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Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 companies mapped

This chart is a stacked bar count of every company in the CDR Directory, grouped along the x-axis by removal pathway (direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, and so on), with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play producers, brokers and marketplaces, and firms where CDR is a side business bolted onto a different core model. The total height tells you which pathways are crowded with company formation. The segment mix tells you something a raw count hides: whether a pathway’s apparent size is built on operators actually delivering tonnes, on intermediaries reselling them, or on incumbents whose CDR line is a minor adjunct. Two pathways with identical totals can have very different underlying economies once you see the split. ...

Liverpool Bay CCS Wins UK Seabed Lease—But Financial Close Still Pending

Carbon Herald just published UK’s Crown Estate Seabed Lease Clears Way For Liverpool Bay CCS Project. Carbon Herald reports that Liverpool Bay CCS Limited has signed a seabed lease agreement with The Crown Estate, removing a major regulatory and property-rights barrier for the proposed carbon capture and storage project off the coast of North Wales and northwest England. The lease covers the offshore area intended for CO2 injection and permanent storage in depleted gas fields. The project is part of the HyNet North West cluster, one of the UK government’s priority industrial decarbonisation programmes. The agreement is described as a milestone that allows development activities to progress toward final investment decisions and construction. ...

Captain's CDR Log #222: The demand-side rules are racing ahead of the supply-side social license

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three policy fronts, read together, expose CDR’s real regulatory risk. Switzerland bound companies to interim removal volumes in January 2025. The Science Based Targets initiative opened comments on its draft Net Zero Standard 2.0 in March 2025, and the final standard is still pending. And this week a rural revolt against CO2 pipelines in the US and Canada got loud enough that Carbon Brief flagged it as the read of the week. Read together, the fight has shifted. It is no longer whether removals count. It is whether demand-side rules will force buyers to procure tonnes before the physical infrastructure to deliver them is socially permitted. ...

Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 tracked companies

This violin plot sorts every pure-play CDR company in the Directory by its pathway (columns) and its headcount (vertical axis, log scale from 1 to 100+). Each dot is one company, coloured by its current liveliness tier — Active, Moderate, Suspect, or Likely Dead. The grey shape behind each column is the size distribution: where it bulges, that’s where most companies in that pathway sit. The value here is comparative. A raw company list tells you who exists; this view tells you where the weight sits. Pathways with most dots stacked at the bottom are dominated by sub-10-employee firms — many small entrants, few that have grown. Pathways with dots reaching up the column have produced operators that scaled past the founder-and-a-few-engineers phase. Colour (not vertical position) is what tells you the health story: red dots high up the column mean a sizeable operator went quiet; red dots on the floor are the long tail churning as it always has. ...

Captain's CDR Log #220: Five numbers from five jurisdictions redrawing the CDR map this week

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week’s deal flow forms a map, not a technology chart. Five numbers from five jurisdictions show that where a project sits, and under which regulator, is now the primary determinant of whether it finances. The pathway matters less than the postcode. 1.77 million credits. Rwanda authorized Econetix to market up to 1.77M CORSIA-eligible credits under Article 6, per Biochar Today’s reporting on the ICAO letter. This is a government-issued letter of authorization sized for compliance aviation demand. Article 6 supply is being minted at the host-country level, and Rwanda moved first at this volume. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-08-07

Today’s three stories point in the same direction: CDR is getting welded onto infrastructure that already exists, not built from scratch on empty lots. Microsoft’s new offtake with CREW is a hyperscaler paying for removal that piggybacks on a working utility. Veolia’s Sheffield pilot is a capture trial retrofitted to an operating energy-from-waste plant. Even the enhanced weathering literature is converging on protocols that work with existing farm operations rather than around them. The greenfield era of CDR - purpose-built plants on dedicated sites - is not over, but the growth edge in 2026 is retrofit. ...

Veolia Launches UK's First Non-Amine Carbon Capture Trial in Sheffield

Carbon Herald just published Veolia Trials UK-First Non-Amine Carbon Capture Tech. Carbon Herald reports that resource management firm Veolia has partnered with Sheffield City Council to trial a next-generation carbon capture technology that avoids the use of amines. The pilot is described as a UK first for this type of non-amine capture chemistry. Amine-based solvents are the dominant approach in post-combustion capture but come with degradation, energy penalty and emissions concerns, which is why alternative sorbents are drawing attention. The outlet frames the deployment as a test of whether an alternative capture route can work at municipal scale in a real operational setting. ...

Captain's CDR Log #219: Microsoft's CREW offtake shows hyperscalers now buy CDR bolted onto existing utility infrastructure

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Microsoft signed a long-term offtake with CREW Carbon this week, buying durable removal credits from a startup that captures CO2 at municipal wastewater treatment plants. The deal, reported by Carbon Herald, matters less for the tonnage and more for what it says about hyperscaler procurement logic. CREW has now raised over $35M in equity while booking more than $40M in signed offtakes across 10 utility deployments, according to The Carbon Curve. That ratio inverts the DAC pattern, where equity dwarfs contracted revenue for years. It suggests a specific thesis is taking hold among the biggest CDR buyers: pay for tonnes that come off infrastructure someone else already built and operates. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-08-06

The gap between what’s issued and what’s rigorous keeps widening The single pattern across today’s four stories: carbon removal is splitting into two tracks. One track is scaling issuance and revenue fast. The other track is tightening what counts as a real tonne. The distance between them is now the most important number in the field. Captain’s CDR Log #218 puts it starkly. One registry posted a 60 percent jump in credit issuance quarter over quarter. Next door, a separate integrity sweep flagged roughly 95 percent of reviewed projects for methodology gaps, permanence concerns, or MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) issues serious enough to warrant re-review. Both things are true at the same time. Volume is up. Confidence per tonne is not. Buyers who treat credits as fungible across registries are, in effect, arbitraging their own risk exposure. ...

Podcast take: #7: I should have used my retirement funds for retirement instead of assuming th

Take: #7: I should have used my retirement funds for retirement instead of assuming the future of our planet is of interest to

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 04 Au. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/7-i-should-have-used-my-retirement TL;DR Anonymous submissions podcast; three short letters from CDR workers read aloud. Total runtime under 5 minutes. Submission 1: venture capital’s 10-year return horizon doesn’t fit hard-tech durable carbon dioxide removal timelines. Familiar critique, stated cleanly. Submission 2: pushback on the “novel CDR steals from proven climate tech” framing — argues voluntary markets are doing exactly what they’re supposed to. Submission 3: a supplier who cleared every methodology hurdle since 2021 and can’t sell credits on the spot market. Bitter, and worth hearing. Not analysis, not reporting — it’s a vibes check on practitioner morale in mid-2026. Useful as a temperature reading, not as data. Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous is a curated read-aloud of anonymous, unverified submissions from people working in climate. Episode 7 pulls three that all land on the same nerve: the mismatch between what CDR practitioners were told the market would do and what it’s actually doing in 2026. Under five minutes, no guest, no debate — just the letters. ...