Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/is-carbon-removal-stronger-than-the

TL;DR

  • Three Toronto operators (Amplify, Mangrove, CarbonRun) argue the durable-CDR vibes are worse than the fundamentals — useful corrective if you’ve been doom-scrolling.
  • Venture was the wrong instrument for an infrastructure sector; the “missing middle” between VC and big-bank project finance is the real bottleneck. Accurate diagnosis, no easy fix offered.
  • CarbonRun’s first verified river alkalinity issuances exposed how optimistic pre-audit limestone-to-feedstock ratios were. First time I’ve heard an operator say this out loud.
  • 1,100+ permanent CDR companies counted across public lists — Vlaar predicts consolidation via acqui-hire, not a clean die-off. Plausible.
  • Affordability framing in government budgets is the under-discussed existential risk for compliance demand. Worth taking seriously.

Na’im Merchant’s Toronto Climate Week wrap puts Trish Nixon (Amplify Capital), Brandon Vlaar (Mangrove Systems), and Luke Connell (CarbonRun) in one room to take stock of durable CDR a year after the US political shift. It’s a finance/measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)/supplier triangle, recorded live, and unusually candid about what isn’t working.

The most load-bearing argument is Nixon’s: venture capital was never the right instrument to scale a capital expenditure (CapEx)-heavy infrastructure sector, and the sector is now stuck in a missing middle. Off-take contracts from Frontier-style buyers are bankable-ish but too short-dated; ticket sizes are too small for the infrastructure lenders Connell met at Carbon Unbound, who quoted a $200–250M floor backed by real estate collateral. The gap gets filled, if at all, by folk funds, project-equity vehicles, and credit streaming — none of which move at the speed or scale a gigaton trajectory requires. Vlaar’s counter is that the structural plumbing (CBAM, Article 6 eligibility, EU ETS removal inclusion debates, 45Q/45Z reinforcement even under the current US administration) is materially further along than it was 24 months ago when McKinsey’s $30B-by-2030 number was being thrown around.

The other genuinely new disclosure: Connell admits CarbonRun’s pre-issuance techno-economics overstated limestone-to-feedstock efficiency, and that audit exposed it once trucks, fuel grades and Nova Scotia-specific emission factors got netted off the gross. “Models that look good on paper get exposed quickly.” This is the kind of operator honesty the river alkalinity pathway needed on the record, and it’s why the small initial issuances matter more as a learning instrument than as revenue. Vlaar’s parallel point from the Mangrove vantage: the friction cost of waiting a year between activity and credit issuance is working capital these companies can’t afford, which is why digital MRV is really a treasury problem dressed as a measurement problem.

Worth pairing this with the broader CDR 2.0 framing Julio Friedmann has been pushing at Carbon Direct — Merchant explicitly invokes the five pillars (technical readiness, project assurance, standardization, bankability, transactional ease) and the panel maps cleanly onto them. CarbonRun’s verified issuances are also a relevant data point against the more skeptical river alkalinity literature; the Carbon to Sea Initiative convening in Halifax referenced here is where that pathway’s MRV norms are being hashed out. Canada’s $10M procurement is acknowledged as symbolic-not-structural; marine CDR (including river alkalinity) was excluded from this round.

Useful hour if you’re underwriting a durable-CDR project, sizing a missing-middle fund, or trying to explain to a board why VC math broke.