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Captain's CDR Log #266: Why the operators scaling fastest are the ones sitting on waste streams

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The three biggest CDR operator moves this week share one structural feature: none of them invented a capture step. ADM, Vaulted Deep, and Exomad Green are each monetizing a CO2 or biomass stream that already existed as an industrial cost. Start with ADM. The company entered the voluntary carbon market this week with 800,000 tonnes of removal capacity registered on Puro.earth, according to Carbon Herald. Those tonnes are not new capture. They are CO2 already being separated at ADM’s ethanol and agricultural processing facilities, now routed into a market structure that can sell them as durable removals. Puro.earth flagged the entry on LinkedIn as “Significant news for the engineered carbon removal market”, which is itself notable: the “engineered” label now stretches to cover industrial CO2 co-product streams from ag processing. ...

CDR Sector Guardedly Hopeful at NY Climate Week, But Craves Honest Reckoning

Heatmap News just published The Carbon Removal Crowd Is Feeling Cautiously Optimistic. Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo files a dispatch from the opening day of New York Climate Week, where CDR-focused events carried a more upbeat tone than expected given the current political climate. Senator Brian Schatz pointed to the roughly $1 billion Frontier Climate purchase commitment and the survival of the 45Q tax credit through last year’s clean energy rollbacks as signs of durable bipartisan support. Panelists discussed how the industry can broaden its coalition, including engaging skeptics who see CDR as a distraction from emissions cuts. Frontier’s Joanna Klitzke argued for being more transparent about failed approaches, citing a mineralization effort using steel slag on roads that did not pencil out technically or economically. ...

Captain's CDR Log #265: Five numbers showing rulemakers now set CDR's price and eligibility

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers this week point the same direction. The gating factor for a saleable tonne of carbon removal is no longer whether the technology works. It is whether the tonne fits inside a specific rulebook: ICAO’s CORSIA, the London Protocol, a registry protocol a regulator has blessed, or a corporate-claims framework built by SBTi and Gold Standard. Policy is setting price, permanence, and eligibility. ...

Soil carbon dominates CDR with 15,849 active researchers in 2025

This chart tracks Soil Carbon researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a Soil Carbon-relevant paper that year (active); below the line are dormant researchers, split into those who published the previous year and those who published only earlier. New entrants join at the base of the active band each year as a teal block. Soil Carbon is the largest pathway by headcount, sitting closest to mainstream soil science. The top envelope is the number actually publishing in the pathway each year. ...

JAL, Climeworks ink first CORSIA-compliant carbon removal deal

Carbon Herald just published Japan Airlines, Climeworks Solutions Sign Historic CORSIA-Compliant CDR Deal. Carbon Herald reports that Climeworks Solutions and Japan Airlines have entered into an agreement described as the world’s first carbon dioxide removal deal aligned with CORSIA, the UN aviation sector’s international offsetting and reduction scheme. The arrangement positions engineered CDR as a tool airlines can use to meet compliance obligations under CORSIA, which governs how carriers address emissions above a set baseline. The deal signals a route for direct air capture and similar removal methods to enter regulated aviation carbon markets rather than relying solely on voluntary buyers. Specific tonnage, pricing, and delivery timelines are covered in the full article. ...

569 pure-play CDR startups employ just 13,571 people

This chart plots every pure-play CDR company in the Directory as a single dot. The horizontal axis is the company’s founding year (estimated from its primary domain registration), the vertical axis is its current headcount on a log scale, and the colour codes the company’s pathway. The shaded blue background traces overall company density — darker patches mark where the crowd of pure-plays sits. The value here is shape, not ranking. A bar chart would tell you how many companies exist in each pathway; this view tells you the entire industry’s growth contour at one glance — when did the wave of small startups hit, where are the rare big older operators, what cluster sits on the floor of “still under five people”. Outlier dots near the top of the chart are the names everyone already knows; the dense low band is where most of the industry actually lives. ...

Summit's CO2 pipeline expands in Iowa as legal fights stall the full project

Inside Climate News just published What’s Next for Summit’s Carbon ‘Pipeline to Nowhere’?. Inside Climate News reports that the Iowa Utilities Commission is moving toward hearings on phase two of Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed CO2 pipeline, which would add hundreds of miles of new line to a project already facing significant legal obstacles. Summit’s original plan was to gather carbon dioxide from ethanol plants across the Corn Belt and transport it to North Dakota for underground sequestration. The project has faced permit denials, route disputes, and pushback from landowners in multiple states. The article looks at where the expansion proposal stands and what the regulatory path forward could look like. ...

Captain's CDR Log #262: A single Norwegian river becomes the first quantified proof point for river alkalinity enhancement

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story A team led by Shannon Sterling has posted the first quantified field trial of river alkalinity enhancement, adding alkaline minerals to the Kvina River in southern Norway and measuring the resulting carbon removal. The preprint, Quantified Carbon Dioxide Removal from an Alkalinity Addition Field Trial in the Kvina River, Norway, landed on CDRXIV this month. It matters because it moves a whole pathway class, river alkalinity enhancement, or RAE, from a whiteboard concept to a number. And it does so in a very specific place, chosen for very specific reasons, which is the story worth pulling apart. ...

CURA Lands $10M to Scale Low-Carbon Cement Tech

Carbon Herald just published CURA Raises $10M To Scale Cement Decarbonization Tech. Carbon Herald reports that CURA Climate Inc., a Canadian cleantech startup, has secured $10 million in financing aimed at accelerating the commercialization of its cement decarbonization technology. The funding is intended to help the company move from development toward broader deployment in an industrial sector responsible for roughly 7-8% of global CO2 emissions. Cement decarbonization has drawn growing investor interest as producers face pressure from climate policy and corporate procurement standards. The article positions CURA among a wave of startups targeting emissions from clinker production and process chemistry, though specific technology details and investor names are covered in the full piece. ...

Captain's CDR Log #261: PyroCCS and BIG both raised seed money for biochar, but they are not the same company

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. What does “biochar carbon removal” actually mean in 2026? Two seed rounds closed this week under the same pathway label. PyroCCS in Germany raised from Lotus One and Counteract. Biochar Industrial Group raised $1.5M pre-seed for pan-African expansion. Both are called biochar. Reading the two announcements back to back, they describe different businesses. ...