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A new Nature Sustainability paper just delivered a hard verdict on one of the most politically popular forms of carbon removal in Europe: burning trees to make electricity, then capturing the CO2. The answer, from Timothy Searchinger and colleagues at Princeton and the World Resources Institute, is that forest-fuelled BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) will not produce net negative emissions for more than 150 years, emits more than unabated natural gas for decades, and roughly triples to quadruples the cost of electricity. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council just signed a BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) offtake with Microsoft for 626,000 tonnes. That’s not the headline most people will remember from this week. But it should be. The structural innovation inside that deal, and the four other numbers below, point to a CDR procurement stack that almost no one is staffed to execute against. ...

The Day CDR Started Writing Its Own Rulebook Today’s four stories point at one pattern: the CDR field is no longer waiting for governments to define what counts as good carbon removal. Buyers, nonprofits, and companies are writing the rules in real time, and the definitions they pick now will shape which projects get funded for the next decade. That is the headline. The rulebook is being drafted in public, by the people placing the bets. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week’s Bluesky chatter wasn’t about the next Microsoft-sized offtake. It was about something quieter and more consequential: Sara Vicca’s note that author teams for the IPCC 2027 Methodology Report on CDR Technologies, CCU and Storage are mobilizing. The fight over who defines durable removal has started, and the experts weighing in aren’t aligned. ...

Today’s signal is a widening split in carbon markets. Engineered removals are posting record volumes and long-term contracts, while a major avoided-emissions category just got downgraded by an order of magnitude. Buyers are voting with their checkbooks, and the vote is for durable, measurable tons. The record month nobody should gloss over March 2026 logged 1.51 million tonnes of CDR purchases in a single month. That is not a cumulative figure. It is one month. The pace suggests 2026 will blow past every prior year, and the mix is shifting toward contracts with real delivery schedules rather than speculative forward offtakes. The buyers driving this are familiar names, but the volumes per deal are climbing. ...

Swiss agricultural carbon company Cotierra has delivered its first 1,200 tCO₂e of soil carbon removal credits to myclimate, the Zurich-based climate project foundation, and extended the offtake partnership into 2027. The delivery, drawn from Cotierra’s 2025 production year, is one of the first sizeable tranches of agricultural soil carbon removals to actually land in a buyer’s account rather than sit as a forward contract. Why it matters Agricultural soil carbon has a credibility problem. The category has been dogged by questions about permanence, measurement accuracy, and whether claimed removals are additional to what farmers would have done anyway. Actual verified delivery, not promises, is what the segment needs to rebuild trust with corporate buyers. A 1,200-tonne delivery is modest next to what engineered removal players ship, but in soil carbon it counts as a real-world receipt. The 2027 extension signals myclimate is willing to commit to a multi-year pipeline from this supplier rather than treating it as a one-off pilot. ...

First-generation REDD+ projects, the flagship forest-protection credits traded on the voluntary carbon market, claimed 10.7 times more avoided deforestation than independent evaluations can justify. That’s not a rounding error. That’s an order-of-magnitude gap between what was sold to buyers and what actually happened in the forest. Why it matters REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) credits have been the single largest category of nature-based carbon credits on the voluntary market for years. If the credits overstate their climate benefit by a factor of nearly 11, then companies and governments that retired those credits believing they offset real emissions were, in effect, paying for phantom tons. This paper, published in Nature Communications, doesn’t just confirm the problem. It pinpoints why it happened, and that diagnosis matters far more than the headline number. ...

March 2026 was the biggest single month for durable CDR purchase commitments in recent memory. Roughly 1.51 million tonnes of carbon removal were contracted, with two deals alone accounting for over 85% of that volume. The numbers signal that corporate buyers are no longer dabbling in CDR. They’re locking in multi-year, industrial-scale supply. Why it matters Until recently, most CDR purchases were measured in hundreds or low thousands of tonnes. A month where a single deal covers a million tonnes changes the math on what suppliers can finance and build. Large offtake agreements give project developers the revenue certainty they need to break ground on facilities that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If this pace holds, 2026 could redefine what “market-ready” means for durable carbon removal. ...

Novocarbo, a German climate tech company specializing in biochar-based carbon removal, has signed a long-term partnership with Stadtwerke Dessau, the municipal utility serving the city of Dessau in Germany. The deal will see Novocarbo supply both biochar carbon removal credits and renewable heat to the utility, a pairing that highlights how CDR infrastructure can double as local energy infrastructure. Why it matters Municipal utilities are not the buyers most people picture when they think about carbon removal demand. The typical CDR customer profile skews toward big tech companies and corporate sustainability teams chasing net-zero pledges. A German Stadtwerk, a publicly owned local utility, signing a long-term biochar deal signals something different: CDR is starting to find a home in the mundane, essential business of heating buildings and managing local energy supply. That’s a distribution channel worth paying attention to. ...

The gap between carbon credit claims and real-world carbon removal just got another data point. A new study finds that REDD+ avoided-deforestation projects overclaimed their climate benefit by a factor of 10.7. Meanwhile, buyers and developers are shifting toward removal credits with tighter measurement, and the signals are everywhere in today’s stories. The crediting gap is reshaping where money flows A peer-reviewed study found that REDD+ projects, which sell credits based on forests they claim would have been cut down, overstated their avoided deforestation by 10.7 times on average. That means for every ton of CO2 these credits claimed to protect, roughly a tenth of a ton was real. This isn’t new territory. Earlier analyses flagged similar problems. But the scale of the overclaim keeps getting confirmed, and it matters because these credits still circulate in voluntary markets. ...