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Austria moves to lift its 2011 ban on underground CO2 storage with draft act

Carbon Herald just published Austria Drafts CO2 Storage Act To End 2011 Underground Storage Ban. Carbon Herald reports that the Austrian government has released a draft law, the Kohlenstoffdioxid-Speicherungsgesetz, which would formally end the country’s prohibition on geological storage of CO2. The ban dates back to 2011 and has kept Austria out of onshore carbon capture and storage development for more than a decade. The draft follows earlier signals from Vienna that it intended to move toward a national carbon management framework covering hard-to-abate industrial emissions. According to the outlet, the text is a draft at this stage, meaning it still has to move through consultation and parliamentary approval before storage projects could be permitted. The report frames the move as bringing Austria closer to EU-level policy on CCS and industrial carbon management. ...

Captain's CDR Log #270: Why weathered rock is not the same as removed carbon, and who is checking

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now CarbonPlan’s latest Modeling Bytes installment found that swapping daily weather inputs for monthly or annual averages raised modeled rock weathering by 10-20% across eight example sites, and the carbon removal number did not move in step with it. That gap, between how much rock dissolves and how much CO2 a buyer can claim, is the whole business of enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the practice of spreading crushed silicate rock on farmland so it reacts with CO2 in soil water. The critics are not saying the rock does nothing. They are saying the conversion step deserves the same scrutiny as the field data. ...

Captain's CDR Log #269: Spiritus signs DAC-to-EOR LOIs and hands DAC critics their cleanest dollars-and-tonnes case

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique, in the critic’s own words “Sometimes the future-tech is used as excuse to do nothing in the present.” That is Aurel Wünsch (@aurel.indoorco2map.com on Bluesky), applying the mitigation-deterrence argument to DAC. The market news that gives his line new teeth this week: Spiritus has signed its first three letters of intent with US oil and gas producers for on-site CO2 supply for enhanced oil recovery (Carbon Herald). ...

Captain's CDR Log #268: Chad Baum's six-country survey reframes the social license debate

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The prevailing view at every CDR panel I have watched this year runs like this: novel removal projects (enhanced rock weathering, direct air capture, bioenergy with capture and storage) keep stalling because publics don’t understand them. Fix the messaging, run a town hall, publish a nice explainer, and the NIMBY problem eases. Kevin Lee Caster captured the mood bluntly on Bluesky: “Sadly, far too many people have been tricked into opposing Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration as this story clearly demonstrates” (@kevinleecaster on Bluesky). Opposition, in this frame, is a comms failure. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-09-24

Today’s stories share a single thread: the CDR field is being forced to grow up on quality, delivery, and honesty about what removal is actually for. Buyers are pricing delivery risk. Regulators are being asked whether removals inside an emissions trading scheme deter mitigation. Researchers are stress-testing the science. And a US House member is trying to move ocean CDR through Congress on bipartisan terms. Different fronts, same underlying pressure: stop treating tonnes as fungible and start naming what each one costs, delivers, and displaces. ...

Podcast take: Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici on the ReSCUE Oceans Act and Bipartisan Support f

Take: Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici on the ReSCUE Oceans Act and Bipartisan Support for mCDR

Take on a podcast episode from Plan Sea: Ocean Interventions to Address Climate Change, originally published Thu, 10 Se. Listen: <> TL;DR Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) walks through the ReSCUE Oceans Act, a bipartisan bill to set up a federal framework for marine CDR research. Useful primer, light on specifics. Bill would coordinate NOAA, NASA, NSF around mCDR (including ocean alkalinity enhancement). No dollar figure — “we’ll work that out.” Notable gap. Bipartisan co-sponsors: Schatz (D-HI), Murkowski (R-AK) in Senate; Bonamici and Buddy Carter (R-GA) in House. Realistic path unclear this Congress. Separate win discussed: bipartisan bill to block NSF from decommissioning the Ocean Observatories Initiative buoys. Small but concrete measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)-adjacent story. On the Trump administration gutting NOAA’s mCDR capacity: acknowledged as a problem, no strategy offered beyond “hopefully rehire.” Wil Burns (American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal) and guest co-host Priyanka Hooghan (Carbon to Sea) interview Rep. Suzanne Bonamici in her Capitol Hill office. The conversation covers the ReSCUE Oceans Act — Removing and Sequestering Carbon Unleashed in the Environment and Oceans — plus her work as bipartisan Oceans Caucus co-chair and a side fight over ocean observing infrastructure. ...

