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Louisiana blocks parish-level bans on carbon capture projects

Carbon Herald just published Louisiana Lawmakers Prevents Parishes From Banning Carbon Capture. Carbon Herald reports that Louisiana legislators rejected a package of bills aimed at giving parishes the authority to prohibit carbon capture and storage activities locally. The proposals had been driven by parish-level concerns about CCS pipelines, injection wells, and pore space rights, particularly in areas targeted by industrial decarbonization projects. By stopping the measures, the state preserves a centralized permitting framework in which CCS approvals remain primarily a state and federal matter rather than a local one. The outcome is a notable signal for developers planning sequestration hubs in Louisiana, which is among the most active US states for proposed CCS infrastructure. ...

Captain's CDR Log #142: Louisiana strips parishes of CCS veto power while Class VI still has no consent rule

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 Louisiana’s legislature just killed the bills that would have let parishes ban carbon capture and storage projects inside their borders. The Louisiana House Natural Resources Committee blocked the parish-veto measures, which means Allen, Vernon, and Livingston parishes, all of which had been pursuing local moratoria, no longer have that tool. Siting authority for CCS now sits entirely with the state and, for the underground injection wells themselves, with the federal Class VI permitting program. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-05-21

The gap between models and machines just got harder to ignore Today’s stories share one uncomfortable thread: the distance between what climate models assume carbon removal will deliver and what the actual industry can build. One skeptic, one labor-force number, and one essay on stalled progress all point at the same problem from different angles. If you only have time for one takeaway from today, it is this: the modeled CDR future and the operational CDR present are roughly three orders of magnitude apart, and almost nobody is pricing that gap into their plans. ...

Podcast take: 400: What kind of leader does my CDR company need me to be?—w/ Julia Reichelstei

Take: 400: What kind of leader does my CDR company need me to be?—w/ Julia Reichelstein, Vaulted Deep

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 21 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/400-What-kind-of-leader-does-my-CDR-company-need-me-to-be-w-Julia-Reichelstein--Vaulted-Deep-e3jiss8 TL;DR Vaulted Deep is on track for ~50,000 tonnes of durable removal this year, up from 25,000 tonnes cumulative to date — credible scale-up for a non-biochar developer. Reichelstein frames Vaulted as a waste management company first, CDR second; gets paid on the disposal side, which sidesteps biomass-competition risk entirely. The Microsoft ~5M-tonne offtake (signed 2024) underwrites site development through ~2040 — the deal that turned them from operator into builder. Most of the conversation is leadership philosophy, not technical. Useful if you’re a founder; thinner if you came for measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) or geology specifics. Spin-out mechanics from Advantek get a rare honest treatment — including why venture-backed spin-outs are scarce. Ross Kenyon hosts Julia Reichelstein, co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep, for a wide-ranging conversation that’s roughly one-third Vaulted operations and two-thirds founder psychology. If you’ve heard Reichelstein on the technical circuit before, this is the softer cut — useful for understanding how she thinks, less useful if you want to interrogate the deep-well injection thesis. ...

Take: Carbon removal is stuck in low earth orbit. Here's how we get out.

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 30 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/carbon-removal-is-stuck-in-low-earth TL;DR Friedmann argues CDR 1.0 built the scaffolding (registries, raters, taxonomy) but isn’t structured to close commercial deals — reframing, not bashing. Five pillars to unlock CDR 2.0: technical readiness, project assurance, standardization, bankability, transactional ease. Useful checklist, light on novelty individually but coherent together. Headline claim: deals die at the CFO, not the CSO. Risk management, not price, is the binding constraint. Rings true with what buyers actually say. Pointed critique: 5,000-ton pilots don’t interest 100kt-scale buyers like Microsoft/JPM/Airbus. Sector is still over-indexed on first-of-a-kind storytelling. Intro segment announces the Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub at Thetford Mines — 800Mt tailings, Frontier RFP open through May 22, 2026. Naim Merchant hosts Julio Friedmann (Chief Scientist, Carbon Direct) to walk through Carbon Direct’s new “CDR 2.0: Five Pillars of Successful Project Deployment and Delivery” report. The episode is essentially a guided tour of why durable carbon removal deal flow has stalled and what specifically needs to change at the buyer-procurement-bank interface. There’s also a 4-minute opening from Merchant announcing the Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub partnership between Carbon Removal Canada, Frontier, and Thetford Mines. ...

