Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 16 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/seven-buyers-in-a-trench-coat

TL;DR

  • Microsoft pausing new durable CDR purchases isn’t the story — the story is they were ~80-90% of the market to begin with. Correct framing.
  • Governments committed $45M to CDR purchases, spent ~$0; private sector spent $10.5B. Striking number, worth citing.
  • Jack’s case: voluntary buying was always a house of cards; policy has to take over. Hard to argue with at this point.
  • Defense of enhanced oil recovery as a legitimate scaling pathway for direct air capture. Will annoy some, but the argument is coherent.
  • Dream policy: low-carbon-intensity product standard embedded in trade, with CDR compliance pathways. Interesting, underdeveloped here.

Naim Merchant interviews Jack Andreasen Cavanaugh, who runs the Carbon Management Program at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy and previously led carbon management policy at Breakthrough Energy. The episode is a reaction to Heatmap’s reporting that Microsoft is pausing new durable carbon removal purchases, and Cavanaugh’s weekend piece arguing the real failure is governmental, not corporate. It’s the cleanest articulation I’ve heard of “the voluntary market was always structurally fragile” — read the episode post if you don’t have an hour.

The load-bearing number: governments have committed roughly $45M to CDR purchases with essentially $0 actually spent, against $10.5B from the private sector. Cavanaugh’s “seven buyers in a trench coat” line lands because it’s true — Stripe kicked it off with $1M, Frontier scaled it to a billion-dollar advance market commitment, and Microsoft did the rest. Everything was hinged on the assumption that voluntary buyers would multiply and that compliance markets would eventually arrive. Neither happened fast enough. His prescription: federal US policy is dead for ~2 years, so use the time to build marker bills and coalitions, and lean on state-level (California LCFS integration, Colorado), Canadian, EU ETS, and Asian programs where movement is actually possible.

The more contentious section is on enhanced oil recovery. Cavanaugh’s argument: once a DAC facility hits 500,000 tons/year, the CO₂ is going into a pipeline and a well operated by oil and gas regardless — and EOR barrels have lower lifecycle emissions than primary extraction. He’s also bearish on 45Q in its current form: $180/ton for DAC isn’t enough to make a facility profitable, and small pilots can’t access pipeline/storage anyway, so the credit mostly helps large projects like Oxy’s Stratos in West Texas. Everything outside DAC and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) — enhanced weathering, biochar, marine pathways — gets essentially no federal support. That gap matters if you believe, as Cavanaugh does, that DAC alone can’t deliver the gigatons.

The most actionable provocation: Microsoft, Google, JP Morgan and other buyers should be spending political capital on CDR policy advocacy, not just purchases. The ROI argument is straightforward — a single policy unlocks orders of magnitude more deployment than a $50M offtake. He name-checks Carbon Removal Alliance, Carbon Removal Canada, and Carbon Gap as the groups doing this work today, but notes CDR still isn’t a political priority for most legislators. Occidental gets credit as the rare company that has lobbied effectively — they’re a big reason the 45Q DAC credit survived recent rounds.

Useful for: policy folks, buyer-side strategy teams, and anyone running a CDR company trying to figure out whether to slow down, pivot to pilots, or chase EOR offtake in the next 12 months.