Posts

Take: Debunking the Myths: Why Carbon Removal Can Scale with Klaus Lackner

Take on a podcast episode from Climate Chat, originally published Tue, 29 Se. Listen: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnI-2ckIDMQ TL;DR Thermodynamic minimum for direct air capture is ~20 kJ/mol CO2 vs ~700 kJ/mol released burning gasoline; current DAC runs 10–20x above that floor. Useful framing. Lackner’s practical cost floor: $10–30/t (materials, water, electricity only); $100/t is the “economy survives” threshold. Cost-floor argument is the episode’s strongest section. Learning rate is the make-or-break variable: 20% per doubling scales to gigatons, 10% fails. Rarely stated this bluntly. Policy ask: certificate of sequestration at the wellhead plus a reverse auction for government buying of historical emissions. Coherent, not new. Arcusa (ASU) finding cited: roughly half of Microsoft’s carbon certificates are “orphaned” after 30 years. First time I’ve seen this number on a podcast. Dan Miller hosts Klaus Lackner — the physicist who published the first technical direct air capture paper in 1999 and co-founded Global Research Technologies — for a structured walk through what he calls the myths about carbon dioxide removal. Episode: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnI-2ckIDMQ. Topics are energy balance, cost floors, storage capacity, fossil-company moral hazard, scaling precedents, and the policy design Lackner wants. It’s a long interview with a live Q&A; the substance is front-loaded. ...

Take: How Much CO₂ Can Enhanced Weathering Really Remove? - Derry

Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Mon, 28 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/How-Much-CO-Can-Enhanced-Weathering-Really-Remove----Derry-e3pgntl TL;DR Derry’s whole-system argument: shallow-soil cation depletion (top 10–30 cm) measures the first step, not alkalinity export. Direct challenge to current ERW measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). Three sinks consume alkalinity downstream: ion exchange in acidic soils, secondary clay precipitation (generates acidity), carbonate precipitation. “Not delayed, it’s been consumed.” Water budget check: ~250 mm/yr runoff in US corn belt would need 25–30 mmol/L alkalinity to move 5 t CO₂/ha/yr; real streams run 1–3. Useful framing. Natural basalt catchments max out near 1 t CO₂/ha/yr (wet tropics), typically ~0.2. Global basalt weathering ~0.1–0.15 Gt CO₂/yr. First time I’ve seen this benchmark set against ERW claims. Host tone is snarky; guest is measured and explicitly open to rebuttal. Take the substance, discount the wrapper. Andrew of Reviewer 2 does geoengineering hosts Louis Derry, Cornell geochemist (30 years, also affiliated with IPGP Paris), on a new Nature paper with Kate Maher and Oliver Chadwick arguing that critical-zone processes cap alkalinity export from basaltic systems. The episode is essentially a mechanistic case for why enhanced rock weathering (ERW) removal claims of 5–10 t CO₂/ha/yr are physically implausible in row-crop agriculture. ...

Take: Inside the UK’s Answer to the GGR Review - with James Screen

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 06 Oc. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/the-uk-governments-answer-to-the-ggr-review-with-james-scree TL;DR UK government’s GGR review response is a “staging post,” not a strategy; hard questions deferred to the Carbon Budget 7 delivery plan (expected 2026). Geological net zero rejected mainly for political reasons: no appetite to reopen what net zero means. Candid, and worth knowing. UK ETS removals integration slips from “end of 2028” to “as soon as practicable” — Screen says don’t over-read it, but UK-EU linking is a live variable. Carbon contracts for difference (CCfDs) can serve both voluntary and ETS sales, but the taxpayer subsidy implied doesn’t scale. Honest framing. GGR business model still has no financial close; the transport & storage network model does (Liverpool Bay). The CDR Policy Scoop hosts Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart interview James Screen, who until recently ran the greenhouse gas removals (GGR) team at the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ). Recorded 29 September, the episode dissects the government’s response to Alan Whitehead’s independent GGR review — what was accepted, what was parked, and why — from someone who drafted it and can now speak personally. ...

Captain's CDR Log #281: The EU ETS plan for 250 Mt of removals hinges on which tonnes count

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The 250 Mt figure settles how much, not which tonnes or whether they arrive Carbon Gap’s explainer on the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) puts a single number in front of European removal suppliers: the European Commission plans to fund 250 million tonnes of carbon removal through the ETS by 2040 (Carbon Gap on LinkedIn). The plan itself traces back to the Commission’s July legislative proposal for the ETS review, so the volume is not new. What Carbon Gap adds is the framing. The post says the rules now have to answer two questions: will they make sure the removals happen, and which removals will count (same post). I think that framing is right, and it changes how suppliers should read the number. 250 Mt is a ceiling on possible demand. It is not a commitment to any method. ...

