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Enhanced weathering keeps 1,460 researchers active in 2025

This chart tracks Enhanced Weathering researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a Enhanced Weathering-relevant paper that year (active); below the line are dormant researchers, split into those who published the previous year and those who published only earlier. New entrants join at the base of the active band each year as a teal block. Enhanced Weathering is one of the youngest and fastest-growing pathways. The top envelope is the number actually publishing in the pathway each year. ...

Captain's CDR Log #197: Why 22 days at Puro just rewrote the working-capital math for durable suppliers

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Puro.earth says its median time from carbon removal supplier submission to credit issuance dropped to 22 days in 2026, down from 40 days in 2025, per its own LinkedIn announcement. That figure is self-reported and not independently audited, so treat it as a claim, not a verified statistic. But if it holds, my forecast is this: by Q1 2027, time-to-cash, not price per tonne, becomes the primary axis of competition among durable CDR registries, and registries that cannot clear issuance in under 30 days will lose material share of new biochar and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) supplier registrations. The reason is arithmetic. Every day a verified tonne sits unissued is a day of working capital a thin-margin operator must finance. Cutting median latency from 40 to 22 days shortens the cash conversion cycle by nearly three weeks per batch. On a simple 12 percent annual cost of capital, that is roughly 0.6 percent of credit value saved per cycle, illustrative math on my part, and it compounds across every batch a facility ships. ...

40 US projects have delivered 850,000 tonnes of certified durable carbon removal

CDR.fyi just published Mapping Certified Durable Carbon Removal in the United States | CDR.fyi. CDR.fyi has published an analysis of US durable carbon removal projects that have received issued credits through the Puro.earth and Isometric registries as of June 20, 2026. The dataset covers 40 projects with roughly 850,000 tonnes of net CO2e removals issued between 2022 and mid-2026. Annual issuances grew from 29,000 tonnes in 2023 to 460,000 tonnes in 2025, a compound annual growth rate near 298 percent. Biochar dominates certified deployment so far, projects are spread across multiple regions rather than clustering in innovation hubs, and most sit in smaller communities where feedstock availability and existing industry shape siting. The analysis deliberately excludes announced, under-construction, uncertified, and pilot facilities. ...

Captain's CDR Log #196: How three deals in one week redrew the map of who owns which capture tech

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Capture technology is being sorted into national stacks before it ever reaches a competitive market. Three deals reported this week, each in a different jurisdiction, follow the same template: a domestic anchor absorbs or bankrolls a capture startup, and the credits get spoken for before any buyer sees a price. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-07-14

Today’s three stories point at the same uncomfortable truth from different angles: the CDR field keeps shipping structures that look complete but leave the hardest question unanswered. Who pays when the carbon comes back? That question sits at the center of the EU’s newly-finalized Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) rules, it hovers over a fresh seed round for microalgae-based biomass carbon removal (BiCRS, or bioenergy and biomass with carbon capture and storage), and it explains why soil carbon research employs more people than six other pathways combined while still struggling to sell durable tonnes. ...

Soil carbon dominates with 15,849 active researchers, beating six pathways combined

This chart tracks Soil Carbon researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a Soil Carbon-relevant paper that year (active); below the line are dormant researchers, split into those who published the previous year and those who published only earlier. New entrants join at the base of the active band each year as a teal block. Soil Carbon is the largest pathway by headcount, sitting closest to mainstream soil science. The top envelope is the number actually publishing in the pathway each year. ...

Captain's CDR Log #195: The CRCF carbon farming rules ship with a reversal-liability hole big enough to drive an offtake through

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance. The European Commission has adopted the first technical methodologies under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation, covering afforestation, agroforestry, and soil carbon, according to the Commission’s certification-schemes page. Italian legal analysts at Rete Clima report that the framework treats carbon farming units as temporary by design, with monitoring obligations attached. Who is bound: project developers seeking EU certification, the certification schemes that will audit them, and any buyer making claims on the units. When it bites: the moment the first schemes are recognized and units start issuing. ...

Arrhenius Lands Seed Funding to Scale Fast-Growing Microalgae BiCRS

Carbon Herald just published Arrhenius AG To Scale Microalage-Centered BiCRS With New Seed Funding. Carbon Herald reports that Arrhenius AG, a Switzerland-based carbon removal company, closed a Seed funding round last week. The capital is intended to help the firm scale its BiCRS pathway, which stands for biomass carbon removal and storage and in this case is built around microalgae rather than terrestrial biomass. Microalgae-centered BiCRS uses fast-growing algae to capture CO2, with the resulting biomass then processed for durable storage. The article covers the funding announcement and the company’s scaling plans, with the outlet noting the round positions Arrhenius to expand its operations from its Swiss base. ...

Direct air capture is doubling its publication tempo

Direct air capture is publishing at nearly double last year’s rate. By early July 2026 the CDR Researcher Census had already logged 379 DAC papers - almost the entire 2025 total of 422, in half a year. The run is a clean doubling roughly every two years: 157 papers in 2022, 214 in 2023, 350 in 2024, 422 in 2025. 2026 is indexed only through early July, so the last bar is a floor; annualised it points to about 730 papers, and indexing lag will push the real figure higher. Of the seven census pathways, DAC’s absolute output is mid-pack, but its acceleration is among the steepest - and it is the count most trusted externally. Lück and colleagues’ 2025 map of global CDR research in Nature Communications put 108 DAC papers in 2021 against the census’s 109 - a near-exact match, the tightest of any pathway. ...

Enhanced weathering: the quiet accelerator

Direct air capture gets the magazine covers - the giant fans, the billion-dollar plants, the tech-founder energy. Enhanced rock weathering gets a grinder, a truck, and a field of crushed basalt. Yet in the CDR Researcher Census it is one of the fastest-growing research fronts in the entire field, and almost nobody outside it is watching. Counting papers the census surfaced from OpenAlex and classified as carbon-removal-relevant, enhanced weathering runs 136 papers in 2022, 175 in 2023, 264 in 2024, and 401 in 2025 - a near-tripling in three years (a factor of 2.9), and a plus-52-percent jump from 2024 to 2025 alone. Every year is bigger than the last, and the curve is steepening. ...