Posts

Captain's CDR Log #188: The July 17 ETS review will decide if CRCF certificates are worth anything

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now. On 17 July, the European Commission publishes its review of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), Europe’s carbon market. The publication was just delayed by two days, a small signal of how contested the drafting still is. This single document will determine whether Europe’s new carbon removal certification framework becomes a source of real, bankable demand for CDR, or remains a labeling scheme with no buyer of last resort. ...

Captain's CDR Log #187: Why UNDO's Mat Meredith is building ERW's future on Eastern Ontario cropland

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Mat Meredith went on the Raw Green podcast this week and framed his whole industry’s problem in five words. His team’s promo put it plainly: he sat down “for a wide-ranging conversation on enhanced rock weathering (ERW) and what it actually takes to prove carbon removal works” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). Not what it takes to deploy. Not what it takes to fund. What it takes to prove. That word choice is the whole strategy, and the strategy has a postal code: Kingston, Ontario. ...

Week in CDR — 2026-W27

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. The week’s connecting thread is infrastructure and institutions catching up to the pitch decks: Canada committing real money to a west-coast CO2 pipeline, the Netherlands naming a CRCF supervisor, Germany opening its largest DAC unit, and a fresh arXiv paper reminding us that enhanced weathering timelines depend on soil chemistry the marketing rarely mentions. Meanwhile the buyer base for durable CDR keeps broadening even as the EU ETS review slips — small delay, but the calendar around 2040 targets is tightening. ...

Iowa Regulators Cut Dakotas From Summit CO2 Pipeline Approval

Carbon Herald just published Iowa Regulators Strip Dakotas From Summit Pipeline Order. The Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC) has issued two new regulatory orders that strip out critical interstate language from… The post Iowa Regulators Strip Dakotas From Summit Pipeline Order appeared first on Carbon Herald. Why it matters (Context): Summit Carbon Solutions’ multi-state CO2 pipeline is one of the largest carbon-transport buildouts in the US, and its permitting fights across Iowa and the Dakotas have become a bellwether for how hard it is to move captured CO2 across state lines. When a state commission narrows or reworks the interstate portions of an approval, it reshapes the routing math for every project that depends on shared trunk infrastructure. If you follow CO2 transport and storage policy, the regulatory detail here is worth reading in full at the source. ...

Captain's CDR Log #186: 1,200 tonnes on day one is the number that reframes ASEAN's $8.5B carbon promise

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,200 tonnes. That is the total volume of greenhouse gas allowances that cleared on the debut trading day of Vietnam’s first national carbon exchange, which opened Monday. A single mid-sized coal unit emits that much in under two hours. The number to hold it against is $8.5 billion. That is what Abatable’s new report estimates as Southeast Asia’s CORSIA credit opportunity through 2035. CORSIA is the international aviation sector’s carbon offsetting scheme, and Abatable models Vietnam as a headline supplier within it. Run the math and day-one exchange volume works out to roughly 0.0004% of the annual tonnage that thesis requires. The gap between the marketed opportunity and the venue meant to clear it is not a rounding error. It is the whole story. ...

Verde Signs 10-Year Biochar Paving Deal With Ergon, Eyes Carbon Credits

Carbon Herald just published Verde Lands 10-Year Biochar Paving Deal With Ergon, Eyes Carbon Credits. Verde Resources (OTCQB: VRDR) has signed a 10-year commercialization agreement with Ergon Asphalt & Emulsions, the largest supplier… The post Verde Lands 10-Year Biochar Paving Deal With Ergon, Eyes Carbon Credits appeared first on Carbon Herald . Our take (Context): Worth a click if you track Carbon Herald-style coverage. -> Read the full piece at Carbon Herald ...

Captain's CDR Log #185: Three CCS projects, three ownership models, one clear winner emerging

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three carbon capture and storage (CCS) announcements landed this week, and together they answer a question the industry has been dodging. The variable that decides whether a project survives is no longer capture cost or reservoir geology. It’s who sits on the cap table. Projects with a sovereign or a First Nation holding equity moved forward. Projects built on private balance sheets alone died. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-07-03

The lesson from today’s three stories is the same one, told three ways: in carbon removal, the rock is more reliable than the rules. Geology does not renegotiate. Governments and corporations do. Two of today’s stories show the ground shifting under carbon storage, one through a provincial policy rewrite and one through a corporate retreat from 850,000 acres of seabed. The third reminds us that the underlying chemistry of removal has been teaching the same lessons for a century, whether or not anyone was listening. ...

ExxonMobil gives up 850,000 acres of Gulf carbon storage leases

Carbon Herald just published ExxonMobil Surrenders 850,000 Acres of Gulf Carbon Storage Leases. Carbon Herald reports that ExxonMobil has notified the US Department of the Interior that it is surrendering roughly 850,000 acres of offshore carbon storage leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The acreage was part of the company’s push to build a large-scale carbon capture and storage business, anchored by its Low Carbon Solutions unit and its position as one of the biggest lease holders for subsea CO2 storage in US federal waters. The move marks a significant scaling back of that offshore storage footprint. The outlet frames the decision as a quiet but consequential shift in Exxon’s offshore carbon strategy, with implications for the pace of Gulf Coast CCS development. ...

Crushed basalt on a field — a century of enhanced rock weathering experiments reaching the same conclusion

History Rhymes: A Century of Crushed Rock Keeps Teaching the Same Lesson

Last week we published a long write-up of the first CDI Symposium, where a room of soil scientists picked apart the world’s most-measured enhanced-rock-weathering experiment and landed on an uncomfortable conclusion: the rock dissolves, but the expected carbon-removal signal often doesn’t show up — and whether it does depends heavily on the specific soil. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the symposium suggested, is not a universal climate fix but a context-dependent one, and measuring it honestly is the whole ballgame. ...