Posts

Captain's CDR Log #279: Two waste companies, two lenders, and the debt now financing carbon removal

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Does a carbon removal developer need one big named buyer before a lender will write a cheque? Two debt deals that landed in the same news cycle answer that question two different ways, and the fact that both closed is the finding. AMP borrowed against a facility whose credits feed a single Google contract. Vaulted Deep borrowed against a national expansion with no single offtaker named in the financing coverage. Both lenders said yes. Both borrowers handle garbage for a living. ...

Captain's CDR Log #278: Five numbers on the distance between a sold tonne and a lasting one

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers, two of them from recent announcements and three from undated modeling and commentary, point at the same gap: the word “tonne” on a removal invoice says nothing about how long the carbon stays out of the air. Critics argue that silence is a defect in the product itself. On the evidence below, they are mostly right. ...

Captain's CDR Log #277: A biochar model's own issue tracker questions year-round heat revenue

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critic is the model’s own issue tracker The sharpest critique of biochar unit economics right now is not from a skeptic outside the field. It sits in the open issue tracker of the Biochar_AG model (@domwoolf/Biochar_AG on GitHub), where Issue #106 states the problem in two sentences: “It assumes every plant sells all its heat, year-round. Rural residue areas rarely have large heat users (industrial process heat, district heating).” The issue adds that the model has no spatial heat-demand layer, so revenue per tonne may be overstated exactly where crop and forest residues actually sit. ...

SeaO2 Is Bankrupt, But Its Ocean CDR Work Lives On via CarbonBlue and CTRL-S

Carbon Herald just published CarbonBlue And CTRL-S To Carry On SeaO2’s Legacy. Carbon Herald reports that SeaO2, a Netherlands-based developer of direct ocean carbon removal technology, has gone bankrupt, and that co-founder Ruben Brands has indicated the company’s work will not disappear with it. According to the outlet, two other companies, CarbonBlue and CTRL-S, are set to carry forward elements of what SeaO2 built. CarbonBlue is an ocean-based carbon removal developer working on water-side CO2 extraction, and CTRL-S is another startup in the same space. The piece frames this as a continuation of SeaO2’s technical and commercial legacy rather than a straightforward acquisition, with Brands positioning the handover as a way to keep the underlying approach moving toward deployment despite the original company’s failure. ...

Captain's CDR Log #276: Taiwan's biochar pledge and the scientists who decide what a tonne lasts

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Taiwan’s biochar target will be counted under rules written elsewhere, and those rules rest on stability methods that researchers are still assembling. A national target that borrows its measuring stick Peng Chi-ming, Taiwan’s environment minister, told a European podcast that his ministry is aiming for 1 million tonnes of biochar carbon removal per year by 2030, and that it will build its certification and trading system by referencing four outside frameworks: the EU’s CRCF (the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming regulation), the European Biochar Certificate (EBC), Japan’s agricultural biochar strategy and the EU CRCF Buyers’ Club (Taiwan’s environment minister Peng Chi-ming sets a goal of 1 million tonnes of biochar carbon removal per year by 2030). Three of the four are European. None is Taiwanese. That is a reasonable shortcut for a ministry that wants an internationally compatible system, and it has one consequence Peng did not spell out: whatever those frameworks assume about how long biochar carbon stays in the ground, Taiwan’s target inherits. ...

Captain's CDR Log #275: Tim Jesper Suhrhoff and the evidence that farm lime can be a carbon sink

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Farm lime in the Mississippi River Basin removes carbon on net, at about 90% of its ideal CO2 removal potential, and the lime spread there since 1900 adds up to roughly 0.44 GtCO2 (billion tonnes of CO2) of removal. That is the headline of Agricultural liming is a carbon sink in the Mississippi River Basin, a Nature paper from Tim Jesper Suhrhoff, Christopher Reinhard, Yoshiki Kanzaki and colleagues. Most emissions inventories book that same lime as a CO2 source. One of them is wrong. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-10-01

Today’s four stories share one shape: the fastest-growing source of durable CDR supply is not new machines built from scratch. It is existing industry with removal bolted on. An ethanol plant that already vents a pure CO₂ stream. A palm-processing operation that already piles up nutshells. A government that already has forestry and farm residues to manage. Call it “bolt-on removal”: take a process that is running anyway, and route its carbon underground or into a stable solid instead of into the air. ...

