Posts

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 20 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. The week’s connective tissue is infrastructure quietly being rebuilt around CDR — Frontier and Cascade Climate setting de facto methodology standards, Canada and the EU bolting compliance scaffolding into place, and the AI-data-center narrative hardening from talking point into actual capital allocation logic. Underneath that, a bankruptcy and a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) warning paper offer useful counterweights to the build-out story. ...

Carbon Herald just published CREW Carbon Secures $25M To Scale Its Wastewater Treatment Optimization Technology. Carbon Herald reports that CREW Carbon raised $25 million in an oversubscribed Series A round aimed at scaling its technology for optimizing wastewater treatment operations. The approach targets emissions reductions and efficiency gains at municipal and industrial treatment facilities, a sector that is often overlooked in climate discussions despite its energy intensity and process emissions. The funding is expected to support commercial deployment and team growth as the company works with utility partners. Specific investor names, deployment timelines, and measured CO2-equivalent reductions per facility are detailed in the original article. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus: Canada is the new CDR frontrunner Carbon Removal Canada spent the week telling anyone who would listen that the country is home to the world’s first surficial mineralization hub, with the potential to “catalyze billions in economic activity.” The industry body, federal agencies, and a chorus of developers working ultramafic mine tailings in British Columbia and Quebec all share the same line: Canadian geology plus Canadian permitting plus Canadian grids equals global CDR leadership. Frontier buyers nod along. So do the trade press. ...

Carbon Herald just published Draft EU CBAM Rules Allow Carbon Credit Deductions, But Cap International Credits At 10%. Carbon Herald reports that the European Commission has launched a public consultation on draft rules clarifying, for the first time, how carbon credits can be used under the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The draft allows importers to deduct carbon credits against their CBAM liabilities, but limits the use of international credits to a 10% share. The clarification addresses a long-standing question about how foreign carbon pricing instruments and offsets interact with the EU’s border carbon regime. The consultation period gives industry, governments and civil society a window to respond before the rules are finalized. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. When the same week delivers two carbon-credit financing announcements that both claim to “unlock” the market, the question is whether they’re solving the same problem. They aren’t. One is trying to manufacture supply that doesn’t exist yet. The other is trying to smooth payment on supply that already does. That asymmetry tells you a lot about where CDR finance is going. ...

Carbon Herald just published Carbon Capture Debate Intensifies In Louisiana. Carbon Herald covers the ongoing fight in Louisiana over carbon capture and storage, which has emerged as a flashpoint in the state’s 2024 legislative session. The piece outlines competing pressures from industry developers pursuing CCS projects along the Gulf Coast, local communities raising concerns about pipelines and underground injection wells, and lawmakers weighing new restrictions and permitting rules. It situates the debate against Louisiana’s heavy petrochemical footprint and the federal incentives, including 45Q tax credits, that have drawn project proposals to the state. The article tracks how parish-level opposition and proposed bills could reshape the regulatory path for CCS deployment. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Earlier this month, Jim Mann sat on a panel at the UK House of Lords Climate Policy Forum and argued for where the UK should aim its climate effort. UNDO’s own account framed it plainly: their founder “joined a panel on where the UK should focus its efforts in climate” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). That seat matters. CDR founders rarely get one. Mann took it not to talk lab results, but to make the policy case for enhanced rock weathering at national scale. ...

Today’s stories circle one uncomfortable question: who is actually checking the work? From boardroom disclosures to rock dust in Darjeeling tea estates, the day’s reporting points to a CDR industry that is scaling faster than its verification, transparency, and risk-management systems can keep up. The disclosure gap is now measurable A joint audit by Senken and Sylvera of Germany’s DAX40 companies found that most large German firms either do not disclose their carbon credit purchases in a usable way, or disclose them without the registry detail needed to verify quality. Captain’s Log #134 walks through what the audit looked at and why it matters: when a buyer says “we retired X tonnes,” outside reviewers should be able to trace those tonnes to specific projects, vintages, and methodologies. Often they cannot. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 07 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/398-Scientists-vs--Engineers---the-Commercial-Pressure-on-Carbon-Dioxide-Removalw-Erica-Dorr--Samara-Vantil--Rainbow-e3j0jq0 TL;DR Rainbow’s head of science Erica Dorr and certification engineer Samara Vantil reframe the science-vs-engineering split as a false binary; both do applied work daily. The real gap is technical-vs-commercial. Useful framing for anyone who’s watched a salesperson promise a methodology change on a call. Concrete example: biochar lab samples cost ~€600 to ship Africa→Europe. That’s the kind of number that should anchor measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) requirement-setting. Defense of Charm’s “cut scope” posture as courage, not laziness — diminishing returns on the last sample are real and worth saying out loud. When project developers can’t deliver a data point, Rainbow’s default is a conservative discount factor, not rejection. Worth knowing if you’re a buyer reading their credits. Ross Kenyon hosts Erica Dorr (head of science) and Samara Vantil (environmental engineer, certification) of Rainbow, the carbon removal standard and registry. The episode is a follow-up to two essays Kenyon wrote for Rainbow on whether durable CDR needs more field engineers or more scientists, and lands somewhere more interesting than either piece: the science/engineering line is fuzzy, and the harder boundary is between technical teams and commercial. ...

Take on a podcast episode from REEF Roundup: 🪸Coral Reefs🐠 and 🐙Marine Conservation🦈, originally published Wed, 15 Ap. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reefroundup/episodes/Dr--Sambuddha-Misra-Drinking-Tea-to-Save-Coral-Reefs--The-Mechanics-of-Enhanced-Rock-Weathering-in-Darjeeling--S5E5-e3hsh58 TL;DR Alt Carbon’s chief scientist explains why Darjeeling’s foothills are a rare “supply-limited” weathering regime — solid mechanistic justification for site selection. 2025 Isometric-verified delivery claimed as Asia’s first enhanced rock weathering (ERW) credits; guest says next tranche is ~10x larger. Useful datapoint on Asian ERW supply. Current deployment ~80,000 acres, roadmap to 250k then 1M acres across Bengal and Assam. Ambition is real but measurement is the bottleneck. Honest admission: a million-acre deployment implies ~3M samples/year, more than all geochemistry has measured historically. New measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) methods required. Reported 25–100% crop yield uplift on degraded tea-estate soils from basalt micronutrients. Eye-catching, but no controls described — take with caution. Reef Roundup (a marine conservation show) hosts Dr. Sambuddha Misra, IISc earth scientist and chief scientist at Alt Carbon, for a surprisingly substantive walk through the geochemistry, MRV, and scaling math of enhanced rock weathering in the Himalayan foothills. The framing is coral-reef alkalinity, but the meat is durable CDR: basalt sourcing, supply-limited weathering regimes, Isometric verification, and the brick wall of sample-scale measurement. ...