Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 30 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/carbon-removal-is-stuck-in-low-earth

TL;DR

  • Friedmann argues CDR 1.0 built the scaffolding (registries, raters, taxonomy) but isn’t structured to close commercial deals — reframing, not bashing.
  • Five pillars to unlock CDR 2.0: technical readiness, project assurance, standardization, bankability, transactional ease. Useful checklist, light on novelty individually but coherent together.
  • Headline claim: deals die at the CFO, not the CSO. Risk management, not price, is the binding constraint. Rings true with what buyers actually say.
  • Pointed critique: 5,000-ton pilots don’t interest 100kt-scale buyers like Microsoft/JPM/Airbus. Sector is still over-indexed on first-of-a-kind storytelling.
  • Intro segment announces the Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub at Thetford Mines — 800Mt tailings, Frontier RFP open through May 22, 2026.

Naim Merchant hosts Julio Friedmann (Chief Scientist, Carbon Direct) to walk through Carbon Direct’s new “CDR 2.0: Five Pillars of Successful Project Deployment and Delivery” report. The episode is essentially a guided tour of why durable carbon removal deal flow has stalled and what specifically needs to change at the buyer-procurement-bank interface. There’s also a 4-minute opening from Merchant announcing the Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub partnership between Carbon Removal Canada, Frontier, and Thetford Mines.

The most load-bearing argument: stop trying to educate the Chief Sustainability Officer and start de-risking the deal for the Chief Financial Officer. Friedmann is blunt that buyers like Microsoft, JP Morgan, and Airbus are transacting at 100,000-ton clips and won’t engage 5,000-ton pilots — yet the sector keeps pitching first-of-a-kind novelty. “Even if the Chief Sustainability Officer wants to do it, the CFO doesn’t.” His project-assurance point is the freshest part of the conversation: engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors notice your soil-type mistake after you’ve signed, then charge $20M to fix it. CDR doesn’t have like-for-like substitution if a bioenergy-with-carbon-capture-and-storage (BECCS) project fails, so one blown project is a body blow to the whole category. He thinks the scarcest resource in CDR isn’t capital or buyers — it’s experienced project managers who’ve built $2B facilities. No good answer for how to recruit them.

On standardization, Friedmann wants industry-led convergence (the USB-2.0 analogy) rather than government-set or academic-set standards, and he names the European Union’s approach as falling into the latter trap. He’s gentle on the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) — argues their teams are small and the right question is how to resource them, not scold them. On bankability he concedes there’s no template; HSBC vs. Wells Fargo vs. an Amazon off-take all look different. The honest admission: buyers’ clubs are harder to assemble than the sector pretends, and existing efforts (Frontier, Stripe, Carbon Removal Canada’s Advance Market Coalition) move real but small tonnage.

If you want context, this pairs with Carbon Direct’s 2026 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market (Friedmann frames CDR 2.0 as the constructive companion to that diagnostic). The CFO-bottleneck thesis echoes themes from prior CD coverage of Frontier offtake structuring, and the Quebec hub announcement is worth tracking on its own — 400–700 Mt of theoretical removal potential from existing tailings is among the larger surficial-mineralization opportunities anyone has scoped publicly.

Useful for buyer-side practitioners, project developers preparing for final investment dec