Posts

Climeworks — the Swiss company that built the world’s first commercial direct air capture plants — just opened its Canadian headquarters in Calgary. And it’s not just a symbolic office: they’re planning what could become the company’s largest DAC facility anywhere. The Alberta Play#A small team is already working out of the Energy Transition Centre in downtown Calgary. By fall, Climeworks will deploy a mobile testing unit (currently being tested in Saudi Arabia) to see how its technology handles Alberta’s extreme cold. If you’re going to run a DAC plant through a Canadian winter, you’d better test it first. ...

Exomad Green just crossed 300,000 delivered carbon removal credits from its biochar operations. Based in Bolivia, the company converts agricultural waste into biochar across the Global South — and it’s now one of the largest biochar CDR producers by volume. Why 300K Credits Matters#Most carbon removal companies are still measuring their output in hundreds or low thousands of tonnes. Exomad is operating at a scale that actually registers on the global CDR dashboard. For context, the entire voluntary carbon removal market delivered roughly 2.4 million tonnes in 2025. Three hundred thousand credits from a single biochar operator is significant. ...

Kenya just demonstrated what serious carbon market regulation looks like — and several big projects didn’t survive the scrutiny. KOKO Networks: The Headline Collapse#KOKO Networks, a climate-tech company selling carbon credits from clean cookstove distribution, collapsed into administration after the Kenyan government denied it a Letter of Authorization under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The problem? KOKO claimed 93% of woodfuel in their target areas came from deforested sources. The actual figure in cities like Nairobi is closer to 38%. That single metric inflated their credits by over 2.4×, turning roughly $7 million worth of legitimate reductions into $15 million of claimed credits. ...

A new study adds another wrinkle to ocean carbon removal: the microbes riding sinking particles may be dissolving the very minerals that help carbon reach the deep ocean. The Finding#Researchers discovered that bacteria attached to marine snow — the shower of organic debris that carries carbon from the ocean surface toward the deep — can accelerate the dissolution of calcium carbonate. These aren’t unusual organisms doing something exotic. They’re common ocean bacteria whose metabolic waste creates acidic microenvironments around the particles they colonize. ...

The mining industry produces billions of tonnes of alkaline waste rock every year. A new whitepaper argues this waste stream could become one of the largest pathways for scaling carbon dioxide removal. The Opportunity#Geochemical CDR — using mineral reactions to permanently capture CO₂ — has a chicken-and-egg problem. You need large volumes of reactive minerals, processing infrastructure, and land. The mining industry already has all three. ...

A new study throws cold water on some of the rosier projections for biological ocean carbon removal. The core finding: carbon and phosphorus have different residence times in the ocean, and failing to account for this nutrient cycling mismatch could lead to serious overestimates of how much CO₂ actually stays sequestered. The Disconnect#Here’s the simplified version: ocean iron fertilization (OIF) works by adding iron to surface waters to stimulate phytoplankton growth. The phytoplankton absorb CO₂, die, and sink — theoretically carrying that carbon to the deep ocean for long-term storage. ...

Sustaera, a North Carolina-based DAC startup, just dropped a bold claim: their third-generation electro-thermal approach captures CO₂ from air at 90%+ energy efficiency, with capital costs 3-5x lower than existing thermal DAC technologies. If verified at scale, that’s not incremental. It’s the kind of step change that could make DAC competitive with biochar. What’s Different?#Incumbent DAC systems — including Climeworks’ solid sorbent approach and Carbon Engineering’s liquid solvent method — typically max out around 40% thermal efficiency. Sustaera says its proprietary nano-structured sorbent combined with integrated electric heating smashes through that ceiling. ...

North America’s carbon market map just got more interesting. Officials from Washington State, California, and Québec have released a draft agreement that lays out how their three emissions trading systems could be linked into a single cross-border market. What’s Actually Happening#Washington’s Climate Commitment Act created a cap-and-invest program that launched in 2023. California and Québec have been running a linked cap-and-trade system since 2014. The new draft agreement — released last week — proposes connecting all three. ...

One of CDR’s persistent problems is simply keeping track of itself. Dozens of pathways, hundreds of companies, thousands of papers — and no single place to see where things actually stand. RMI and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability just launched a fix: an interactive CDR tracker that maps progress across 32 different carbon removal approaches. What It Does#Built on RMI’s 2023 Applied Innovation Roadmap for CDR, the tracker is a live, searchable database covering: ...

Nueva Ecija — a rice-growing province in the Philippines — just became the first place in Southeast Asia to generate Puro.earth-verified biochar carbon credits. And the model is beautifully simple: take rice husks (agricultural waste), convert them to biochar, and distribute it to farmers. Project NuevaChar#Launched in 2022 under Governor Aurelio “Oyie” Umali, Project NuevaChar is a joint venture between the provincial government and Singapore-based Alcom Pte Ltd. The facility combines green heat production with biochar manufacturing. ...