Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 26 Fe. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/policy-wins-and-growing-pains-as

TL;DR

  • FY26 appropriations gave durable CDR (carbon dioxide removal) real wins: $45M for the DOE purchase prize, $70M+ for RD&D, despite the President’s budget zeroing them out. Genuinely surprising.
  • DAC (direct air capture) Hubs took a hit: $1B of remaining funds repurposed to small modular reactors, leaving ~$800M. Obligated grants untouched.
  • 1 million tons delivered milestone is mostly biochar — Peter Minor frames the concentration as a warning sign, not a victory lap. Sharp framing.
  • Consolidation (Terradot/Ion) read as maturity, not panic — scale matters more in CDR than most industries for project finance and offtake credibility.
  • Gianna Amador: per-ton price is the wrong KPI in the prove-and-learn era. Worth chewing on.

Naim Merchant kicks off a new “Removers Roundtable” format on The Carbon Curve with Gianna Amador (Carbon Removal Alliance), Erin Burns (Carbon180), and Peter Minor (Absolute Climate). The hour is a US-centric stocktake: where federal CDR policy actually landed a year into the new administration, what the consolidation wave means, and whether the field’s talent and narrative survive the right-sizing.

The appropriations update is the news hook and the most actionable thing in the episode. Despite the administration’s FY26 budget zeroing out CDR lines, Congress moved forward $45M for the DOE CDR purchase pilot prize, $70M+ for CDR RD&D, plus geologic sequestration funding at EPA and state primacy support. Amador and Burns are clear-eyed that appropriated ≠ spent — the administration may sit on the money — but Burns makes the structural point that sustained appropriations baselines matter for future administrations and reflect “stickiness” of bipartisan support. The bad news: $1B of unobligated DAC Hubs money got repurposed to SMRs (small modular reactors), shrinking the remaining pool to ~$800M. Project Cypress (Climeworks/Heirloom, Louisiana) and the 1PointFive South Texas hub are still in limbo.

The more interesting conversation is the “prove and learn” pivot (Robert Höglund’s framing). Minor is blunt that the gigaton-by-2030 narrative was always implausible — CDR was originally pitched as the hard-to-abate cleanup tool for future decades — and the current reset is a return to form, not a crisis. His sharpest take: the 1Mt delivery milestone being dominated by biochar, with most purchases from one buyer (Frontier, unsaid but obvious), is a concentration risk, not a triumph. Amador’s adjacent heterodox claim — that per-ton cost is largely the wrong metric this early, and what matters is whether projects deliver legible economic and community benefits that unlock policy — is the kind of argument the buyer-side discourse needs more of, even if you disagree. Burns warns the field against running from environmental justice work for political-fashion reasons: the EJ posture predates the Biden era and was always about building durable local coalitions (think Cassidy on DAC Hubs in Louisiana), not ideology.

For context on the policy mechanics, the Carbon Removal Alliance has been the primary vehicle pushing the appropriations asks, and Carbon180 has been doing the longer-arc authorizing and EJ work Burns references. The biochar-concentration concern Minor raises echoes ongoing debate about whether CDR.fyi delivery numbers actually reflect a maturing portfolio or a market still leaning on the cheapest available durable-ish tons.

Worth the hour if you’re tracking US federal CDR policy, doing buyer strategy, or running a company thinking about the consolidation map. Skip if you only want technical pathway detail — this is sector-strategy talk.