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In October 2025, the Trump administration cancelled over $1.2 billion in federal funding for the two flagship US Direct Air Capture hubs — Project Cypress in Louisiana and the South Texas DAC Hub. It was the single largest withdrawal of public capital from the CDR sector in history. The fallout is still shaping the market today. What Changed The Biden administration spent 2021-2024 building DAC as a standalone climate industry. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act provided the architecture: direct federal co-funding for first-of-a-kind commercial facilities, designed to prove that DAC can work at scale and attract private capital. ...

Just ahead of the 2026 F1 season opener, Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS has announced what may be motorsport’s most comprehensive carbon removal investment to date: 7 new CDR projects across 6 different technology pathways, bringing the team’s total portfolio to approximately 18,900 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. The technologies span the full CDR spectrum: Direct Air Capture (DAC) Biochar Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) Biomass Storage Projects are located across Brazil, Canada, the US, the UK, Denmark, and India — deliberately overlapping with regions where the F1 circus races. ...

Germany just did something it has never done before: put carbon dioxide removal into the federal budget as a standalone line item. The 2026 Bundeshaushalt includes €98 million for CDR projects and an additional €11.5 million specifically for purchasing carbon removal certificates. According to the German Association for Negative Emissions (Deutscher Verband für negative Emissionen), the pipeline extends further — with additional funding planned through 2033. Handelsblatt broke the story, profiling two approaches already operational in Germany: biochar (led by Hamburg-based Novocarbo, which won the German Sustainability Prize 2025) and enhanced rock weathering. ...

Here’s the reality check the CDR industry needs to sit with: a new paper in Communications Earth & Environment (Nature portfolio) finds that scaling negative emissions technologies to the gigatons could create serious resource and environmental bottlenecks — some of which nobody is planning for. The paper by Cobo, Galán-Martín, and Guillén-Gosálbez runs a comprehensive life-cycle assessment across the full CDR technology portfolio and identifies what the authors call “previously overlooked bottlenecks.” ...

The International Energy Agency just dropped a data point that the carbon removal industry has been waiting for: CDR is officially one of the seven emerging energy sectors that have offset the decline in EV venture funding since 2021. In its State of Energy Innovation 2026 report, the IEA maps the full innovation pipeline — from early research to commercial-scale demonstration — and carbon removal sits alongside nuclear, next-gen geothermal, and critical minerals as the new magnets for venture capital. ...

IEA: Carbon Removal Now Captures One-Third of Energy Venture Capital The International Energy Agency’s State of Energy Innovation 2026 report delivers a milestone data point: carbon dioxide removal, alongside nuclear and next-gen geothermal, now accounts for approximately one-third of all energy venture capital investment — up from less than 5% in the late 2010s. Nearly 400 companies have been founded in these emerging sectors over the past decade, with over 60% launched after 2020. ...

New Scientist highlighted a growing body of research suggesting that spreading crushed basalt on farmland could absorb up to 1 billion tonnes of CO₂. Field trials in Queensland, Australia, are among the latest to generate real data. Nations like Brazil are already deploying enhanced rock weathering (ERW) at scale, partly because crushed silicate rock also reduces fertiliser costs. Big number. Important caveat: “could” is doing a lot of work in that headline. ...

Svante Technologies just acquired Carbon Alpha, picking up a BECCS project, a CO₂ pipeline, and a geological storage hub in Western Canada. The deal also brings something rarer: a genuine co-ownership partnership with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC), which represents nine First Nations in Saskatchewan. The North Star Project Carbon Alpha’s flagship project installs carbon capture at the existing MLTC Bioenergy Centre, which generates renewable heat and electricity by burning sustainable biomass from a neighbouring sawmill. Phase 1 targets 140,000 tonnes of CO₂ capture per year from the biogenic flue gas. ...

A provincial government in the Philippines just did something no one in Southeast Asia has done before: generated verified carbon credits from biochar production. Nueva Ecija’s “Project NuevaChar” converts rice husks — an agricultural waste product — into biochar. Puro.earth audited and validated the facility, confirming net CO₂ removal. In July 2025, Governor Aurelio Umali received the first carbon revenue remittance ever paid to a local government unit from biochar-based credits. ...

The first ship-based ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) experiment just delivered results. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution poured 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine in August 2025, and the findings are cautiously encouraging: 2–10 tonnes of CO₂ removed in four days, with up to 50 tonnes estimated total. No significant impact on marine life detected. Adam Subhas and his team presented these findings at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2026 in Glasgow. “We can definitely say that there was additional CO₂ uptake as a result of this experiment,” Subhas said. ...