Take: S4 E8: Anton Root on the State of the Voluntary Carbon Market

Take on a podcast episode from Untangling Climate Finance, originally published Mon, 17 Au. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/untanglingclimatefinance/episodes/S4-E8-Anton-Root-on-the-State-of-the-Voluntary-Carbon-Market-e3n7jvj TL;DR Anton Root (AlliedOffsets) says weighted-average VCM credit price roughly doubled from ~$3 to ~$7/t since early 2024 — useful data point, driven by mix shift not scarcity. ~1.6 Gt of issued-but-unretired credits sitting in registries, growing ~200 Mt/year. That’s ~8 years of demand overhang. Underrated structural problem. CDR-specific read: >1,000 sellers historically, only ~800 all-time buyers of engineered removals. Consolidation is here; offtake-less projects are in trouble. CCP-tagged issuances in H1 2026 (~18 Mt) nearly matched all of 2022+2023 combined. Integrity signal is real in the numbers, not just the marketing. Asia overtook Europe as largest source of new credit demand last year. Tencent flagged as a high-quality-removals buyer. Jay Tipton hosts AlliedOffsets co-founder Anton Root for a data-heavy read on the voluntary carbon market. It’s mostly VCM-wide, but there’s a meaty CDR segment on seller/buyer imbalance, pricing, and offtake dynamics that’s worth an hour if you’re on the supply or buyer side of durable removals. ...

Biochar leads CDR with 377 companies but Enabling Tech employs 7,700

Each dot on this scatter is a single CDR pathway - direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, mineralization, and the rest. The horizontal axis counts how many companies are working that pathway; the vertical axis sums the employees across those companies. Linear scales on both, so distance on the page matches distance in the numbers. What this view reveals that a headcount table cannot is the shape of the industry. A pathway sitting high and to the right is crowded with firms and staffed deeply. One sitting high but to the left is a pathway dominated by a few large companies. Low and to the right means many small teams chasing the same idea. The spread between these corners is the story of where capital and talent have actually landed, versus where the field is still a cottage. ...

Microsoft, Relae Add Delivery Risk to CDR Quality Criteria for First Time

Carbon Herald just published Relae, Microsoft Publish New High-Quality CDR Criteria, Addressing Delivery Risk For The First Time. Carbon Herald reports that Relae, previously known as Carbon Direct, has published the sixth edition of its Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal alongside Microsoft. The update is notable for being the first version to directly address delivery risk, a factor that has become more prominent as long-duration CDR contracts scale and buyers face questions about whether tonnes will actually be delivered on schedule. The Criteria series is widely referenced across the voluntary carbon market and informs procurement decisions by major buyers. This edition continues the joint effort between Relae and Microsoft to standardize what counts as durable, verifiable removal. ...

Captain's CDR Log #267: Etienne Schneider and the mitigation-deterrence question the EU ETS revision cannot dodge

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Last week, Etienne Schneider posted a short, precise warning into the middle of Europe’s biggest CDR policy fight. “CDR is often linked to mitigation deterrence (MD): the risk that expected removals delay or replace emission reductions. The EU and UK now plan to integrate CDR into their emissions trading schemes,” he wrote (@etienneschneider on Bluesky). That is the whole question in two sentences. It is also the question the EU ETS revision is about to answer, whether negotiators want to face it or not. ...