The most expensive carbon removal deal I read about today was for crushed rock, at $559 a tonne. The most useful science I read today was two papers trying to pin down how much carbon crushed rock actually removes. Those two facts are the day’s story. Money is moving faster than measurement, and the public conversation has not caught up to either. The day’s pattern: price, proof, and public framing are out of sync Three stories, three layers of the same gap. ...
Carbon Herald just published New CATF Tool Enables Users To Evaluate Biomass Carbon Removal Protocols. Carbon Herald reports that the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) has released a new tool designed to help users evaluate biomass carbon removal protocols. The tool targets the growing set of methodologies covering pathways such as biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS), bioenergy with carbon capture (BECCS) and biochar, where crediting rules differ widely across registries. The outlet frames the release as a way for buyers, developers and policymakers to compare how different protocols handle key quality questions for biomass-based removals. The available text does not specify which protocols are covered, what scoring criteria the tool applies, or how outputs are presented, so the full article is the place to look for the actual feature set and CATF’s stated intent. ...
Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Katharine Hayhoe’s notes for Hollywood this week fit in three lines: “Scientists sound the alarm. Nobody listens. Disaster strikes.” She posted that summary of the standard climate movie plot (@katharinehayhoe.com on Bluesky), identified herself as a climate scientist, and said she had notes, including a new ending for Don’t Look Up. Hayhoe did not write about carbon removal. The comparison that follows is mine. ...
CDR Industry Update - October 2026 The directory looks livelier this month, but the motion is in my scoring, not in the field. The headline number is 183 changed records out of 1,470 active companies, up from 114 changes in the September 15 snapshot. Zero companies were added and zero were removed. The count stands exactly where it did last month. Almost all of the churn is liveliness. I re-scored 169 records on the liveliness tier, which is my read of a company’s activity signals - website, LinkedIn, news. It is not something the company did. Of those, 130 moved up and 39 moved down, a net of +91 in the “more alive” direction. ...
Each dot on this scatter is a single CDR pathway - direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, mineralization, and the rest. The horizontal axis counts how many companies are working that pathway; the vertical axis sums the employees across those companies. Linear scales on both, so distance on the page matches distance in the numbers. What this view reveals that a headcount table cannot is the shape of the industry. A pathway sitting high and to the right is crowded with firms and staffed deeply. One sitting high but to the left is a pathway dominated by a few large companies. Low and to the right means many small teams chasing the same idea. The spread between these corners is the story of where capital and talent have actually landed, versus where the field is still a cottage. ...
An 11-year measured record from an olive grove shows the RothC soil carbon model overstated carbon gains by up to twofold. On the same day, two financiers explained that CDR only gets cheap capital once lenders can trust the number of tonnes removed. Those two stories are the same story. The pattern across today’s six posts is that CDR’s binding constraint is moving from “can we remove carbon” to “can anyone else verify and price what we removed.” A plant went live in Western Australia, a headcount census shows how small the pure-play sector still is, and two policy conversations argued that markets and the ocean both need rules before they need volume. Measurement and institutions are now the critical path. ...
Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 12 Oc. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/from-equity-to-debt-how-cdr-gets-bankable-with-julia-reichel TL;DR Vaulted Deep’s $35M Mediobanca debt facility was built on three legs: delivery track record, investment-grade offtakers (Frontier, Microsoft), and an insurer (Arturo) covering residual project risk. CFP Energy’s floor for a loan conversation is ~$5M; the “sweet spot” is substantially larger. An offtake at or near signature is non-negotiable. Frontier brokered the introduction roughly a year before close. Its published offtake templates are the reusable asset for everyone else. Working-capital detail worth stealing: Vaulted pushed registry and buyers from quarterly/annual to monthly crediting because pay-on-delivery would otherwise have sunk it. Policy ask from the lender: anything that creates price predictability or a liquid forward market. Every CDR debt deal named is outside Europe. Sebastian Manhart hosts Julia Reichelstein (co-founder/CEO, Vaulted Deep) and Tyler Manchester (head of voluntary carbon, CFP Energy) on this episode to walk through Vaulted’s $35M debt facility from Mediobanca. It’s a deal post-mortem: why Vaulted waited to take debt, what the lender actually underwrote, and what other developers need in hand before knocking. ...
Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Fri, 09 Oc. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/Internationalisation-of-CDR-Markets---Lashof-e3pql81 TL;DR US durable-CDR demand hasn’t shrunk in absolute terms, but it has against expectations — the federal purchase program never launched. Useful distinction, honestly made. 45Q survived the 2025 budget bill at ~$180/t; four-ish DAC hubs lost federal support, Louisiana and Texas may proceed. Lashof cites a ~250 Mt removals window in proposed EU ETS revisions. First time I’ve seen that number; verify before repeating. Government money is thin: Sweden €3B bio-CCS reverse auction is the only big one; Finland and Brazil’s SBCE ~$100M each. Google signed a rice-paddy enhanced rock weathering deal in Latin America stacking near-term methane reductions with long-term removal. Clever, measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)-heavy. Andrew (Reviewer 2) hosts Daniel Lashof, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, to discuss a WRI communications piece arguing that the centre of gravity in CDR markets is moving out of the US. The hour covers the policy wreckage post-Trump, what Europe, Canada and Brazil are actually funding, and a running argument about measurement, reporting and verification and perverse incentives. Episode here. ...
Take on a podcast episode from Ocean Solutions: a NOISE Lab podcast, originally published Wed, 30 Se. Listen: https://soundcloud.com/morgan-reed-raven/season-3-episode-9-iron TL;DR ExOIS (Woods Hole) is targeting the Northeast Pacific for ocean iron fertilization field trials and still fundraising; Nawaz pushed them to stand up a governance advisory board. “Nutrient robbing” is the distinguishing risk: iron added in one basin can suppress productivity decades later off, say, Peru. Useful framing for permanence-adjacent liability. Workshop finding: publics liked macroalgae sinking until shown it at scale, then preferred offshore direct air capture with sub-seabed mineralization. First time I’ve seen this “betrayal effect” named. The 2012 Haida/Russ George dump became a geoengineering scandal because of the carbon-credit financing, not the iron. Nawaz says it froze German ocean alkalinity funding for ~15 years. Baseline public knowledge of marine CDR in BC/Washington: effectively zero. Cautious interest, not opposition. Ocean Solutions (NOISE Lab / UC Santa Barbara Bren School) closes season three with hosts Lina and Alex interviewing Sara Nawaz, research director at American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal. The hour covers how she runs deliberative workshops on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) in the Pacific Northwest, her advisory work on the Exploring Ocean Iron Solutions (ExOIS) programme, and why iron fertilization carries governance baggage no other ocean pathway does. Episode here. ...
This is a horizontal bar chart ranking the twelve largest pure-play CDR companies by employee headcount, with each bar coloured by the primary removal pathway the company pursues (DAC, mineralisation, biomass, ocean, and so on). Pure-play means the company’s core business is carbon removal, not a side project bolted onto an existing industrial firm. For anyone tracking the sector, this is the quickest way to see where the human capital actually sits. Headcount is a slower, harder signal than press releases or announced offtakes - it reflects real hiring, real payroll, real conviction from investors. The pathway colouring shows whether the talent concentration lines up with where delivered tonnes are going, or whether one approach is staffing up well ahead of its removal track record. ...