Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 8 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 concentrated on enhanced rock weathering, with two peer-reviewed papers pulling in opposite directions on whether ERW can actually deliver at scale, alongside a commercial deal extending ERW credit access. Around that core, offshore CCS gains a new contractor entrant and mineralization-in-concrete gets a fresh LCA scrutiny.
ERW: bench progress vs. field limits
- Nature Biotechnology: Engineered bacterial siderophore production accelerates rock weathering for carbon removal. Pilot-scale continuous bioreactors using unprocessed seawater and renewable acetate weathered 4 kg of olivine, with engineered cells delivering directly measured removal of 0.50 g CO2 per day. A wet, engineered pathway rather than the usual basalt-on-fields approach.
- Springer Nature Research Communities: Limitations on carbon dioxide uptake by enhanced weathering. The authors interrogate the core ERW premise: that ground basaltic rock (high Ca and Mg) spread over row-crop agriculture actually raises net weathering CO2 consumption. Useful counterweight to the bullish measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) narrative dominating ERW commercial announcements.
- Carbon Herald: Commons And InPlanet Team Up To Expand Access To High-Integrity ERW Credits. A distribution deal pushing InPlanet’s tropical-basalt ERW credits through the Commons platform, notable mainly because it lands the same week two papers openly question ERW’s uptake ceiling.
CCS and fuels infrastructure
- Carbon Herald: Jan De Nul Secures First Carbon Capture Contract On UK North Sea Pipeline. The Belgian dredging and offshore contractor makes its first CCS move on a UK North Sea pipeline, signaling that marine-infrastructure specialists are now treating CO2 transport as an adjacent line of business to offshore wind and cables.
- Oxford Net Zero: A High-Integrity Route for CORSIA: Integrating Geologically Balanced Fuels. Oxford Net Zero proposes a pathway for geologically balanced fuels to qualify under CORSIA, the aviation sector’s offsetting scheme. Worth reading if you care whether durable removals get a defined home in aviation compliance demand.
Mineralization accounting
- Zenodo: Carbonation-cured concrete: LCA meta-analysis, net-benefit framework, and probabilistic analysis. A systematic review by J.K. Sah proposing a net-benefit condition framework and a minimum reporting set for CO2 mineralization in cement-based systems, aimed at answering when carbonation-cured concrete is actually cleaner on a lifecycle basis.
The dominant signal this week is ERW under simultaneous scientific pressure from both directions: one lab route claiming measured removals in engineered reactors, another paper questioning whether the field-application premise holds. Conspicuously absent: any material DAC delivery or purchase news, and no visible movement from the large corporate buyer cohort.