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Carbon Curve Intelligence launches free tracker covering the entire CDR sector

Carbon Herald just published Carbon Curve Intelligence: A New Free Tool That Tracks The CDR Sector. Carbon Herald covers the launch this week of Carbon Curve Intelligence, a new free tool designed to track different parts of the carbon dioxide removal sector. The outlet frames the release as a resource for people trying to follow a fast-moving and fragmented market, where project announcements, offtake deals, policy developments and company news are spread across many sources. The piece presents the tool as a sector-wide tracker rather than a single-pathway database, positioning it alongside the growing set of CDR market intelligence products. The material available to us is headline-level and does not spell out the tool’s data sources, coverage boundaries, update cadence, or who is behind the Carbon Curve brand, so readers should go to the original article and the tool itself for those specifics. ...

Captain's CDR Log #303: Simon Evans and the denominator that CDR policy has yet to adopt

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Simon Evans attached a single number to the UK net-zero debate in one line: “For context, the CCC says that the net cost of reaching net-zero by 2050 is… £108bn over 25 yrs” (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky). The post said nothing about carbon removal. That is exactly why I am writing about it. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-29

The CDR field now has more researchers who have gone quiet than researchers who are still publishing. The CDR Researcher Census puts the active pool at 32,833 and the dormant pool at 44,749. That is 58% of everyone who ever worked on removal now sitting out. And it is the day’s most important number. Here is why it matters more than the tripling that sits next to it. Active researchers roughly tripled, from a base near 11,000, to 32,833. That is a real surge. But the dormant count grew faster in absolute terms, and the ratio tells a plainer story than the growth rate: CDR pulls people in, and then most of them leave. The field’s bottleneck is not tonnes or capital. It is retention. ...

Take: 107 | Mining's Untapped Removals Opportunity - with Cara Maesano

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 27 Oc. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/minings-untapped-removals-opportunity-with-cara-maesano TL;DR Almost any carbon removal pathway can run on a mine site; only ex situ mineralization with metal recovery truly requires one. Useful framing. Headline potential (>1 Gt/yr) and $80–300/t range are theoretical and price-based, not cost-based. Maesano says so herself; treat accordingly. Thetford Mines hub (Frontier, Carbon Removal Canada) targets ~800 Mt of Quebec asbestos waste. Research only, no projects announced yet. Arca claims ~100x reactivity from microwave activation of tailings. Lab result, not field data. Environmental liability reduction, not credit revenue, is the current driver for miners. Likely the most actionable insight here. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Cara Maesano, lead author of RMI’s August report on mining and carbon dioxide removal, now scientific and technical director at CDR 2030, on this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop. The ~30 minutes cover which removal pathways fit mine sites, how surficial mineralization of tailings works and is being accelerated, what the report’s scale and cost numbers actually rest on, and why permitting and risk aversion slow adoption more than land area would suggest. ...

Take: Season 3 Episode 8: Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement with Adam Subhas

Take on a podcast episode from Ocean Solutions: a NOISE Lab podcast, originally published Wed, 30 Se. Listen: https://soundcloud.com/morgan-reed-raven/season-3-episode-8-ocean TL;DR LOC-NESS, the first EPA-permitted ocean alkalinity enhancement trial, ran in August in the Gulf of Maine: 6-hour dispersal, 4 days of ship monitoring. Subhas says they have direct measurements of atmospheric CO2 uptake — “tons” over 4 days, error bar still pending. No headline number yet. No measurable biological impacts detected in the plume. Useful, but it’s one summer patch; don’t over-read it. Rhodamine dye made the patch visible from NASA satellites — a genuinely interesting measurement, reporting, and verification angle. WHOI deliberately kept the project off the voluntary carbon market; Subhas tells startups to be explicit about financial motives. Ocean Solutions (a NOISE Lab podcast out of UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School) hosts Lena Capece and Alexandra Phillips interview Adam Subhas, associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and project lead for LOC-NESS (Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope). The episode is a plain-language walk through what ocean alkalinity enhancement is, how the Wilkinson Basin trial was actually executed, what the preliminary results show, and how the team handled fishermen, Indigenous groups, and a split public comment record. Listen here. ...

Take: The Replacement for the Replacement | Andreas Bremen, Co-reactive

Take on a podcast episode from Bite-Size Climate Tech, originally published Mon, 26 Oc. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lydiaclinzi/episodes/The-Replacement-for-the-Replacement--Andreas-Bremen--Co-reactive-e3r3moo TL;DR Co-reactive makes a supplementary cementitious material (SCM) by carbonating milled minerals with CO2 in a tubular reactor — storage happens inside the product, not underground. The pitch isn’t lower-carbon cement; it’s replacing fly ash and slag, which are vanishing as coal plants close and steel moves to direct reduction. Useful framing. Scale path: 1,000 t/yr demo now, 10,000 t by end of 2027, 100,000 t before 2030. A cement plant does ~1 Mt. Honest about the gap. Reaction time cut from years (ambient) to ~1 hour via milling, heat, pressure, additives. Feedstock not specified. Water: 250 kg/t product, recirculated, vs ~150 kg/t for cement. Not a removal play yet — CO2 source is point-source, not air. Lydia Chen’s Bite-Size Climate Tech sits down with Andreas Bremen, chemical engineer, mineralization PhD and co-founder of Co-reactive, for a short tour of their carbonation-to-SCM process, the 1,000 t/yr demonstration plant in Erkrath, and the go-to-market logic. Recorded 3 September 2026. Episode here. ...

Active CDR researchers tripled to 32,833 as dormant pool hit 44,749

This chart tracks CDR researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a CDR-relevant paper that year (active), stacked upward; below the line are dormant researchers, split into those who published the previous year and those who published only earlier. New entrants join at the base of the active band each year as a teal block. The top envelope is the real, working research workforce each year — the number of people actually publishing, not the cumulative head-count. ...

Captain's CDR Log #302: Basin to hectare, the week's CDR numbers are measured in local units

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Global underground CO2 storage reached 43.6 million tonnes in 2024, while a maize plot in Shenyang received biochar at 2.63 tonnes per hectare per year, a ratio of roughly seventeen million to one. Both numbers are real and both matter for CDR, but neither converts into the other. This week’s figures each arrive in the unit their host geography can produce: a basin, a plant, a field, a mine, or a national treasury. ...

Captain's CDR Log #301: Two CDR debt deals, two answers to who eats a missed tonne

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Two recent CDR debt deals point to the same gate, and it is not the offtake. Citi’s $72M note for Applied Carbon’s Texas biochar and HASI’s $34M term loan for Terradot’s rock weathering each put the real underwriting work on one question: who absorbs a tonne that never gets verified. They answer it in opposite ways. ...

338 of 476 pure-play CDR firms were founded since 2020

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. ...