Google deal pushes September 2026 durable CDR past 1M tonnes — but it's lumpy

CDR.fyi just published Durable CDR Market Recap: September 2026 — Key Deals & Trends. CDR.fyi’s monthly recap reports that more than 1 million tonnes of durable carbon removal were contracted in September 2026. The bulk comes from Google’s agreement with enhanced weathering developer Terradot for 1 million tonnes, paired with a separate 1 million tonne CO2e methane elimination purchase by 2030. Smaller deals include Granitor buying 5,000 tonnes from Stockholm Exergi for delivery starting in 2030, Milkywire closing eight Salesforce-backed pre-purchases totalling 3,661 tonnes across DAC, alkalinity enhancement and biomass storage, and Japan Airlines signing a CORSIA-oriented agreement with Climeworks. The partnerships section covers Exomad Green and Carbonfuture expanding biochar supply by 1.1 million tonnes through 2035, Whirlpool’s multi-supplier portfolio via ClimeFi, Supercritical’s India distribution deal with Ground Up, Dotz Nano’s sorbent supply contract with Soletair, and Euroclear’s portfolio through CUR8. ...

Captain's CDR Log #280: Why the same alkalinity removes different amounts of carbon in different seas

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) credits are sold by the tonne, but the removal behind each tonne is set by the water the alkalinity goes into. Last week, on 1 and 2 October, three open data deposits and one preprint landed that each treat location as the variable rather than the footnote: a global coastal efficiency study with its figure data and code on Zenodo, a lab dataset on how flow affects hydroxide dissolution, and a 20-day microcosm study from the upwelling system off northwest Spain. Read together, they say an OAE project’s address decides its carbon math. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-06

Carbon removal is turning into infrastructure, and infrastructure needs three things a pilot plant does not: lenders, a workforce, and public consent. All three showed up in today’s stories, and the one place they do not yet line up is the ocean. That is the day’s pattern. The money is arriving through ordinary channels, debt rather than grants. The jobs are concentrating in the companies that build tools rather than the ones that remove tonnes. And a Nature Climate Change study says the public will only back any of it if the process looks fair and the institutions look trustworthy. So the constraint is shifting from “can this work” to “who pays, who builds, and who agrees.” ...

Take: Canada's New Nickel Mine Could Make Carbon Capture Obsolete

Take on a YouTube video from Musa Tule, originally posted 2026-10-05. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b34GVwxE66s TL;DR Explainer on Canada Nickel’s Crawford project near Timmins, Ontario: a 41-year, ~1.6 Mt-nickel mine whose ultramafic tailings can mineralize CO2. Mechanism covered accurately: serpentinized ore rich in brucite reacts with concentrated CO2 in-circuit, forming magnesium carbonate in hours. Useful for a lay audience. Title is wrong on its face — this is carbon capture and storage, just mineralized. Overstated. Economic framing is the real signal: carbonation as the business case that justifies a sulfide mine in an Indonesia-flooded market. Transcript cuts off before any tonnage or cost numbers for the carbonation itself. Treat the scale claim as unverified here. A general-interest Canadian channel (video here) walks through the Crawford nickel project and Canada Nickel Company’s plan to inject concentrated CO2 into tailings while they’re still moving through the processing circuit. The substantive argument is that a mine’s waste stream — millions of tonnes of already-crushed, already-reactive rock — is a cheaper mineralization reactor than anything purpose-built. ...

Enabling Tech leads CDR workforce with 7707 employees across 969 companies

This chart is a stacked horizontal bar showing CDR-attributable headcount across pathways on the vertical axis, with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play companies whose entire reason for existing is CDR, divisions inside larger firms where CDR is one line of business, and “ecosystem” firms, the directory’s label for companies that sell tools, verification, brokerage, or software to those operators. Bar length is total attributed workers; the color split is where those workers actually sit. ...

Public CDR support hinges on trust and fairness, Nature Climate Change study finds

Carbon Herald just published New Study Examines What Matters Most For Public CDR Support. Carbon Herald reports on a study published in Nature Climate Change that examines the drivers of public support for carbon dioxide removal. According to the outlet, the researchers set out to assess which factors matter most when people form views on CDR, a question that has grown more pressing as governments and companies scale up removal targets. The article frames the work as a contribution to understanding how social acceptance might shape deployment of removal approaches alongside emissions cuts. The piece points readers to the underlying study for the detailed findings, which the summary available to us does not spell out, including the specific factors identified or the populations surveyed. ...