Posts

Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 companies

Each dot on this scatter is a single CDR pathway - direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, mineralization, and the rest. The horizontal axis counts how many companies are working that pathway; the vertical axis sums the employees across those companies. Linear scales on both, so distance on the page matches distance in the numbers. What this view reveals that a headcount table cannot is the shape of the industry. A pathway sitting high and to the right is crowded with firms and staffed deeply. One sitting high but to the left is a pathway dominated by a few large companies. Low and to the right means many small teams chasing the same idea. The spread between these corners is the story of where capital and talent have actually landed, versus where the field is still a cottage. ...

Captain's CDR Log #153: Two assessments, one geography problem — where the rocks are versus where the rules are

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Where does the EU’s 2030 carbon storage target break down geographically? Not in Brussels, where the rules are written, but in the member-state capitals where the pore space actually sits unbuilt. Two assessments published this autumn map the same problem from opposite ends. Read them together and the geographic mismatch becomes the story. ...

Captain's CDR Log #152: Stockholm's 750kt deal just set the floor — watch the next 180 days of municipal off-take

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Stockholm Exergi’s 750,000-tonne, 15-year permanent BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) off-take to the City of Stockholm is the new European price floor for permanent removal, and within six months it will lock in a two-tier price curve that Brussels has not authored. The deal is the largest non-corporate permanent removal contract on record (onestopesg), and it was signed while the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation methodologies remain unwritten after CRCF Days 2026. That vacuum hands pricing power to private registries, Isometric and Puro.earth, for every deal that closes before the end of 2026. The buyer archetype has also shifted. A municipal government, not a tech corporate, just set the benchmark. Other European cities will price their next budget cycles against it. ...

Week in CDR — 2026-W22

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 21 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 signal sits at the intersection of policy retrenchment and methodological maturation: U.S. disclosure rules are being unwound just as Europe and Asia tighten market plumbing, and the science community is sharpening the question of what “permanent” actually buys you. Two large buyer deals also landed, both shaped less by climate ambition than by procurement strategy and portfolio engineering. ...

LSB Takes Full Control of El Dorado CCS to Streamline 45Q Claims

Carbon Herald just published LSB Moves Toward Full Ownership Of El Dorado Carbon Capture Project. Carbon Herald reports that LSB Industries has signed an agreement with Lapis Carbon Solutions that sets a pathway for LSB to assume full ownership of the planned carbon capture project at its El Dorado, Arkansas ammonia facility. The arrangement restructures the partnership originally formed to develop the capture and sequestration infrastructure at the site. The El Dorado project is intended to capture CO2 from ammonia production and store it underground, with the captured volumes potentially qualifying for 45Q tax credits. The outlet frames the move as LSB consolidating control over project economics and timing as it advances toward a final investment decision. ...

Captain's CDR Log #151: Three tools launched this week show developers building their own integrity stack

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR registry stack is bifurcating. Project developers are building their own pre-issuance integrity tools, while traditional registries quietly retreat to scheduling and certification. This week made the split impossible to miss. Three launches, read together, tell the story. Mati Carbon released a free app for stress-testing enhanced rock weathering data. The tool sits upstream of any registry. It is open-sourced. It is built by a developer answering the integrity question before a methodology asks it. EW (enhanced rock weathering, the practice of spreading crushed silicate rock on fields to accelerate natural CO2 mineralization) has a measurement problem, and Mati is solving it on its own terms. For background on the pathway, see our primer on enhanced weathering. ...

Captain's CDR Log #150: CRCF Days came and went with the methodology fights still unresolved

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance The EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF) is a voluntary EU-wide certification scheme for four categories of removals: permanent storage, carbon farming, soil emission reductions, and carbon stored in products. It binds certified operators to a Commission-approved methodology, applies across the bloc, and is meant to feed downstream uses (corporate claims, possible future ETS interaction, Member State procurement). The framework is in force. The methodologies that decide what a “CRCF tonne” actually represents are not. ...

Linde-Valmet Team Up on Electric Carbon Capture for Pulp Mills

Carbon Herald just published Linde And Valmet Partner On Electric Carbon Capture For Pulp And Paper. Carbon Herald reports that industrial gas company Linde and pulp and paper technology supplier Valmet are joining forces to develop electric carbon capture solutions tailored to the pulp and paper sector. The collaboration aims to combine Linde’s experience in CO2 separation and processing with Valmet’s footprint in mill engineering and process integration. The focus on electrically driven capture is intended to align with mills that have access to low-carbon power, potentially reducing reliance on steam-based regeneration. The outlet frames the move as targeting an industry with significant biogenic CO2 streams that are increasingly viewed as candidates for capture and storage or utilization. ...

Captain's CDR Log #149: Five numbers that expose who is actually writing the checks in CDR right now

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week point at the same thing. Named individuals are now the rate-limiting step in CDR scale-up. The gaps between what each of them pledged and what they have actually wired matter more than any tech roadmap update. 28%. That is roughly how much of Jeff Bezos’s $10B climate pledge the Bezos Earth Fund has disbursed six years in, per Bloomberg reporting surfaced by Amanda Kolson Hurley ([@amandakhurley.bsky.social on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/amandakhurley.bsky.social/post/3mmway5qaic2z)). Roughly $2.8B out against a 10-year clock that is more than half elapsed. CDR grantees who modeled Earth Fund money into their 2026-2028 runway are now repricing that assumption. Hurley also flagged that “the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is winding down its climate work” while “Sergey Brin’s foundation and Steve Ballmer - and especially, MacKenzie Scott - are giving a lot of climate dollars.” The seat is rotating. Which human is in it this quarter decides which CDR pipelines survive. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-05-28

Today’s stories share a common thread: the gap between CDR’s narrative and its actual mass. A widely circulated Nature Reviews paper is being read as a breakthrough it does not claim to be. The global pure-play CDR workforce fits inside a mid-size tech company. And buyers, from Terraset to the seven-buyer coalition we covered, are still teaching suppliers how to pitch them. The field is small, the signals are loud, and the discipline to tell those apart matters more every quarter. ...