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Substrate Biochar Opens First South Africa Site, Targets African Industrial Market

Carbon Herald just published Substrate Biochar Launches First Production Site In South Africa. Carbon Herald reports that Substrate Biochar, a company focused on industrial biochar solutions for Africa, has announced the launch of its first production site, located in South Africa. The announcement marks the company’s move from planning into physical operations on the continent. Biochar is produced by heating biomass in a low-oxygen environment, and the resulting stable carbon can be applied to soils or used in industrial products, which is why it has become one of the more commonly credited engineered carbon removal pathways. The article covers the site launch and the company’s framing of its role in the African biochar market, and readers should go to the full piece for any details on capacity, feedstock, and intended offtake. ...

Enabling tech tops CDR headcount at 8,069 of 24,729

This chart is a stacked horizontal bar showing CDR-attributable headcount across pathways on the vertical axis, with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play companies whose entire reason for existing is CDR, divisions inside larger firms where CDR is one line of business, and “ecosystem” firms, the directory’s label for companies that sell tools, verification, brokerage, or software to those operators. Bar length is total attributed workers; the color split is where those workers actually sit. ...

Reykjavík summit: solar geoengineering is where CDR was in 2015

Marginal Carbon just published Will we cool the earth?. Marginal Carbon’s Robert Höglund attended the Global Risk and Stabilization Summit in Reykjavík, a first-of-its-kind gathering of roughly 250 people working on approaches that might stabilize Earth’s climate, including stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening and ice sheet interventions. He describes a small field of around a thousand people, funded at only tens of millions of dollars per year, with organizer Renaissance Philanthropy alongside Outlier Projects, SRM360, The Degrees Initiative, Reflective and ARIA. A speaker likened its current standing to carbon removal in 2015, when CDR was widely dismissed as geoengineering. The piece singles out Earth’s declining reflectivity as the summit’s most alarming theme, noting that aerosol pollution masks an estimated 0.5°C of warming with uncertainty spanning near zero to about 1°C. ...

Captain's CDR Log #298: A preprint caps novel removal plus storage at 32–51 Gt by 2050

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Peak warming moves by at most about 0.025 °C. That is what novel carbon removal plus geological storage buys by 2050 in a new preprint, even when the model is told to assume the best. The critique, in the authors’ words The paper is Merfort, de Jonge-Anderson, Dorndorf et al., on Research Square, titled ‘Limited contribution of novel Carbon Dioxide Removal and Geological Carbon Storage to reducing peak warming’. Its abstract states that ’even under highly optimistic assumptions, geological carbon storage and novel carbon removal contribute only 32–51 GtCO₂ cumulatively by 2050’, a total it benchmarks at ‘approximately one year’ of global emissions. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-24

Nine million euros is 0.27% of 3.4 billion. That ratio is today’s story, and it shows up in all three posts in different clothes: CDR is still a small passenger inside much larger climate systems, whether the system is European public finance, a Kenyan e-fuels plant, or the ocean science literature. DAC money is a rounding error inside Europe’s net-zero spending Sirona Technologies, the Belgian DAC developer, landed a €9.1M Furu grant. Set against the €3.4B net-zero funding round it came out of, that is 0.27% of the money. I tracked the figure in Captain Drawdown’s daily CDR Log #297 because the denominator matters more than the numerator. A single DAC grant looks large on a company press release and small on a continental budget, and both views are correct at the same time. ...

Skytree to supply DAC CO2 for Kenyan e-fuels in deal with Galetech, Mwahera

Carbon Herald just published Skytree, Galetech, And Mwahera Partner On Direct Air Capture For E-Fuel Production In Kenya. Carbon Herald reports that Skytree, a Netherlands-based developer of modular direct air capture units, has signed a strategic partnership with Galetech Energy Developments and Mwahera Green Hydrogen aimed at e-fuel production in Kenya. The arrangement pairs Skytree’s atmospheric CO2 capture with green hydrogen from Mwahera, with Galetech bringing renewable energy project development experience to the mix. The stated goal is to combine captured carbon and hydrogen into synthetic fuels, positioning Kenya’s renewable resources as a base for low-carbon fuel supply. The piece frames the deal as an early-stage collaboration rather than a construction-ready project, and no capacity figures, capital commitments, or delivery timeline are detailed in the announcement as covered. ...

Captain's CDR Log #297: Sirona's €9.1M Furu grant is 0.27% of Europe's €3.4B net-zero round

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 0.27%. That is the share of the EU Innovation Fund’s latest €3.4 billion round that went to direct air capture, the first time the program has funded one at all. The first EU DACCS grant is a ceiling, not a cheque The European Commission selected Sirona Technologies’ Furu project for up to €9.1 million (about $10.2 million), making it the first direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS, meaning machines that pull CO2 from ambient air and lock it away permanently) project ever backed by the Innovation Fund. The award sits inside a round that spread €3.4 billion across 77 projects in 23 countries. Independent coverage from Balkan Green Energy News flagged two debuts in the same round: a small modular reactor and a direct air capture project. So DACCS entered the Commission’s flagship industrial grant program through the same door as nuclear. It just entered with a much smaller suitcase. ...

Captain's CDR Log #296: AI arrives in CDR as tool, buyer and rival, and critics see only one role

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. AI entered CDR this week in three roles at once: as a measurement tool, as a buyer, and as a competitor for the clean power and land that removal depends on. Nearly all the public commentary on AI and climate landed on the third role, and the role with the most direct effect on credit quality, measurement, drew the least scrutiny. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-22

The gap between a 1.7°C peak and a 1.5°C landing is roughly 440 to 660 billion tonnes of CO2 that someone has to pull back out of the air. That is a first-order estimate using the IPCC’s best guess of about 0.45°C of warming per 1,000 billion tonnes of CO2, and it understates the job, because as atmospheric CO2 falls the oceans give some back. So the number is a floor, not a ceiling. ...

Podcast take: 106 | SHOWDOWN: Europe’s CDR Strategy: BioCCS vs Tech Neutral - with Kaja Voss a

Take: 106 | SHOWDOWN: Europe’s CDR Strategy: BioCCS vs Tech Neutral - with Kaja Voss and Alastair Collier

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 20 Oc. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/showdown-europes-cdr-strategy-bioccs-vs-tech-neutral TL;DR Motion: “Europe’s CDR strategy should put bio-CCS first.” Audience voted 70% against; tech-neutrality won. Voss’s case: ~75% of durable offtakes to date are bio-CCS; it’s cheapest among 1,000-year pathways; its pipelines/terminals serve DAC later. Collier’s case: concentrated tech = concentrated politics. Cites Australia’s 2013 carbon-price repeal as the cautionary tale. Useful framing. Voss claims biomethane-to-CCS alone could reach 1 Gt/yr by 2050 on sustainable biomass. In-house number, unverified; treat with caution. Northern Lights got 80% capex support from Norway — Voss’s core “storage is a utility” argument. Strongest point on her side. The Carbon Removal Scoop (recently rebranded from The CDR Policy Scoop) runs its fifth live debate at Carbon Unbound Europe in London, moderated by Eve Tamme. Kaja Voss, CEO of Inherit — which captures CO2 from biogas upgrading and stores it via Northern Lights — argues Europe should deliberately prioritise bio-CCS (biogenic carbon capture and storage). Alastair Collier, Chief R&D Officer at biochar developer A Healthier Earth, argues for technology neutrality anchored in the CRCF (Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming regulation). Episode: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/showdown-europes-cdr-strategy-bioccs-vs-tech-neutral ...