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The name says it all. Ctrl-S — the keyboard shortcut for save — is a new company doing exactly that for the direct air capture sector: saving the work before it’s lost. Here’s the context. DAC investment has dropped more than 60% from its 2022 peak. The Trump administration cancelled tens of millions in federal DAC funding. Companies that raised on the 2021-2022 climate hype cycle are running out of runway, and when a deeptech startup dies, its IP, experimental data, and hard-won engineering knowledge often die with it. Papers in drawers. Lab notebooks in storage units. Sorbent formulations that took years to develop, gone. ...

Everyone talks about trees when they talk about forest carbon. But the real story is underground. A new study published in Science by researchers at Lund University and Stanford finds that old-growth forests in Sweden store 72% more carbon per acre than managed forests — even when you give managed forests credit for the carbon locked in harvested wood products like lumber and furniture. Without that generous credit? The gap widens to 83%. ...

Tuesday’s lineup hit five stories across three continents — a potential billion-dollar CDR contract, European infrastructure that’s actually being designed properly, two different flavors of DAC innovation, and a Swiss rodent that might outperform your favorite carbon removal startup. What We Covered Today#Microsoft’s CDR Bet: The Vaulted Deep Deal Could Be Worth ~$1B — Microsoft agreed to store 4.9 million tonnes of CO₂ with Houston-based Vaulted Deep. That’s more than the entire global CDR industry (excluding forestry) removed in 2023. The estimated price tag: roughly $1 billion. While the federal government freezes DAC hub funding, Microsoft is single-handedly creating a market. Impressive and deeply concerning in equal measure — one company’s climate commitment shouldn’t have to substitute for industrial policy. ...

The Weekly State of CDR — March 24, 2026#Infrastructure is being built. But the delivery gap is growing faster than procurement. The Gigaton Tracker#MetricValueSpent on CO₂ removal$11.5BCO₂ sold44.3 MtCO₂ delivered~1.2 Mt (2.7%)Active purchasers1,023Active suppliers735Target10 Gt/year by 2050The gap: 1.2 Mt delivered vs. 10 Gt target = 0.012% of the way there. Reaching the floor requires 35x acceleration over 24 years. The industry has built an enormous procurement apparatus. It has not built removal capacity yet. ...

A 30-kilogram rodent with orange teeth might be one of the most cost-effective carbon removal technologies on the planet. A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment provides the first detailed carbon accounting of beaver-modified wetlands — and the numbers are genuinely surprising. Researchers studied a stream system in northern Switzerland that beavers have been reshaping for over a decade. Their finding: if you scaled beaver-created wetlands across suitable habitats in Switzerland, they could offset 1.2–1.8% of the country’s annual carbon emissions. ...

Here’s the problem with most direct air capture: you spend enormous amounts of energy releasing the CO₂ you just captured. Heat the sorbent to 900°C (solid sorbents) or boil a solvent (liquid systems) — either way, the energy cost dominates the economics. That’s why DAC still costs $400–$1,000 per tonne. But what if you could release captured CO₂ by just… making the air humid? Researchers at Arizona State University, led by doctoral researcher Gayathri Yogaganeshan, have published new work explaining exactly why certain commercial polymers can capture CO₂ from dry air and release it when exposed to moisture. No heat. No pressure. Just wet/dry cycling. And for the first time, they’ve mapped the structural differences that make some materials dramatically better at it than others. ...

Microsoft just signed what might be the largest carbon removal contract in history — and nobody in Washington had anything to do with it. E&E News reports that Microsoft has agreed to store 4.9 million tonnes of CO₂ with Vaulted Deep, a Houston-based startup that uses geological storage. Neither party confirms the price, but industry experts estimate the deal could be worth approximately $1 billion. Vaulted Deep CEO Julia Reichelstein called the deal’s impact “Revolutionary.” ...

While the US spent 2025 freezing $3.5 billion in DAC hub funding, the Netherlands quietly started building the kind of CDR infrastructure that actually scales. Platform Zero just organized a CDR strategy session in South Holland with an attendance list that tells you everything about how Europe does industrial policy differently. At the table: Skytree (DAC), SeaO2 (ocean alkalinity enhancement), TNO (the Netherlands’ heavyweight national research organization), Provincie Zuid-Holland, Gemeente Rotterdam, the Port of Rotterdam, InnovationQuarter, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, Paebbl, Carbyon, everox, Zero Emission Fuels, EBN B.V., and Division Q. ...

The CO₂ in your beer probably came from an ammonia plant. Or an ethanol refinery. Or — if you’re drinking Almanac Beer Company’s new “Flow – Clean Air Edition” — straight from the sky above a parking lot in Alameda, California. Almanac just launched what appears to be the world’s first commercial beer carbonated entirely with CO₂ captured from ambient air via direct air capture. Their partner, Berkeley-based Aircapture, installed a modular DAC unit in the brewery’s parking lot — it looks like an oversized HVAC unit with a chimney — that pulls CO₂ from the air and liquefies it to beverage-grade purity (99.999%). The beer is already available at 800+ retailers across California, including Safeway, Whole Foods, Total Wine, and BevMo. ...

📊 v2 Update (March 23, 2026) This census now uses LLM classification (Gemini Flash) instead of keyword-based search. Every paper was re-classified by title + abstract across our 7 CDR pathways. Starting from 37,133 candidate papers, we filtered 12,384 as NOT_CDR, leaving 24,749 high-confidence CDR papers. Researcher count updated to 122,674. Pathway assignments recalculated. Full methodology below. This is more rigorous but catches different papers — earlier keyword searches found 21,804. ...