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There’s a CDR opportunity hiding in plain sight, and it smells faintly of wood pulp. Pulp and paper mills have been industrial energy users for over a century. They burn enormous quantities of biomass — wood residues, black liquor, bark — to generate the heat and power their processes require. For climate purposes, that’s been considered roughly carbon-neutral: the trees absorbed CO₂ while growing, the mill releases it when burning. ...

The voluntary carbon removal market tends to move in increments. ClimeFi just jumped three levels at once. The Swiss CDR procurement specialist has launched the Beyond 2030 RFP — its most ambitious procurement round to date — seeking between 100,000 and 500,000 tonnes of durable carbon removal from corporate buyers acting collectively. The round is pathway-agnostic, but requires 200+ year permanence as a minimum threshold. No forestry offsets, no short-lived solutions. ...

First Microsoft, now Google. The world’s biggest tech companies are placing serious bets on biochar — and this week’s numbers are hard to ignore. Google has signed a multi-year agreement with Commonwealth Sortation LLC, an affiliate of AMP Robotics, to remove 200,000 metric tonnes of CO₂e via biochar by 2030. This is one of Google’s largest carbon removal purchases to date, and it comes just days after Microsoft’s landmark 1 million-tonne biochar deal with Liferaft — the biggest in US history. ...

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. ...