Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 12 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.
Two direct air capture companies made moves this week that say more about where the money is than where the CO2 ends up: one is relocating to Norway, the other is lining up oil producers as customers for enhanced oil recovery. Alongside that, mineralisation showed up in three different registers (a croplands field study, a lab concrete mix, and a cement-waste review), and the nature-based and ocean pathways drew the kind of scrutiny that arrives once a method starts scaling. The thread is that removal is being tested less on chemistry this week than on where it sits in the real economy and on the ground.
DAC business models under pressure
- Carbon Herald: Sirona Technologies Shifts Focus To DACCS In Norway, Pausing Middle East Project. Pausing Project Moringa in the Middle East and concentrating on Norwegian DACCS is a small company’s read on where geological storage, permitting, and offtake look most bankable; the geography of DAC keeps drifting toward jurisdictions with a working storage story rather than the cheapest energy.
- Carbon Herald: Spiritus Insk First Three Letters Of Intent With US Oil And Gas Producers For On-Site EOR CO2 Supply. Supplying captured CO2 to oil producers for enhanced oil recovery is the revenue path much of the removal sector has spent years distancing itself from; three letters of intent are not contracts, but they show a DAC developer willing to sell molecules on site rather than wait for credit buyers.
Mineralisation, from field to lab to kiln
- CDRXIV: Evidence of rapid basalt dissolution in Southeastern US croplands. Milliken et al. report field evidence that crushed basalt applied to croplands in the Southeastern US is dissolving rapidly, a direct test of the weathering rates that enhanced weathering with silicate rocks relies on as a proposed carbon dioxide removal method.
- sciencedaily.com: This new concrete is stronger and pulls CO2 from the air. The researchers describe a concrete mixture that is both stronger and able to absorb carbon dioxide, meaning the CO2 uptake comes alongside a structural improvement rather than at the expense of one.
- sciencedirect.com: Mineral carbonation of cement-plant residues and industrial by-products: Process pathways, cement-kiln flue-gas integration and technology readiness. A review that maps process pathways for carbonating cement-plant residues and industrial by-products, examines integration with cement-kiln flue gas, and assesses technology readiness, positioning itself against earlier reviews that covered mineralisation in construction materials, alkaline industrial wastes, and industrial flue-gas use separately.
Governance and scrutiny of open-system pathways
- hoi.edu: New international coalition establishes shared principles for responsible research into ocean iron-based carbon removal. Ocean iron fertilisation carries a history of contested experiments, so a coalition agreeing on coordination, information sharing, transparency, and common standards before field research expands is as much a social licence exercise as a scientific one.
- environmentalpaper.org: Dry Streams in an Ocean of Eucalyptus: new report calls for Aperam expansion to be halted. Biochar credits are only as clean as their feedstock, and this investigation links Aperam BioEnergia’s charcoal and biochar production in Brazil’s Upper Jequitinhonha Valley to decades of eucalyptus plantation impacts, ending with a call to halt expansion; buyers of Brazilian biochar removals should read the provenance chain closely.
The dominant signal was commercial realism: DAC developers chasing storage jurisdictions and oil-field customers rather than waiting for a voluntary market to mature. Conspicuously absent was any large buyer announcement or policy decision to counterbalance it, leaving the week’s supply-side pragmatism without a demand-side answer.