CDR Week and notes

Captain's CDR Log #127: Maritime contracts, interstate compacts and Article 6 deals build the legal pipework

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three contracts crossed three different borders this past week, and together they tell a story the tonnage debate keeps missing. CDR’s binding constraint is no longer chemistry or capture cost. It is the legal pipework for moving and storing CO2 across boundaries that were never designed to be crossed. ...

Carbon balance, not carbon ratio: how to read CDR efficiency claims

Most CDR efficiency claims are framed as a ratio. They should be framed as a balance. A ratio of 1.1 — 100 tonnes emitted across the lifecycle to capture 110 tonnes — is a vanity metric. The number that matters is the net balance: gross capture minus embodied plus operational emissions. That is what we mean when we say a pathway is “85% net.” For every 100 tonnes of CO2 pulled out of the air or fixed in stable form, 85 tonnes survive after you subtract everything the project emitted to make those 100 tonnes happen. The 15 tonnes you are losing went into making steel, running compressors, trucking rock dust, or heating a sorbent. That is what credible buyers should pay for: the 85, not the 100. The credible registries already refuse to issue credits for anything else. ...

Captain's CDR Log #126: Five numbers that frame the gap between CDR ambition and CDR arithmetic

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week. Together they sketch a market where buyers are writing bigger checks than ever, while the people, electrons, and dollars-per-ton math underneath those checks remain stubbornly thin. The demand side is sprinting. The supply side is still putting on its shoes. 20,000 tonnes. Boeing’s new portfolio purchase through Supercritical, sourced from biochar and enhanced rock weathering, is among the largest aviation-linked durable CDR offtakes inked for 2026. The signal matters as much as the volume: ERW (enhanced rock weathering, where crushed silicate rock pulls CO2 out of the air as it weathers) is now considered procurement-grade alongside biochar. That is a credibility milestone we flagged when Mombak generated the first Isometric-verified ERW credits. ...

Captain's CDR Log #125: Five voices wrestle with the Stanford DAC opportunity-cost paper

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. A Stanford-led paper in Nature Communications Sustainability dropped this week and broke the CDR feed open. Direct air capture has substantial health and climate opportunity costs argues that $100M/year on utility-scale wind or solar beats DAC on combined climate and health benefits across nearly every U.S. grid region through 2050. The fight isn’t over the numbers. It’s over whether the equation is the right one. ...

570 pure-play CDR firms employ just 9,558 people

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. ...

Wind and solar beat DAC on climate and health in nearly all US grid regions

Spending $100 million a year on utility-scale wind or solar beats direct air capture on combined climate and health benefits across nearly every U.S. grid region through 2050, according to new Stanford-led modeling published in Communications Sustainability. DAC only pulls ahead under a “Breakthrough” scenario where the technology hits 800 kWh and $100 per ton of CO2 captured, numbers far below what any commercial system has demonstrated. Why this matters DAC has been pitched as a necessary partner to emissions cuts, attracting billions in U.S. tax credits and federal hub funding. But climate dollars are finite, and most prior DAC studies have looked at the technology in isolation rather than asking what else that capital could do. This paper reframes the question as opportunity cost, and when you add health benefits from displaced fossil combustion, renewables win almost everywhere. To be clear: DAC still has a role removing residual emissions from sectors that cannot decarbonize, and for drawing down legacy CO2 after net zero. The finding here is narrower. As a near-term mitigation tool competing for the same dollars as wind and solar, DAC is hard to justify on current performance. ...

Captain's CDR Log #123: The intermediary layer is quietly becoming the CDR market's most powerful tier

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three deals this week show the same pattern. Hyperscaler and industrial buyers are not buying carbon removal credits anymore. They are buying portfolio construction services from a thin layer of intermediaries who now sit between every supplier and every dollar. Start with Boeing. The aerospace giant just contracted for 20,000 tonnes of removal across biochar and enhanced rock weathering, a process that grinds silicate rock to speed up natural CO2 absorption. But Boeing did not pick the suppliers. Supercritical assembled a six-supplier basket across two pathways and sold it as a single product. The buyer outsourced the diligence. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-05-02

Today’s digest is unusual: all three items are podcast conversations, not deals or deployments. Taken together, they point to the same uncomfortable question. Why is carbon dioxide removal still treated as a side conversation in mainstream climate work, and what would it take to change that? The mainstreaming problem The first piece, episode 397 of the Carbon Removal Show, asks whether CDR should rejoin the mainstream climate conversation. The framing matters. CDR was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pathways from the start, but in public debate it drifted into its own lane, often viewed with suspicion by climate advocates worried about moral hazard and dismissed by others as too small to matter. ...

Take: Carbon removal is stuck in low earth orbit. Here's how we get out.

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 30 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/carbon-removal-is-stuck-in-low-earth Naim Merchant hosts Julio Friedmann, Chief Scientist at Carbon Direct, to unpack the firm’s new “CDR 2.0” report. The thesis: durable carbon removal has reached “low Earth orbit” — markets, registries, raters, a buyers coalition all exist — but the next stage requires a different operating model. Friedmann lays out five pillars: technical readiness, project assurance, standardization, bankability, and transactional ease. ...

Take: DIGGING DEEP with Gabrielle Walker: A Life in Climate

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 29 Ap. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/digging-deep-with-gabrielle-walker-a-life-in-climate TL;DR Long-form interview with Gabrielle Walker (CUR8, Rethinking Removals) — part biography, part state-of-the-CDR-market read. Worth it for the second half. Walker’s “pre-compliance” framing for 2026-2035: SBTi draft reportedly requires removals by 2035, ISO net-zero standard (due later this year) will mandate interim removal targets. Useful if accurate. British Airways portfolio anecdote: Sean Doyle reportedly sees CDR as ~30% of BA’s decarbonization solution. First time I’ve seen that number cited publicly. CUR8’s 5-pillar diligence framework (climate integrity, team, future potential, delivery risk, “core benefits” not co-benefits) — practical, steal-able. Honest moment: Walker admits she initially dismissed Global South CDR as virtue-signaling before James Wanjigi (Kenya) changed her mind. Worth hearing. Episode link. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme launch a long-form spinoff of the CDR Policy Scoop with Gabrielle Walker — co-founder of CUR8 and Rethinking Removals, and one of the people who has actually been in rooms with FTSE-100 CSOs trying to convert intent into off-takes. The first 60% is biography (Antarctica, ice cores, science journalism); the back half is the part practitioners want. ...