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Capture6's Project Tortuga goes live in Western Australia, turning brine into CDR

Carbon Herald just published Capture6 Officially Launches Project Tortuga In Western Australia. Carbon Herald reports that Capture6 has formally launched Project Tortuga in Western Australia, moving the project from planning into operations. The facility is designed to take brine, the salty waste stream left over from desalination, and process it to recover freshwater while generating the chemical inputs Capture6 uses for its direct air capture approach. The company has previously framed this water-plus-carbon model as a way to co-locate removal with existing desalination infrastructure and cut the cost of both. The Western Australian site has been described as a demonstration-scale step toward larger deployments, with the outlet covering the launch announcement and the project’s stated goals rather than operating results. ...

Captain's CDR Log #288: An 11-year olive grove record finds RothC overstated soil carbon up to twofold

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique: a standard soil model ran up to twofold ahead of eleven years of measurement An organic olive grove in Spain kept eleven years of soil carbon records, and when the research team compared those measurements against the RothC model, the model overestimated sequestration rates by “up to twofold,” according to the write-up at bioengineer.org. The same summary singles out biochar as the most problematic case. That is the critic’s claim in its own words: a model widely used in carbon accounting can run at double the real rate. ...

I checked ~650 CDR companies. 14 will sell you a tonne.

Exactly 14 of the roughly 650 carbon removal companies I checked this week will sell an individual a tonne of durable CDR online, with a credit card, right now. That is 2 in 100. I went looking the way a buyer would, and this is the accounting. The sweep covered three registries and 566 company websites A year ago Dirk Paessler built cdr-shops.com after trying to buy 200 tonnes of CDR for the Carbon Drawdown Initiative and ending up in sales calls. This month the Initiative rebuilt the directory, and I did the crawling: all 60 suppliers on Isometric (78 projects), all 70 suppliers on Puro.earth (119 projects), all 51 durable-CDR suppliers on Rainbow (137 projects; the French registry formerly known as Riverse), plus the 566 reachable supplier websites in [the company database I maintain]( (1,814 CDR companies tracked). I looked for checkout pages, embedded payment widgets, Shopify and WooCommerce storefronts, and buy links buried three clicks deep. ...

Captain's CDR Log #286: Canada's $8 billion removal export pitch and the tonne it cannot keep

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. One figure, two ledgers. Carbon-removal advocates say Canada could attract $8 billion in investment if its projects could sell credits abroad, per an analysis in Canada’s National Observer. The same analysis asks the question that decides whether that money is cheap or expensive for Canada: who gets the climate gains? Under the Paris Agreement’s rules for internationally transferred credits (Article 6), a tonne sold to another country is generally a tonne the seller stops counting toward its own target. So the $8 billion and Canada’s own climate claim draw on the same tonnes. ...

NGK's honeycomb ceramics now capturing CO2 at Project Brighton DAC site

Carbon Herald just published NGK Deploys Honeycomb Structure Ceramics For Direct Air Capture At Project Brighton. Carbon Herald reports that NGK Corporation, the Japanese industrial ceramics and technology manufacturer, has deployed its honeycomb structure ceramics at a direct air capture site referred to as Project Brighton, and that the equipment is now in operation. NGK is best known for ceramic honeycomb substrates used in automotive exhaust catalysts, and the company has been positioning the same high surface area geometry as a contactor platform for DAC sorbents. The outlet frames the installation as a move from material development into field deployment, with the ceramics serving as the structured medium through which ambient air is drawn so that CO2 can be captured and later released. Details on scale, partners, and capture performance were not available in the material we reviewed. ...

Captain's CDR Log #285: Why national champions may shape ocean removal rules before London does

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast: country-level cases will move before a binding London rule does My forecast is that between now and April 2027, marine CDR governance will advance more through national cases built by individual practitioners than through a binding decision from the parties to the London Convention and Protocol. The parties met this month and, as the Columbia Climate Law Blog reports, debated marine CDR governance under an agenda item on marine geoengineering including ocean fertilization. Debate is the operative word. Meanwhile South African engineer Caitlin Wale, founder of Kinjani and a Senior Fellow in the Ocean Visions GEOS fellowship, is building a case for South African leadership in marine CDR through SAILOR, an initiative that convenes scientists, industry, policymakers and communities. She holds no government mandate. She is making an argument. My claim is that arguments like hers, turned into national processes, will decide where ocean experiments proceed over the next six months, because treaty text moves slowly and the people writing it are still assessing the question. This is my reading of the sequence, not a reported fact. ...

Captain's CDR Log #283: Norway's projected land carbon uptake to 2100 fell from about 20 to 5 Mt a year

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Norway’s projected average net carbon uptake from its land sector to 2100 is now about 5 MtCO2 a year. The 2019 projection for the same quantity was about 20 MtCO2 a year. Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social on Bluesky) set the 2019 and 2026 projections side by side, and the expected sink shrank by three-quarters, roughly 15 Mt a year of removal that national carbon accounting could pencil in seven years ago and cannot now. His summary: “Successive projections of Norwegian Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) emissions lead to smaller net uptake… These are big changes, with big policy implications.” LULUCF is the inventory category for land use, land-use change and forestry. ...

Swiss wastewater body tenders biogas upgrade; Carbon Herald calls it a Europe trend

Carbon Herald just published Swiss Biomethane Tender Highlights European Shift Toward Biogenic Carbon Capture. Carbon Herald reports that EBBV, an intermunicipal wastewater association serving the Basse-Broye and Vully area of Switzerland, has opened a public procurement process for a complete biogas upgrading facility. The plant would separate methane from the raw biogas produced during sewage sludge digestion so it can be injected as biomethane, with the CO2 fraction becoming a potential feedstock for capture rather than a vent stream. The outlet frames the tender as one example of a broader trend among European utilities and waste operators to treat biogenic CO2 from anaerobic digestion as a resource for storage or utilization. The piece does not give a project budget, timeline, or confirmed capture volume, and the tender itself appears to cover upgrading rather than a dedicated capture unit. ...

Captain's CDR Log #282: Buyers are lining up, but few projects get through the diligence gate

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus is that durable carbon removal is demand-limited. Buyers, advocates, and most market commentary repeat it. Kevin Lee Caster (@kevinleecaster.bsky.social on Bluesky) puts it in one line: “Millions of tonnes of Carbon Dioxide Removal are being purchased. Millions more tonnes of CDR need to be purchased in order to help the industry grow to the scale necessary.” More tonnes bought, more plants built. That is the model. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-08

All four of today’s stories come down to one question: which tonnes count. The physical limits on carbon removal are not the binding constraint right now. The accounting rules are. That shows up in the EU, where a plan for 250 Mt of removals inside the Emissions Trading System depends entirely on eligibility definitions. It shows up in the UK, where the government’s answer to its greenhouse gas removal (GGR) review is mostly a set of rules about what qualifies for support. It shows up in the science, where the honest answer to “how much can enhanced rock weathering remove” is “it depends on what you can measure.” And it shows up in Klaus Lackner’s long-running argument that scale is a manufacturing and policy problem, not a chemistry problem. The ceiling on CDR this decade is a definitions problem. ...