Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 13 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there.

The week’s signal is a widening gap between announced capacity and what’s actually getting built or bought. A 1Mt ARR deal and the largest-ever SAF certificate purchase show corporates still willing to write big checks for the lower-permanence end of the stack, while a new UK DAC consortium and fresh analyses of the EU Buyers’ Club and marine CDR rulebook underline how much policy scaffolding is still missing for the durable end. A German broadsheet hammering the “huge gap” framing rounds out the mood.

Buyer side moves

  • Carbon Herald — Fortune Global 500 Company Invests In 1M Tonnes Of ARR Credits Via Climate Impact Partners — A 1Mt ARR offtake from an unnamed F500 buyer is one of the larger nature-based deals of the year, but the anonymity matters: ARR volumes at this scale still travel via brokers because the buyer doesn’t want a Guardian piece picking apart the project portfolio.
  • Carbon Herald — American Airlines And Google Sign Major SAF Agreement — Google is buying SAF certificates to cover American’s emissions on Google business travel — effectively a corporate book-and-claim arrangement that sidesteps the CDR stack entirely. Worth watching as a template that could pull discretionary climate budget away from durable removals.
  • Carbon Gap — EU Buyers’ Club — Carbon Gap’s tracker entry is the clearest public summary yet of what the Commission’s voluntary buyers’ coordination actually commits members to (not much, yet). Useful baseline before the next signaling round under the Industrial Carbon Management Strategy.

DAC and the build-out gap

Methodology and regulatory plumbing

  • Quantum Commodity Intelligence — Marine CDR needs to overcome regulatory issues to scale: paper — Yet another paper flagging that the London Protocol amendments, EEZ jurisdictional ambiguity, and measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) gaps remain the binding constraint on mCDR — not technology readiness or buyer demand. The interesting question is whether anyone in the regulator class is actually moving.
  • UNDO (LinkedIn) — What is SAT-C? — UNDO publicly naming and describing their porewater extraction technique is a small but real shift toward open-methodology competition in enhanced rock weathering (ERW) MRV, where Lithos, Eion and InPlanet have each gone their own way. Worth a skim if you’re tracking how ERW quantification consolidates.
  • LSE Grantham — Equitable design of blue carbon finance for mangrove-related livelihoods and China’s role — Grantham’s framing of China as a potential standard-setter for mangrove blue carbon is novel; if Beijing pushes a REDD+-style framework through its own offset market first, it would set a de facto template that the VCM and Article 6 supervisory body would have to react to.

The dominant signal this week was buyers and policymakers still circling the question of what counts as a credible removal — with EU coordination, mCDR rules, and ERW methodology all in the same unresolved bucket. Conspicuously absent: any meaningful update from the big DAC hubs (Stratos, Cypress, Project Bison) or movement on the US 45Q reconciliation that the industry has been waiting on for months.