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Every week, CaptainDrawdown takes on one widespread misconception about carbon removal. This week: enhanced weathering. The myth: It’s just spreading crushed rock on fields. How could something that primitive ever work at gigaton scale? The reality is considerably more interesting — and more promising. What Enhanced Weathering Actually Is#Enhanced weathering (EW) accelerates a natural process that has regulated Earth’s climate for hundreds of millions of years. When silicate rocks like basalt weather, they react with CO₂ dissolved in rainwater to form bicarbonate ions. Those ions eventually wash to sea, where the carbon is effectively locked away for geological timescales — think thousands to millions of years. ...

🌍 From Japan — this story was originally published in Japanese. We’re bridging the language gap because good CDR ideas don’t care about borders. Here’s a fact that might bother you: commercial greenhouses routinely burn kerosene specifically to generate CO₂ for their plants. Not for heat. For the carbon dioxide itself. Plants grow faster with elevated CO₂ levels, so growers literally combust fossil fuels inside their greenhouses to get it. ...

One million carbon removal units. Ten years. One company in Iowa. Liferaft, a biochar producer operating out of the US Midwest, just signed the largest biochar carbon removal offtake in American history with Microsoft. The deal — facilitated by London-based marketplace Supercritical — commits Microsoft to purchasing 1 million CRUs over a decade from Liferaft’s pyrolysis operations in Iowa and Illinois. Two days ago we covered Microsoft’s $1B-range deal with Vaulted Deep. Now this. Redmond isn’t dabbling in carbon removal anymore — they’re building a diversified CDR portfolio with the kind of volume commitments that actually move markets. ...

Eight hundred thousand people flush their toilets in the Oslo region. Now, for the first time ever, the CO₂ from processing that sewage is being permanently stored 8,500 feet under the North Sea. Inherit Carbon Solutions, HoopCO2, and the Northern Lights joint venture have achieved something the CDR world has been waiting for: the first permanent geological storage of biogenic CO₂ from biogas production. This isn’t a pilot. It’s not a feasibility study. It’s operational BECCS with verified permanent storage. ...

Immediate carbon removal would eliminate all climate damages. Delay it 25 years and you only get half the benefit. That’s the headline finding from a new Stanford study published in Nature, and it’s the most powerful economic argument for CDR deployment I’ve seen. The researchers built a framework linking individual emissions to actual, quantifiable global damages. The numbers are staggering, specific, and uncomfortable. The damage ledger#Since 1990, US emissions have caused $10 trillion in global damages. Not theoretical future costs — realized economic harm distributed across the planet: ...

Climeworks — the company synonymous with sucking CO₂ out of the air with giant fans in Iceland — is now the single largest buyer of enhanced rock weathering credits on Earth. Their latest partnership with Lithos Carbon expands a relationship that started in 2023, when the two companies struck a deal for 3.5 million tonnes of ERW removal over a decade. Now they’re bringing verified ERW credits to market together, with Lithos delivering its largest batch yet: 5,160 registry-certified tonnes of CO₂ removal. ...

Wednesday’s five stories span policy, preservation, forests, robotics, and agriculture — and the throughline is that carbon removal keeps getting more real, more diverse, and less dependent on any single approach or government. What We Covered Today#Canada Creates the First National CDR Procurement Program — While Washington cancels DAC hub funding, Ottawa launched a dedicated procurement program for carbon dioxide removal credits. The $7M CAD budget is modest. The mechanism isn’t. This is the first time any national government has directly purchased CDR credits — not tax credits, not subsidies, actual procurement. The signal to the market: sovereign demand exists. Watch for other governments to follow within 12 months. ...

If you told me a climate startup was using autonomous rovers and microwaves to turn mining waste into a carbon sink, I’d assume it was a pitch deck fever dream. But Arca Climate is actually doing it — and the pilot data is impressive. The Vancouver-based company, born from UBC research, is led by a team with serious geological credentials. Co-founder Greg Dipple has spent 20+ years at UBC studying ultramafic rocks — the magnesium-rich minerals that naturally pull CO₂ from the air and lock it away for thousands of years through mineral carbonation. Co-founders Peter Scheuermann and Bethany Ladd round out the leadership. ...

Every few months, another study adds a line to biochar’s already impressive resume. But this one is different — it’s not a single experiment, it’s the whole picture. A new meta-analysis published in Carbon Research, led by Mbezele Junior Yannick Ngaba, synthesized 78 peer-reviewed studies from across the globe to quantify biochar’s impact on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. The headline numbers: CO₂ emissions: reduced by 24%Methane (CH₄): reduced by up to 36%Nitrous oxide (N₂O): reduced by up to 39%And at high application rates (40 tonnes per hectare), the global warming potential reduction reached 83% on a 100-year timescale. ...

While the US is busy cancelling DAC hub funding, Canada just quietly did something no national government has done before: it launched a dedicated procurement program for carbon dioxide removal credits. The program, structured as a Request for Standing Offer, commits at least CAD $10 million (~$7M USD) to purchasing CDR credits generated within Canada. Federal departments can buy credits from five eligible pathways: direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS), bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), biochar, biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS), and enhanced mineralization. Each CDR stream gets its own competitive process, evaluated on technical merit and price, with contracts running through March 31, 2029. ...