Posts

The Misconception#“Carbon credits are all scams” This is CDR Misconception #4 in our weekly series debunking common myths about carbon dioxide removal with data and evidence. The Math#The legitimate grievances: Some REDD+ projects credited forests never under threatCookstove offsets with flimsy MRVPermanence gaps: forests sold as 30-yr sinks that burned in year 5Baseline manipulation to inflate claimed reductionsThe 2023 Verra REDD+ exposé was real. The critics aren’t wrong about these specific projects. ...

A busy science day. Five original posts covered ocean CDR ecology, EU carbon market policy, land justice, a corporate soil CDR deal, and biochar quality standards. Here’s the full picture. What We Published Today#Good News for Ocean CDR: Zooplankton Survive OAE in New PLOS One Study A new peer-reviewed study in PLOS One tested Oikopleura dioica — a gelatinous zooplankton species central to ocean carbon export — under ocean alkalinity enhancement conditions. The species showed resilience. One species, one data point, but the direction matters for the OAE risk literature. The study DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0344503. ...

Biochar is frequently cited as one of the most cost-competitive carbon dioxide removal pathways. Costs of $50–200 per tonne CO₂ are achievable at scale — far below direct air capture at $400–1,000+ per tonne, and competitive with enhanced weathering at larger deployment volumes. But there’s a catch: not all biochar is equal. The gap between high-quality and low-quality biochar is large enough to determine whether a buyer is purchasing centuries of durable carbon storage or a product that will degrade meaningfully within decades. ...

Most net-zero pathway models assume large amounts of land-based carbon dioxide removal. New forests. Bioenergy plantations. Soil restoration. The assumptions are baked into the models as givens. A new study in Nature Climate Change asks the question those models often skip: where, specifically, does this land come from — and who lives there? Ruben Prütz of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and colleagues analyzed five widely used 1.5°C pathway models. They mapped the geographic distribution of where land-intensive CDR deployment is expected to occur across the modeled scenarios. ...

A new study published in Joule (Cell Press) models what happens when permanent carbon dioxide removal is formally integrated into the EU Emissions Trading System. The headline finding: integration could incentivize 68–86 Mt CO₂ of removals per year by 2050. Researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) contributed to the analysis. The paper (DOI: 10.1016/j.joule.2026.S2542-4351(26)00079-6) arrives at a moment when the regulatory and market infrastructure for CDR in Europe is advancing, but the critical link between the carbon price signal and CDR deployment remains unbuilt. ...

One of the persistent concerns about ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) as a carbon dioxide removal strategy is what it does to marine life. A new study published in PLOS One provides a useful data point: Oikopleura dioica, a gelatinous zooplankton species that plays a meaningful role in ocean carbon cycling, showed resilience to OAE conditions in controlled experiments. The study (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0344503) is not a definitive ecological clearance for OAE. But it narrows the uncertainty range in an area that matters. ...

Boeing has signed a multi-year carbon dioxide removal purchase agreement with Grassroots Carbon, a Texas-based company that quantifies soil carbon gains from improved grazing practices on working rangelands. The deal was reported by Carbon Herald on April 1, 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed. Why This Deal Is Noteworthy#Aviation is one of the hardest industries to decarbonize. Airlines and aerospace manufacturers face significant emissions from kerosene combustion at altitude — where the warming effects of contrails and NOx emissions compound the CO₂ impact. Direct electrification of long-haul aviation is not commercially viable in the near term. Sustainable aviation fuels are advancing but remain expensive and constrained by feedstock supply. ...

A busy Tuesday in CDR, with policy, funding, and geography all in motion at once. What We Covered Today#The EU Carbon Market Could Scale CDR to 60 Million Tonnes by 2050 The headline number from a new Joule paper by researchers at the Potsdam Institute: integrating carbon dioxide removals into the EU ETS could deliver around 60 million tonnes per year by 2050, primarily through DAC and BECCS. The mechanism is clean — a carbon price built into ETS provides the long-run certainty that grant-by-grant funding cannot. The authors lay out a three-phase integration roadmap, with the first phase focused on getting MRV and sustainability standards right before credits enter the market. The EU has committed to decide on ETS inclusion of removals by 2026. The timeline is real. ...

Gigablue announced the first close of its Series A at $20 million back in January — revealed at Davos, which tells you something about where the company is positioning itself. The round was led by Planet Ocean Capital, an ocean-climate-technology venture fund, with participation from additional VCs. The New Zealand mCDR trial we covered earlier today is the same Gigablue. The $20M is funding both that research and a broader scaling push. ...

A startup called Gigablue chartered a boat from Port Chalmers in Dunedin and headed out to the Bounty Trough, a stretch of deep ocean off New Zealand’s Otago coast. The plan: lower containment pens into the water, deploy 55kg of cellulose particles embedded with iron and manganese, and take water samples for three weeks. Radio New Zealand noticed. The resulting explainer they published is one of the better public accounts of what marine CDR actually is — and why a healthy dose of skepticism is the correct response. ...