Take on a podcast episode from Reviewer 2 does geoengineering, originally published Fri, 09 Oc. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reviewer2geoengineering/episodes/Internationalisation-of-CDR-Markets---Lashof-e3pql81

TL;DR

  • US durable-CDR demand hasn’t shrunk in absolute terms, but it has against expectations — the federal purchase program never launched. Useful distinction, honestly made.
  • 45Q survived the 2025 budget bill at ~$180/t; four-ish DAC hubs lost federal support, Louisiana and Texas may proceed.
  • Lashof cites a ~250 Mt removals window in proposed EU ETS revisions. First time I’ve seen that number; verify before repeating.
  • Government money is thin: Sweden €3B bio-CCS reverse auction is the only big one; Finland and Brazil’s SBCE ~$100M each.
  • Google signed a rice-paddy enhanced rock weathering deal in Latin America stacking near-term methane reductions with long-term removal. Clever, measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)-heavy.

Andrew (Reviewer 2) hosts Daniel Lashof, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, to discuss a WRI communications piece arguing that the centre of gravity in CDR markets is moving out of the US. The hour covers the policy wreckage post-Trump, what Europe, Canada and Brazil are actually funding, and a running argument about measurement, reporting and verification and perverse incentives. Episode here.

The most useful part is Lashof’s refusal to overstate the US decline. Pressed on whether the market shrank absolutely or relatively, he concedes it “may not actually have shrunk” in absolute terms — the damage is to expectations. Startups priced in a federal government that would buy tons via the DOE “prize” and fund six-plus DAC hubs; instead the purchase program died and roughly four hubs (including California’s) lost support. 45Q, which predates the Inflation Reduction Act and had bipartisan backing, survived the repeal bill. Microsoft is still buying, just slower. Oxy’s million-ton STRATOS build in West Texas continues, but as an enhanced oil recovery asset, not a credit factory. The investor “cold feet” story, in other words, is about lost demand subsidies, not lost demand.

On the international side, the numbers are smaller than the framing suggests. Denmark’s Group of Negative Emitters is, by Lashof’s own admission, “more an aspiration than a big deal.” Sweden’s €3 billion reverse auction for bio-CCS is the one serious government buyer, with the usual caveat that counterfactual biomass accounting under EU rules is contested — Lashof says Isometric’s protocol demands “significantly more rigor than the government minimum.” Finland is at about $100M; Brazil’s SBCE has committed roughly $100M in government money; Canada has “stepped up a little bit.” The big claim is the EU ETS: proposed revisions would, per Lashof, create “about a 250-million-ton market in the EU over the next few years.” That figure is load-bearing for the whole internationalisation thesis and he doesn’t source it on air.

The MRV exchange is worth hearing. Andrew pushes back on Lashof’s line that DAC is “pretty easy to measure,” citing Climeworks’ embodied-emissions criticism, and both agree Drax is not delivering real removal. Lashof’s own example of market-mediated failure — US corn ethanol raising crop prices and driving deforestation — is the sharpest warning in the episode for anyone designing biomass-based removal incentives.

Context: the private-side anchors remain Frontier (Lashof puts the fund near $2 billion) and Isometric as registry. The Google rice/enhanced rock weathering (ERW) deal — alternate wetting and drying for methane now, weathering-based removal verified later — is an interesting test of whether blended reduction/removal contracts can bridge the ERW alkalinity-export uncertainty that Reviewer 2 covered the previous week. Lashof’s closer is the familiar one: voluntary markets keep the industry alive, but gigaton scale requires mandatory polluter-pays integration, with aviation as the obvious first sector.

Useful for policy and buyer-side people tracking where non-US demand is real versus announced; skip if you already follow EU ETS removals drafting closely.