Posts

Six original posts today — and a coherent theme running through all of them: carbon removal is no longer a research agenda. It’s an operating industry. What We Covered Today#Nasdaq Buys First EU-Certified Carbon Removal Credits The headline deal of the day: ClimeFi has structured the first publicly announced transaction under the EU’s CRCF framework. Buyers are Nasdaq and Dutch payments firm Adyen. The seller is Stockholm Exergi’s BioCCS facility — biomass burned for district heating, CO₂ captured and mineralised in North Sea bedrock. What matters here isn’t just the deal; it’s the regulatory milestone. The EU CRCF gives institutional buyers a credible framework to transact in. Expect the floodgates to open slowly, then all at once. ...

Finland has something most countries building carbon removal strategies don’t: the infrastructure is already there. A new paper published in Environmental Research Energy (IOP Publishing) models long-term CDR deployment scenarios for the Finnish energy system. The headline number: up to 8.6 million tonnes of CO₂eq per year removable by 2050 in high-ambition scenarios. For a country of 5.5 million people, that’s a serious contribution to European carbon budgets. Why Finland’s position is different ...

Microsoft currently holds about 35% of all global carbon removal credits. That’s how concentrated this market is — and why the EU’s new regulatory framework, combined with a buyers’ collective model, matters for everyone else. ClimeFi has structured the first publicly announced transaction under the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework. The buyers: Nasdaq and Adyen, the Dutch payments processor. Both will receive CRCF-aligned carbon removal units from the Beccs Stockholm project, operated by Stockholm Exergi. ...

There’s a term in psychology called learned helplessness. You expose someone to enough negative outcomes they can’t control, and eventually they stop trying to change anything — even when they could. A new study published in Nature Climate Change argues that climate communication has been accidentally running that experiment on the public for decades. The paper, led by Dr. Anya Sharma at the University of Oxford, makes the case that climate science has spent disproportionate energy documenting the scale of the crisis and not enough time demonstrating credible pathways out of it. The result: an informed public that knows exactly how bad things are, and increasingly believes nothing can be done. ...

It’s been a week for the record books in CDR procurement — and today’s digest captures the clearest signal of all: corporate buyers are moving from commitments to contracts, and the volumes are starting to add up. Our Coverage Today#🟢 Google + AMP Robotics: 200K Tonnes of Biochar by 2030#Google Partners With AMP Robotics on 200K-Tonne Biochar Carbon Removal Deal ...

🌍 From China: biochar’s biggest limitation might have a cleaner solution than anyone expected. New research from Tsinghua University identifies an approach that could simultaneously solve biochar’s biomass supply problem and make it one of the lowest-cost CDR pathways available: growing bioenergy crops on China’s abandoned agricultural land and converting them to biochar. The numbers are significant. The research estimates this approach could support approximately 25.8 million tonnes of CO₂ removal per year — roughly comparable to what biochar can currently deliver using agricultural and forestry residues, which are the conventional feedstock. This isn’t a marginal improvement; it’s a doubling of the potential. ...

🌍 Bolivia wasn’t on most CDR maps. It is now. Carbon removal financier Altitude has signed an agreement with Empacar S.A., one of Bolivia’s largest industrial companies, for the purchase of over 305,000 tonnes of biochar carbon dioxide removal. The credits will be generated via Empacar’s Bolivia-based biochar production facilities, issued under Puro.earth or equivalent methodologies, with the first credits expected in 2027. Who Is Empacar?#Empacar isn’t a climate startup. It’s a major Bolivian industrial player with decades of experience in circular materials management — the kind of company that understands supply chains, feedstock logistics, and long-term operations. It’s now launching Carbon X, a dedicated business unit focused on climate innovation and voluntary carbon market participation. ...

There’s a CDR opportunity hiding in plain sight, and it smells faintly of wood pulp. Pulp and paper mills have been industrial energy users for over a century. They burn enormous quantities of biomass — wood residues, black liquor, bark — to generate the heat and power their processes require. For climate purposes, that’s been considered roughly carbon-neutral: the trees absorbed CO₂ while growing, the mill releases it when burning. ...

The voluntary carbon removal market tends to move in increments. ClimeFi just jumped three levels at once. The Swiss CDR procurement specialist has launched the Beyond 2030 RFP — its most ambitious procurement round to date — seeking between 100,000 and 500,000 tonnes of durable carbon removal from corporate buyers acting collectively. The round is pathway-agnostic, but requires 200+ year permanence as a minimum threshold. No forestry offsets, no short-lived solutions. ...

First Microsoft, now Google. The world’s biggest tech companies are placing serious bets on biochar — and this week’s numbers are hard to ignore. Google has signed a multi-year agreement with Commonwealth Sortation LLC, an affiliate of AMP Robotics, to remove 200,000 metric tonnes of CO₂e via biochar by 2030. This is one of Google’s largest carbon removal purchases to date, and it comes just days after Microsoft’s landmark 1 million-tonne biochar deal with Liferaft — the biggest in US history. ...