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ClimeFi has coordinated what it calls the first publicly announced transaction for carbon removal units aligned with the EU’s new Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework. The buyers: Adyen, the fintech payments platform, and Nasdaq. The supplier: Stockholm Exergi’s Beccs Stockholm project, which captures and permanently stores CO2 from bioenergy. The EU Commission has officially recognized the transaction. Why it matters The CRCF is the EU’s attempt to create a standardized certification system for durable carbon removals. It adopted its first set of methodologies in February 2025, making it the world’s first voluntary standard for permanent carbon removals backed by a major regulatory body. But frameworks only matter if someone actually uses them. This transaction is the first real commercial test of whether the CRCF can function as market infrastructure, not just policy text. For corporate buyers who have been cautious about carbon removal purchases, a recognized EU framework could lower the perceived risk. For project developers, it signals that there’s a pathway from certification to actual revenue. The gap between policy announcements and functioning markets is often enormous. This deal starts to close it. ...

Microsoft just hit the brakes on every carbon removal purchase it has in the pipeline. For an industry where Microsoft has been the single largest voluntary buyer, this is the most significant demand-side signal since the CDR market began to take shape. The question now is whether this is a pause or a pivot, and what it means for the dozens of suppliers who built their business plans around Big Tech procurement. ...

Microsoft has paused all new carbon removal purchases. The company that bought roughly 90 percent of durable CDR last year, more than 45 million tonnes in 2025 alone, is stepping back. Existing contracts continue. New ones are on hold with no resumption date. Microsoft cited a portfolio and market reassessment. That single decision rewires the entire buy side of the market. The next-largest buyer, Frontier, has contracted around 1.8 million tonnes lifetime. Microsoft was not just the biggest customer. It was the market. ...

Sustaera, a North Carolina-based direct air capture (DAC) company, says it has achieved an efficiency breakthrough that could cut the cost of its technology by a factor of three. If the claim holds up at scale, it would represent one of the most significant cost reduction milestones in the DAC industry to date. Why it matters DAC is one of the most promising but stubbornly expensive approaches to carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Current costs for most DAC technologies range from $400 to $1,000+ per ton of CO₂ captured, depending on the company, the energy source, and how you count. Getting that number down to $100-$200 per ton is widely considered the threshold where DAC becomes commercially viable at climate-relevant scale. A 3x cost reduction, if real and reproducible, would put Sustaera squarely in the conversation for reaching that target. ...

Malaysia-based Yinson Production has installed and commissioned what it claims is the world’s first post-combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) system operating on a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel (FPSO) at sea. The system is running aboard the Agogo FPSO, which operates offshore Angola, marking a potentially significant milestone for decarbonizing offshore oil and gas operations. Why it matters Offshore oil and gas production is one of the harder sectors to decarbonize. FPSOs are essentially floating factories that separate oil, gas, and water far from shore, and they burn fuel to power their own operations, generating significant CO₂ emissions in the process. Until now, carbon capture on these vessels has been largely theoretical. If Yinson’s system proves reliable and scalable, it opens a pathway for reducing emissions from hundreds of FPSOs operating worldwide, many of which will continue producing hydrocarbons for decades. ...

The cheapest way to hit 1.5°C carbon removal targets involves no direct air capture at all. That’s the central finding from researchers at Imperial College London, who modeled optimal CDR (carbon dioxide removal) deployment pathways and found that under full international cooperation, the least-cost portfolio is 74% BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) and 26% AR (afforestation and reforestation), with DACCS (direct air carbon capture and storage) completely absent from the mix. ...

The CDR field is simultaneously racing to prove its economics, preserve its hard-won knowledge, and confront a biomass crediting system that may be built on shaky foundations. That tension between building and salvaging defines today’s stories. The Knowledge Drain Is Real Here’s a quiet crisis that deserves more attention: CDR startups are failing, and when they do, their technical know-how vanishes with them. One startup is now explicitly trying to rescue that institutional knowledge before it disappears for good. This isn’t nostalgia. Carbon removal is a field where failed experiments carry enormous informational value. Every reactor design that didn’t scale, every sorbent chemistry that degraded too fast, every MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) protocol that couldn’t survive contact with reality represents lessons that the next generation of companies will need. Losing that knowledge means paying to relearn the same mistakes. The fact that someone has to build a company specifically to prevent this loss tells you something uncomfortable about how thin the CDR talent and knowledge base really is. ...

A new startup called Ctrl-S is racing to buy up intellectual property and experimental data from failing direct air capture companies before that knowledge vanishes for good. Founded by Jason Hochman, who spent four years running the Direct Air Capture Coalition, the company aims to build a licensable library of DAC innovations that surviving companies, energy majors, and even AI-driven materials science firms can tap into, essentially creating a knowledge rescue operation for a sector that’s hemorrhaging capital and talent. ...

The Clean Air Task Force evaluated 25 biomass carbon removal credit protocols and found not a single one worthy of its highest rating. Seven scored “satisfactory,” twelve were “weak,” and six were “very weak.” Perhaps more revealing than the scores themselves: the carbon removal registries that developed these protocols pushed back so aggressively that CATF stripped the names from the results before publication, anonymizing which registry earned which grade. Why It Matters Biomass-based projects account for roughly 88% of all carbon removal credits sold to date, according to CDR.fyi. That’s a staggering concentration of market activity resting on accounting methods that an independent assessment just found to be mostly inadequate. Many of these sales are pre-purchases for projects that haven’t yet delivered certified credits, which means there’s still time to fix the plumbing before the water starts flowing. But the registries’ defensive reaction to the findings suggests the industry may not be eager to do the hard work of self-correction. ...

The year 2025 has landed among the top three warmest years in recorded history, with average surface temperatures reaching approximately 1.44°C above pre-industrial levels. This comes directly on the heels of 2024, which shattered records as the first calendar year to exceed 1.5°C of warming. Carbon Brief’s ongoing “State of the climate” series tracks these numbers in near real-time, and the picture it paints is one of relentless, compounding heat. ...