Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 11 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 throughline is credibility infrastructure: German regulators pulling credits from Chinese projects, a long-running CDR newsletter reassessing its own cadence, and researchers modeling what a real CO2 transport backbone would need to look like. Deal flow continued in the background, but the more interesting signal is around what gets counted, trusted, and physically moved.
Market integrity
- Carbon Herald: ExxonMobil Among Buyers Hit By German Carbon Credit Revocations. German authorities revoking credits from 30 China-based projects, with ExxonMobil named among the affected buyers, is a reminder that offset due-diligence risk now sits on the balance sheet of majors, not just brokers.
- DVNE: CDR Policy: LNe and ANK 2.0 in Motion. Movement on Germany’s Long-Term Negative Emissions strategy and the ANK 2.0 natural climate action program is worth tracking as the policy scaffolding that domestic CDR buyers and suppliers will actually price against.
Deal flow and project progress
- Carbon Herald: remove Continues Streak Of CDR Deals With New Climitra Agreement. Another offtake from the remove accelerator, this time with Climitra, continues the pattern of aggregator-led purchasing filling the gap left by slower corporate direct buying.
- Carbon Herald: The Sitos Biochar Plant In California Advances Towards Commercialization. The Delano, California Treehouse facility moving toward commercial operation is a data point on whether biochar can graduate from pilot economics to sustained delivery at a single site.
- Carbon Herald: New Partnership: ElectraLith To Use Captura’s Tech For Lithium Extraction. Captura licensing its bipolar membrane electrodialysis to a lithium extractor is the kind of co-product play that could subsidize ocean CDR unit economics, if the shared hardware actually scales in both directions.
Infrastructure and adjacent climate tech
- arXiv: Exploring Initial CO2 Transport Topologies for Germany’s Carbon Management. Seibold, Lütz and Brown model early CO2 pipeline network configurations for Germany, framing the problem as jointly optimizing capture investment against transport buildout for residual emissions from cement and waste incineration.
- Heatmap News: Operation Blue Skies. Google’s contrail-avoidance work isn’t CDR, but it’s a useful comparator: a non-CO2 forcing intervention with faster measurement loops than most removal pathways can currently offer buyers.
Meta
- Carbon Removal Updates: Before Next Monday’s CDR Update…. After nearly four years of uninterrupted weekly publication, the newsletter is signaling a change in cadence, worth noting as a bellwether for how sustainable free CDR journalism has proven to be.
The dominant signal this week was integrity and infrastructure catching up to the deal announcements that have driven headlines for two years. Conspicuously absent: any major DAC milestone or a fresh corporate buyer of scale, which continues a quieter stretch on the demand side.