CDR Week and notes

Captain's CDR Log #112: CarbonPlan's Lithos review puts enhanced weathering's MRV on trial

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. CarbonPlan published a review this week of Lithos Carbon’s first commercial enhanced weathering credit issuance, and the findings should stop every durable CDR buyer mid-contract. CarbonPlan’s analysis says Lithos’s gross removal numbers are surprisingly high and that the team could not reproduce them from the public record. This is the same group whose 2021 forest offset work forced a reckoning in the voluntary market. They are now aiming that same lens at enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the pathway most of the industry has been selling as DAC’s cheaper, near-term successor. The timing matters: ERW developers are the loudest voices at SF Climate Week right now, pitching ERW as the scalable answer after Microsoft’s high-profile pause on some purchases. A credibility challenge to the flagship issuance lands at the worst possible moment. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-04-21

Biochar spent most of the last decade as a cottage industry. Hundreds of small producers, bespoke feedstocks, regional offtake deals, a long tail of sub-10,000 tonne projects. Today’s story is about what happens when that phase ends. Consolidation is now the defining pattern in biochar, and it is arriving faster than most CDR watchers expected. From artisan to industrial The tell is in the deal flow. Larger producers are absorbing smaller ones, platform companies are rolling up regional operators, and strategic buyers from forestry, agriculture, and waste management are taking equity stakes in pure-play biochar firms. The logic is straightforward. Biochar’s unit economics depend on three things: cheap and consistent biomass, high utilization of pyrolysis capacity, and access to durable offtake contracts. None of those three reward fragmentation. ...

Captain's CDR Log #111: Biochar's quiet consolidation wave signals a new phase of industrialization

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Biochar’s week was not about credits. It was about assets. In seven days, CHAR Technologies closed on an industrial facility in Quebec, Mangrove Systems absorbed Grain Ecosystem’s project-development pipeline, and a German municipal utility signed on as both offtaker and heat customer. The signal is not who bought tonnes. It’s who bought the plants that make them. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-04-20

The week CDR stopped being graded only on tons Something shifted this week. Three separate stories, from three different corners of the field, all pointed at the same question: what counts as a good ton of carbon removal? For two years the answer has been “a cheap one that verifies.” This week that answer started to break. The money is moving, but not where the headlines suggest The Captain’s Log tracked five numbers from the past seven days. The pattern underneath them is what matters. Capital is still flowing into CDR, but it is flowing toward projects that can prove durability and clean supply chains, not just low price per ton. Buyers who spent 2024 chasing the cheapest verified credit are now asking harder questions about what happens in year 40, where the energy comes from, and who lives near the project. ...

Forest BECCS stays carbon-positive for 150+ years, triples power costs

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's CDR Log #110: Five numbers that show where the real CDR money moved this week

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. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-04-19

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's CDR Log #109: Who Defines Durable Removal When the Rulebook Is Still Being Written

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. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-04-18

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. ...

Cotierra delivers 1,200 tCO₂e of soil carbon to myclimate, extends to 2027

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. ...