Posts

Take: Canada's Next Industrial Play: The Mine That Stores Carbon

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Wed, 21 Oc. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/canadas-next-industrial-play-the TL;DR Canada Nickel’s Crawford project claims up to 1.5 Mt CO2/yr storage via in-process tailings carbonation — reaction time cut from ~a decade to 3–6 hours. Big if real. Key nuance the hosts skip: in-process carbonation is a sink; it’s removal only if the CO2 is atmospheric. Third-party CO2 storage there is CCS, not CDR. Arca’s measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) stack: dynamic closed chambers + eddy covariance, cross-checked against solid-phase mineral mass over 4 months. Useful, concrete description. Dipple on price mismatch: miners think $20–30/t; mineralization needs $50–200/t. Explains why majors walked away in the early days. Policy watch: push to get mineral carbonation recognized under Canada’s CCUS Investment Tax Credit. Na’im Merchant (Carbon Removal Canada) hosts the third instalment of his “Canada’s Next Industrial Play” miniseries on The Carbon Curve, with Mark Selby and Scott MacDougall of Canada Nickel and Greg Dipple, co-founder of Arca. The episode covers how carbon storage got engineered into the Crawford nickel project near Timmins, Ontario, and how Arca measures mineralization at working mine sites. ...

Take: Clear Skies: Direct air capture and Canada's advantage

Take on a podcast episode from Disruptors, originally published Wed, 21 Oc. Listen: https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/rbc-disruptors/ TL;DR Deep Sky positions itself as a “project developer” for direct air capture (DAC), hosting multiple vendor technologies on one Alberta site to compress the learning curve. Useful framing. CEO Alex Petre claims first DAC credits produced in North America as of June. Contestable — US sites have delivered earlier; depends on definition. Final investment decision on a first commercial facility targeted late 2027; three sites in development (Alberta, Manitoba, Quebec); three large plants operational within five years. The commercial thesis is export: Canada’s storage geology plus the DAC investment tax credit sell to storage-poor buyers like Japan and Switzerland via Paris Article 6.2. No cost-per-tonne, capacity, or buyer figures disclosed. The episode is strategy and jurisdiction, not economics. RBC’s Disruptors sends host John Stackhouse to Deep Sky’s test site in Innisfail, Alberta, for a conversation with CEO Alex Petre. The episode is a tour-plus-interview covering how DAC works, why Deep Sky runs competing capture units side by side, and why Petre thinks Canada — geology, gas-processing workforce, fiscal regime — is the jurisdiction to build in. It’s pitched at a general Canadian business audience, so the basics get airtime. ...

Captain's CDR Log #295: A 1.7–1.8°C peak turns the 1.5°C return trip into a drawdown question

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1.7-1.8°C is the peak warming now implied by the lowest-overshoot pathways in UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026. The prior reference point was 1.6°C Joeri Rogelj, a contributor to the report, puts the shift plainly: “The new lowest-overshoot pathways imply peak warming around 1.7–1.8°C instead of 1.6°C previously” (@joerirogelj.bsky.social on Bluesky). He adds that the 2035 emissions gap shrank only because the benchmark got worse. Earlier 1.5°C pathways are no longer reachable, so the best available case now climbs higher before it can come back down. ...

EU Innovation Fund backs first DACCS project: €9.1M for Sirona's Furu

Carbon Herald just published Sirona’s Furu Is Now The First DACCS Project Backed By The EU Innovation Fund. Carbon Herald reports that Sirona Technologies has secured a grant of up to EUR 9.1 million (roughly USD 10.2 million) from the EU Innovation Fund for its Furu project. According to the outlet, this is the first time the fund, which is financed by EU Emissions Trading System revenues, has backed a direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) project. The award places Sirona, a Belgium-based DAC developer, among a small group of European removal projects receiving direct EU support rather than relying solely on voluntary market offtakes. The piece frames the decision as a signal that the Commission is starting to treat engineered removals as eligible infrastructure alongside industrial decarbonisation and clean hydrogen. ...

Captain's CDR Log #294: How a biochar tonne becomes a credit, from Kenyan kilns to a Citi note

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Biochar is the pathway delivering most of the durable carbon removal credit market, according to this explainer on openlibrary.substack.com. That market share is why this week’s operator news matters: a first credit issuance from crop residue, a seven-year offtake for up to 14,000 tonnes, a $72 million bank note tied to a single plant, and a draft standard from one certifier proposing continuous monitoring of kiln output. These are four separate items, not one chain of dependency. Read together, they show what running a biochar operation now involves beyond the kiln. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-20

Only about 3% of contracted durable CDR has actually been delivered. Of 246 biochar pure-play companies, 46 (19%) look dead. And on the same day those two numbers landed, Sweden committed SEK 9.3bn to a single award for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which burns biomass and buries the CO2 it releases. That is the pattern across today’s three stories. Money is concentrating in a few large, state-backed projects while the long tail of smaller suppliers is thinning out, and the contracts that connect buyers to sellers are mostly still unfilled. Capital is not the bottleneck for the winners. Delivery is the bottleneck for everyone. ...

Only ~3% of contracted durable CDR delivered — deal structure now matters as much as price

CDR.fyi just published Types of CDR Purchases: A New Section in the CDR.fyi Buyer's Guide. CDR.fyi has published a new section of its Buyer’s Guide covering the four main structures used to buy durable carbon removal: spot, forward, pre-purchase and offtake. The authors, Shrishti Sinha and Alexander Rink, anchor the piece in CDR.fyi’s own data showing roughly 50.5 million tonnes contracted to date against about 1.7 million tonnes delivered as of October 19, 2026. Each structure is explained with a real deal, including SAP and Climeworks for spot, Klima Foundation and Exomad Green for forward, Shopify and Mati Carbon for pre-purchase, and Microsoft and North Star Carbon Solutions for offtake. The section also covers options and capacity reservations, procurement approaches such as RFPs and aggregated buying, direct versus intermediated purchasing, a decision table and an FAQ on bankability and ex-ante versus ex-post credits. ...

Biochar's 46 likely-dead firms out of 246 pure-plays

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. ...

Captain's CDR Log #293: Sweden's SEK 9.3bn BECCS award set against the EU ETS removals debate

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Sweden has written one cheque for SEK 9.3 billion, roughly $1 billion, to three named companies for durable tonnes. Brussels has a proposal on the table that would route EU allowance revenue toward the same kind of tonnes, but the terms are still being amended. Both answer the same question: who pays for permanent carbon removal in Europe? The comparison shows which answer is bankable today and which one is still a draft. ...

Captain's CDR Log #292: From 1,049 Namibian credits to 350 Mt of Chinese farmland, place sets the scale

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The smallest carbon removal number this week is 1,049. The largest is 350,000,000. Both describe real places, and most of the gap between them is the difference between a model and a registry. Place decides the feedstock and the storage rock, but it also decides, for now, which stage of the pipeline a number has reached. ...