Posts

Captain's CDR Log #209: Maxbauer's Midwest trial says the basalt emperor may be wearing very little

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1. The story A field trial on CDRXIV lands a direct hit on enhanced rock weathering’s favorite mineral. Daniel Maxbauer and colleagues spread crushed rock on a midwestern U.S. cornfield and measured what happened. Their result: coarse-grained basalt produced no statistically detectable CO2 removal signal, while steel slag did, and even the slag signal appeared only on soil that started out acidic. Slag on near-neutral soil showed nothing significant either. Basalt is the feedstock most ERW startups are selling and most buyers are underwriting. A null result on that mineral, in the heart of U.S. row-crop agriculture, deserves more attention than it will probably get. ...

Captain's CDR Log #208: Rebecca Neumann traced the 10 Gt number and found no there there

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus is simple and everywhere: the world needs roughly 10 gigatonnes of durable carbon removal per year by 2050, and that number comes straight from the science of the Paris temperature targets. Buyers size their portfolios against it. Startups pitch against it. Policy-facing writing treats “closing the gap to 10 Gt” as the sector’s organizing problem, as in this Open Access Government piece on closing the carbon dioxide removal gap, which is a fair sample of how the framing gets deployed downstream. ...

Week in CDR — 2026-W30

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 16 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. Two structural stories dominated the week: fresh evidence that natural carbon sinks are getting less reliable exactly when we need them most, and concrete signals about how the CDR market plumbing — pipelines, ETS integration, procurement readiness — will actually get built. Below, the science pieces that should update your baselines, and the market-infrastructure pieces that should update your roadmaps. ...

Carbon Credit Prices Track Buyer Preferences, Not Climate Impact: MIT Study

Carbon Herald just published MIT Study Finds Carbon Credit Prices Reflect Buyers’ Preferences Far More Than Climate Impact. Carbon Herald reports on new MIT research examining how credits are priced in the voluntary carbon market. According to the study, prices are shaped far more by buyer characteristics and preferences than by measurable climate impact, meaning two credits with similar mitigation value can trade at very different levels depending on who is purchasing them. The finding challenges the assumption that market prices act as a reliable signal of quality or additionality in the VCM. It also adds academic weight to ongoing concerns that the market rewards branding and buyer optics over verified emissions outcomes. The full article covers the study’s framing and what it implies for market reform. ...

Captain's CDR Log #207: Rivers may be eating the alkalinity ERW models assume reaches the sea

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique “This is indeed one of the reasons why I think there is still a justification for the old practice of seeing CDR as a form of geoengineering. They both decouple climate variables from cumulative emissions.” That’s Oliver Morton (@eaterofsun on Bluesky), and the target is any CDR pathway whose mass balance does not cleanly close. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW), where crushed silicates dissolve in soil and the resulting alkalinity is assumed to travel to the ocean for long-term storage, is exactly that kind of pathway right now. ...

Captain's CDR Log #206: Peter Reinhardt's bet that crop residue and wildfire fuel are the same operator problem

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Peter Reinhardt just spent two hours on the record explaining how to turn crop residue into carbon buried a kilometer underground. On Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal, the Charm Industrial CEO walked through the company’s full pipeline: gather waste biomass, pyrolyze it into a thick bio-oil, then inject that oil into deep geological formations where it stays. It is the most detailed operator interview any durable CDR chief executive has given this quarter, and it reads less like a pitch than a plant tour. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-07-24

CDR’s demand problem got attacked from three directions today, and that is the pattern worth noticing. The European Commission proposed putting 250 million tonnes of permanent carbon removal into its compliance market. J.P. Morgan extended debt financing to Charm Industrial. And SBTi’s rulebook, which refuses to let removals stand in for emission cuts, came into focus as the single biggest brake on corporate buying. Compliance demand, bank debt, and voluntary-market rules all moved or mattered on the same day. The industry’s binding constraint has never been capture chemistry. It is who pays, under what rules, and today the answers got sharper. ...

SBTi's refusal to let removals substitute for cuts is CDR's biggest demand block

Marginal Carbon just published The main thing holding carbon removal back. Robert Höglund writes that voluntary demand for durable carbon removal is capped because corporate standards reserve it for residual emissions only. Under SBTi rules, CDR cannot substitute for other mitigation options such as biofuels or CCS, and is allowed only after steep gross reductions - roughly 91% for general Scope 3, 97% for aviation, and 100% for shipping. He contrasts this with the EU Commission’s new ETS proposal, which treats durable removals as equivalent to emission reductions rather than limiting them to hard-to-abate categories. Höglund notes an asymmetry: companies can over-rely on biofuels or CCS beyond what pathways model and stay compliant, while CDR is categorically excluded from target implementation. ...

Charm Industrial lands J.P. Morgan debt deal to scale bio-oil carbon removal

Heatmap News just published Transcript: What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal. Heatmap News has published the transcript of a Shift Key episode featuring Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial. Host Robinson Meyer frames the conversation around wildfire risk in the US, noting that roughly 1.6 million acres of forest were burning at the time and that accumulated dead fuel raises fire likelihood. Charm’s model converts biomass, including material from forest fuel clearing, into bio-oil that is injected underground for durable carbon removal. The episode covers Charm’s recent agreement with J.P. Morgan, under which the bank committed to purchase more than 60,000 tons of removal and extended a $20 million debt facility to the company. Reinhardt’s broader background across climate tech ventures also comes up. ...

569 pure-play CDR startups employ just 9,525 people worldwide

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. ...