Take: CO₂ to Ethylene with Alex Ip, CERT Systems

Take on a podcast episode from Bite-Size Climate Tech, originally published Tue, 29 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lydiaclinzi/episodes/CO-to-Ethylene-with-Alex-Ip--CERT-Systems-e3piese TL;DR CERT Systems makes ethylene from CO₂, water and electricity via direct electrolysis; drop-in identical to fossil ethylene. This is utilization, not removal — keep that straight. Market framing: ~200 Mt ethylene/yr, ~250 Mt CO₂ emitted making it. Useful order-of-magnitude anchor. Scale today: a direct-air-capture-to-ethylene pilot at ~1 kg CO₂/day. Target: tens of tons of ethylene/yr “in the next couple of years.” That’s ~2–3 orders of magnitude. Cost: competitive with bio-based polyethylene, still a premium over fossil. Parity thesis rests on refinery integration (O₂, H₂, heat) and cheaper electricity. Plausible, unproven. Tencent CarbonX award funds the commercial demo and pushes CO₂-based materials into consumer products via CarbonXMade. Notable: Chinese corporate capital, not Western buyers. Lydia Clinzi’s Bite-Size Climate Tech hosts Alex Ip, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based CERT Systems, in a roughly 25-minute Season 5 conversation (“Climate Tech Is Just Good Business”). The episode covers the electrolyzer mechanism (the “sandwich” of catalyst-coated electrodes stacked into a reactor), the drop-in argument, current scale, the cost path, and what the CarbonX win unlocks. It is pitched at a general audience, with an eight-year-old explainer segment. ...

Take: The Minister Betting Big on Biochar - with Minister Chi-ming Peng

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 30 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/the-minister-betting-big-on-biochar-with-minister-peng-chi-m TL;DR Taiwan has set a 1 Mt biochar carbon removal target for 2030 — but no biochar crediting methodology exists yet and one plant is operating. Aspirational, not a roadmap. Minister Peng’s math: ~1.3 Mt of Taiwan’s ~5 Mt annual agricultural waste, ~500 pyrolysis units. Feedstock imports are politically and legally (Basel) blocked. Demand driver is the semiconductor sector; TSMC alone may need ~10 Mt/yr of credits. CCS at $300–500/t is priced out; biochar is the “now” option. Taiwan’s ETS runs on the EEX platform and is being designed to accept biochar credits. Article 6.2 deals (Paraguay MOU) are the workaround for non-UNFCCC status. Useful as a case study in top-down CDR target setting before the value chain exists. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Taiwan’s Environment Minister Chi-ming Peng on The CDR Policy Scoop, recorded 28 September, two weeks after he announced a 1 Mt biochar removal target for 2030. The conversation covers the origin of the target, feedstock and pyrolysis capacity numbers, how the target plugs into Taiwan’s carbon fee and forthcoming emissions trading system, and how a non-Party to the Paris Agreement intends to trade credits. ...

Podcast take: The palm nutcracker that became a carbon dioxide removal company—w/ Uzoma Ayogu

Take: The palm nutcracker that became a carbon dioxide removal company—w/ Uzoma Ayogu of Biochar Industrial Group

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 24 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/The-palm-nutcracker-that-became-a-carbon-dioxide-removal-companyw-Uzoma-Ayogu-of-Biochar-Industrial-Group-e3p96kt TL;DR BIG’s model: don’t build greenfield biochar plants; bolt pyrolysis onto existing agroprocessors who already have feedstock, permits, weighbridges and farmer trust. Sound framing. Value split is 20/60/20 of carbon profit (BIG / partner / capex funder); 80/20 early when BIG carries the risk. Rare to hear the terms stated. Target fully loaded removal cost of $50–70/t. Stated as a goal, not a demonstrated number — treat accordingly. Pyrolyzer uptime went 38% → 87% in a year; two larger systems due end-2026 and Q1 2027. Cassava trials: 21–50% yield gains on acidic soils (pH 4.5–5.9). Promising but small, self-reported, and only ~20% of physical biochar sold so far. Ross Kenyon hosts Uzoma Ayogu, CTO of Nigerian palm-kernel processor Releaf and cofounder of its spinout Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), which just closed a pre-seed round. The episode traces how a decade-old agri-supply-chain business ended up issuing Nigeria’s first industrial biochar credits, why the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) arm had to be a separate entity, and what BIG now offers other West African processors. ...