CDR Week and notes

Canada Extends EOR Tax Credits, Broadens CO2-Based Oil Recovery Support

Carbon Herald just published Canada Extends Tax Credits For Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) Projects. Carbon Herald reports that the Canadian federal government has announced plans to extend tax credits available to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. EOR uses injected CO2 to push additional crude from mature reservoirs, and proponents argue it can pair with carbon capture to sequester some of that CO2 underground. The extension signals continued federal backing for CCUS-linked oil production at a time when Canada is also pursuing broader emissions reduction targets. Full details on eligibility, duration, and how the credit interacts with existing CCUS investment tax credits are covered in the source article. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-05-12

The market is maturing faster than the rulebook Today’s stories share one thread: durable carbon removal is starting to behave like an industry, but the scaffolding around it - measurement costs, national policy, buyer concentration - is still catching up. April’s contracting data, India’s accidental export dominance, and the scramble to cut enhanced rock weathering verification costs all point the same direction. Demand is real. The plumbing is improvised. April’s buying tells you who actually runs this market 1.14 million tons of durable CDR got contracted in April. Microsoft, JPMorgan, and Boeing did most of the lifting. That is a healthy month by any historical standard, and it keeps 2026 on pace to clear last year’s totals. But three names doing most of the volume is not a market. It is a club. ...

Infographic summarising the four findings from a 900-post carbon-removal social media engagement study

What 900 carbon-removal social-media posts told me about engagement

Most social-media advice was written for general B2B marketers. I wanted to know whether any of it actually held up in carbon removal, so last week I pulled together a small study. I scraped the engagement numbers on roughly 900 posts: every recent post from the 25 most-watched carbon-removal company pages on LinkedIn, plus the last few months from the highest-engagement climate voices on X and Bluesky. The list included Climeworks, Heirloom Carbon, Frontier Climate, Mati Carbon, Isometric, Cascade Climate, CDR.fyi, and 18 others on the company side, plus Stefan Rahmstorf, Hannah Ritchie, Johan Rockström, Damian Carrington, Simon Evans, Zeke Hausfather and the rest of the visible climate-science cohort on the personal-account side. ...

Bedrock Initiative targets ERW's $200/ton MRV cost with Frontier, Google backing

Cascade Climate just launched the Bedrock Initiative, a coordinated research program designed to cut measurement costs for enhanced rock weathering (ERW) from today’s roughly $200 per ton and generate the standardized field data the method needs to enter compliance carbon markets. The program is backed by Frontier, Google, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Grantham Foundation, King Philanthropies, the Kissick Family Foundation, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. Why this matters ERW, which involves spreading crushed silicate rock on farmland so it reacts with CO2 and locks carbon away as bicarbonate, is one of the cheaper durable carbon removal pathways on paper. But the field has a credibility problem. Measurement, reporting, and verification (measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), the process of proving how much carbon was actually removed) costs are high, and most published field data comes from one-off trials that are hard to compare. Without standardized evidence across many soils and climates, ERW cannot enter compliance markets or count toward national climate commitments. Bedrock is an attempt to fix that with a single coordinated push rather than a patchwork of competing supplier studies. ...

1.14Mt durable CDR contracted in April as Microsoft, JPMorgan, Boeing buy

CDR.fyi just published Durable CDR Market Recap: April 2026 — Key Deals & Trends. CDR.fyi’s monthly market recap reports about 1.14 million tonnes of durable CDR contracted in April 2026. The largest deal was North Star Carbon Solutions, a Meadow Lake Tribal Council and Svante partnership, signing a 15-year, 626,000-tonne offtake with Microsoft from the North Star BECCS Project. JPMorgan Chase signed a 10-year, 60,000-tonne agreement with Graphyte covering its Arkansas facility and a planned Arizona site. Exomad Green and Supercritical agreed on up to 500,000 tonnes of biochar through 2028, and Boeing bought 20,000 credits across six suppliers in four countries. Climeworks, NTT Data, CUR8, Isometric, Sensirion, ClimeFi, and VodafoneZiggo also appear in new partnerships. ...

Biochar leads the CDR baby boom with 377 startups

This chart takes the same founding-year history view and splits each yearly bar by CDR pathway, so you can see not just how many companies were founded in a given year but which kinds of companies. The x-axis is the founding year; bar height is the count of companies started that year; the stacked colors in each bar are the pathways, keyed in the legend. The reason this split matters is that the field did not grow as one thing. Direct air capture has an older cohort, with companies appearing well before the recent funding wave. Biochar, enhanced weathering, and marine pathways cluster much later, riding the 2020-2023 surge. A raw founding-year total hides that staggering; the stacked view makes the sequencing legible. ...

Bake carbon into AI data centers now, or pay more to retrofit later

Carbon Herald just published Wire Carbon Into The AI Build-out, Or Pay For It Later. Carbon Herald frames the current wave of AI data center construction as the largest infrastructure expansion of the century and warns that climate considerations are being treated as an afterthought. The piece contends that decisions on siting, power sourcing, cooling, and embodied emissions made now will lock in emissions trajectories for decades. It calls for carbon performance to be wired into procurement, permitting, and design standards rather than retrofitted after capacity is built. The outlet positions this as both a climate question and a longer-term cost question for operators, utilities, and governments that will eventually face cleanup, retrofits, or carbon liabilities. ...

Captain's CDR Log #132: How a single offtake made India the biggest biochar exporter without a CDR law

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story Microsoft just signed for 557,000 tonnes of biochar carbon removal from Varaha, an Indian developer working with smallholder farmers across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra. The contract, reported this week, is the largest biochar offtake on record. It is larger than every North American and European biochar deal combined to date. And it lands in a country that has no national CDR registry, no compliance carbon market for removals, and no central-government framework for classifying or exporting durable removal credits. ...

Captain's CDR Log #131: Four arXiv papers in one week reveal the policy-price assumption hiding inside every DACCS cost curve

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Four European CDR modeling papers hit arXiv in a single week, and read together they expose an uncomfortable truth: the headline cost numbers for direct air capture and CO2 removal portfolios are governed less by chemistry or geology than by undisclosed assumptions about future carbon prices. Those assumptions diverge by an order of magnitude across teams, and almost none of the papers treat the divergence as the headline variable. ...

Week in CDR — 2026-W19

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 18 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 throughline: capital and policy scaffolding for CDR is wobbling at the same time the workforce and demand-side data show how thin the actual production base is. BP is exiting UK CCS, Microsoft is reportedly pulling back, EU banks want carbon credit use curtailed — and meanwhile only ~9,500 people work at pure-play CDR firms globally. The picks below trace where the supports are buckling and where buyers and regulators are still moving. ...