Take: CBAM and International Credits: What’s Just Changed? - with Dan Maleski

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Fri, 15 Ma. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/cbam-and-international-credits-whats-just-changed-with-dan-m TL;DR Draft Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism implementing act (published 13 May 2026) lets importers deduct carbon costs paid abroad — including, controversially, international credits. First-time clarity worth knowing. Hard cap: international Article 6 credits can offset at most 10% of a CBAM liability. But most third-country ETSs already cap offset use at 5-10%, so binding impact is modest. No quantitative cap on domestic credits used inside a third-country mandatory regime. Maleski can’t justify the asymmetry; nor can the hosts. Genuinely odd policy choice. “Effective” carbon cost is net of free allocation — so Brazil, Turkey, Korea ETSs in ramp-up phase deliver near-zero deduction regardless of headline carbon price. Important reality check. Anti-gaming safeguard is “independent persons” verifying paid prices. Maleski openly notes clients ask how to inflate intra-group credit prices. Thin guardrail. The CDR Policy Scoop (episode link) reconvened Dan Maleski of Ruby Advisors one day after the Commission dropped its draft implementing act on Article 9 of CBAM — the provision letting importers deduct carbon costs already paid in the country of origin. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme spend 30 minutes parsing what the act actually says about international credits, the 10% cap, and why the consultation (closing early June) still leaves big pieces missing. ...

569 pure-play CDR companies share just 9,499 employees

This violin plot sorts every pure-play CDR company in the Directory by its pathway (columns) and its headcount (vertical axis, log scale from 1 to 100+). Each dot is one company, coloured by its current liveliness tier — Active, Moderate, Suspect, or Likely Dead. The grey shape behind each column is the size distribution: where it bulges, that’s where most companies in that pathway sit. The value here is comparative. A raw company list tells you who exists; this view tells you where the weight sits. Pathways with most dots stacked at the bottom are dominated by sub-10-employee firms — many small entrants, few that have grown. Pathways with dots reaching up the column have produced operators that scaled past the founder-and-a-few-engineers phase. Colour (not vertical position) is what tells you the health story: red dots high up the column mean a sizeable operator went quiet; red dots on the floor are the long tail churning as it always has. ...

CCS Gets Its Own Carbon Certificates: Mitchell Foundation Opens 60-Day Review

Carbon Herald just published Foundation Opens Consultation On CCS EACs Methodology. Carbon Herald reports that the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation has launched a 60-day public consultation seeking stakeholder input on a draft methodology for carbon capture and storage Environmental Attribute Certificates (EACs). The framework is intended to standardize how captured and stored CO2 can be tracked and credited through tradable certificates, similar in concept to renewable energy attribute systems. The consultation invites feedback from industry, researchers, NGOs and policy groups before the methodology is finalized. The piece situates the effort within broader work to build credible market infrastructure for CCS deployment and accounting. ...

Captain's CDR Log #141: One skeptic, one number, and the 1000x gap modelers keep assuming away

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,000×. That is the gap between durable carbon removal we are actually delivering today and what the median IPCC 2°C scenario quietly assumes we will be removing each year by 2050. The prior reference point most CDR boosters cite is purchases, not deliveries. CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 market update puts cumulative durable purchases near 10 Mt and calls Q1 the largest quarter on record. That framing flatters the sector. Switch the denominator to tonnes physically delivered and verified, and the annual run rate sits under 1 Mt/yr. IPCC scenarios consistent with 2°C require 5 to 10 GtCO₂/yr by 2050. One million versus five to ten billion. Three orders of magnitude on the delivery line, four on the cumulative line. ...

Pathway 101: Enhanced Weathering

The pathway Enhanced weathering (EW) accelerates a chemical reaction that the Earth already runs at geological pace: the dissolution of silicate rocks by carbonic acid in rainwater. When fast-weathering rocks like basalt, olivine, or wollastonite are crushed to fine particles and spread — usually on cropland, sometimes in rivers, forests, or mine pits — the surface area available for reaction increases by orders of magnitude. CO₂ dissolved in soil water reacts with the minerals, producing dissolved bicarbonate ions that drain through soils to groundwater and eventually the ocean, where the carbon is stored on timescales of 10,000 to 100,000+ years. That long-tailed durability is why EW sits alongside direct air capture and mineralization in most “durable CDR” portfolios, even though it borrows infrastructure (quarries, ag spreaders) from existing industries. ...