Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 16 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 connecting thread is infrastructure and institutions catching up to the pitch decks: Canada committing real money to a west-coast CO2 pipeline, the Netherlands naming a CRCF supervisor, Germany opening its largest DAC unit, and a fresh arXiv paper reminding us that enhanced weathering timelines depend on soil chemistry the marketing rarely mentions. Meanwhile the buyer base for durable CDR keeps broadening even as the EU ETS review slips — small delay, but the calendar around 2040 targets is tightening.
Policy and market plumbing
- Carbon Herald — Canada Advances West Coast Pipeline And Pathways CCS Project — Carney tying the Pathways oil-sands CCS project to a west-coast pipeline package is the clearest sign yet that Canadian CCS deployment is being negotiated as an oil-export quid pro quo, not a standalone climate policy — worth watching for how it reshapes 45Q-equivalent expectations north of the border.
- Energeia — Kabinet wijst NEa aan als toezichthouder koolstofmarkt — The Netherlands becomes one of the first member states to formally name a CRCF supervisor (the NEa, which already runs ETS oversight), giving certifiers a concrete national counterpart before Brussels has finished the methodology annexes.
- Argus — EU ETS review delayed by two days — A two-day slip is trivial on its own, but the ETS review is where permanent removals could get their first compliance-market on-ramp; the delay signals the Commission is still wrestling with the removals-integration question rather than shipping a clean text.
Deployment reality check
- Carbon Herald — Ucaneo Opens Germany’s Largest DAC Plant — “Germany’s largest” is a low bar — Ucaneo’s Berlin-Marzahn site is a pilot, not a commercial unit — but the bio-inspired liquid-solvent approach is one of the few non-solid-sorbent European bets outside of Climeworks’ orbit.
- ScienceDaily — Cost of direct air carbon capture to remain higher than hoped — The $230–540/t range for KOH-based DAC lines up with what Carbon Engineering-lineage projects are actually pricing, and it’s a useful anchor when buyers hear sub-$100 promises from newer entrants pitching 2030 delivery.
Science that changes the pitch deck
- arXiv — Subsoil acidity causes long delays in inorganic carbon sequestration by Enhanced Weathering — Jessen et al. extend the known topsoil-acidity lag problem into the subsoil, implying EW crediting models that assume prompt bicarbonate export may be overstating year-1–5 tonnes by a meaningful margin in acidic agricultural soils — an measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) headache the sector will need to price in.
Demand side
- Puro.earth (LinkedIn) — 4.7x growth in CORC beneficiaries 2020–2025 — Puro’s own registry data, so read accordingly, but the 650+ unique end-buyers figure is the clearest signal that durable-CDR demand is broadening beyond the Frontier/NextGen anchor tenants — useful counter-evidence to the “only a dozen real buyers” narrative.
- Carbon Herald — New Report Puts $8.5B Price Tag On CORSIA Carbon Opportunity For ASEAN — CORSIA Phase 1 demand is the one near-term compliance buyer that could actually clear at scale, and ASEAN supply estimates matter because they set the price ceiling durable removals will compete against for airline budgets.
The dominant signal this week is regulatory scaffolding — pipelines, supervisors, ETS text — moving faster than the tonnes on the ground. Conspicuously absent: any large offtake announcement, and any US federal news, which itself is telling four months into the current administration’s CDR posture.