exxon walks away from 850,000 acres of Gulf storage
ExxonMobil is relinquishing roughly 850,000 acres of carbon storage leases in the Gulf of Mexico. That is a large retreat from what was positioned as a cornerstone of the company’s low-carbon business.
Two readings are possible. The generous one: this is normal portfolio pruning, and the company is concentrating on the acreage with the best geology and the nearest customers. The less generous one: the storage business is not penciling out at the pace the announcements implied, and the leases were cheaper to hold as press releases than as capital commitments.
Either way, the signal for CDR is real. Durable removal at scale, especially DAC, needs storage capacity that actually gets developed, permitted, and operated. Announced acreage is not injected CO2. When the largest players quietly shrink their storage footprint, everyone downstream should update their assumptions about how much sink capacity will exist, and when.
One constraint worth naming plainly, since this involves a fossil major: carbon storage and removal exist to handle hard-to-abate residual emissions. They are not a reason to slow the phase-out of fossil fuels, and a shrinking storage portfolio makes that math tighter, not looser.
A century of crushed rock, same lesson every time
Our history piece today looked at enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the practice of spreading crushed silicate rock so it reacts with CO2 and locks it away as dissolved bicarbonate or solid carbonate. The core chemistry has been understood for over a hundred years, and researchers keep rediscovering the same constraints: weathering is slow, grinding rock tak