The Weekly State of CDR — March 30, 2026
A million tonnes in a single week. Science closing in on cheap DAC. And a German think tank asking the question nobody wants to answer.
The Gigaton Tracker
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Spent on CO₂ removal | $11.5B |
| CO₂ sold | 44.3 Mt |
| CO₂ delivered | ~1.2 Mt (2.7%) |
| Active purchasers | 1,023 |
| Active suppliers | 735 |
| Target | 10 Gt/year by 2050 |
Numbers held steady from last week — the CDR.fyi figures update as deals close, not as they’re announced. What changed was the rate of announcement: multiple deals, multiple continents, a single seven-day stretch. The procurement machine is running. The delivery machine still has a 2.7% completion rate against the contracts signed.
The Headline Take
We crossed one million tonnes of CDR purchased in a single week. That’s the number. A few years ago, that was a full year’s volume. Now it’s a Monday-through-Sunday story.
The deals weren’t flukes. Google signed 200,000 tonnes of biochar via AMP Robotics — AI-sorted municipal waste converted to stable carbon. Bolivia entered the CDR market through Altitude’s deal with Empacar: 305,000 tonnes, Puro.earth methodology, starting 2027. ClimeFi’s Beyond 2030 round seeks up to 500,000 tonnes with a 200-year permanence floor. UK aviation committed £2 million in GGR credits. Canada stayed the only government actively buying CDR credits while announcing a new Climeworks headquarters in its territory.
The procurement story is real. What’s still not resolved: whether the delivery rate climbs to meet it.
This Week in CDR
A. Biochar’s Banner Week
Biochar had a week so strong it’s worth treating as its own section. Google’s 200k-tonne deal with AMP Robotics used AI-sorted municipal solid waste as feedstock — not agricultural residues, not forestry byproduct. That’s a first-principles innovation in biochar supply chain design: take organic material that was heading to landfill (with its attendant methane release), convert it, and store the carbon. The avoided emissions plus the removal makes the accounting more attractive than most biochar projects.
Bolivia’s entry via Altitude’s deal with Empacar is a different kind of signal. Empacar isn’t a climate startup — it’s a major Bolivian industrial company with supply chain experience. When established industrial players build CDR business units, the pathway starts looking less like a startup bet and more like an industry transition.
In China, Tsinghua researchers found that growing bioenergy crops on abandoned farmland could deliver 25.8 million tonnes of CDR annually — roughly doubling biochar’s current theoretical potential in that country alone. The key insight: abandoned land avoids the food-versus-fuel competition that bedevils most biomass CDR proposals. Supply constraints have been biochar’s ceiling. This is a ceiling-raising paper.
ClimeFi’s Beyond 2030 round adds demand-side aggregation to the picture: 100k–500k tonnes, pathway-agnostic, 200-year permanence minimum. No forestry offsets. The voluntary market is quietly developing quality standards that the compliance markets haven’t achieved yet.
B. The EU Gets Its First CRCF Transaction
The week’s policy story landed in Stockholm. Nasdaq and Adyen completed the first publicly announced transaction under the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework, purchasing carbon removal units from Stockholm Exergi’s BioCCS project. ClimeFi structured the deal.
This matters because CRCF is supposed to be the regulatory infrastructure that gives European carbon removal credibility. The fact that Nasdaq — which runs market infrastructure for a living — is a buyer sends a specific signal: this isn’t PR, it’s asset acquisition under a framework they expect to hold.
Meanwhile, Finland modeled up to 8.6 Mt CO₂eq/year removal potential through 2050, with kraft pulp mills as the backbone — and we covered why pulp mills are exceptional BECCS candidates: existing infrastructure, concentrated CO₂ streams, industrial-scale operations. Finland has 50+ kraft pulp mills. If half of them add carbon capture, the math gets interesting.
And Austria’s Graz researchers made an uncomfortable point: less than 10% of annual GHG emissions can be sustainably removed per year across all natural and technological sinks. That constraint reframes who gets to claim CDR in their net-zero accounting — and makes fair allocation a climate justice question, not just a technical one.
C. DAC: Materials and Market
Two DAC stories worth holding together.
Chiba University’s viciazites capture CO₂ and release it below 60°C — squarely in the range of industrial waste heat. If desorption temperature drops below what factories dump into the atmosphere unused, you’ve potentially eliminated 40-60% of DAC’s operating costs. It’s lab-scale materials science, not a deployed plant. But it’s the exact research direction the field needs.
The Aircapture-Corning partnership is a different kind of signal: a 30B+ industrial manufacturer transitioning from R&D collaboration to commercial deployment. Corning has spent a century solving precision manufacturing problems — optical fiber, display glass, specialty ceramics. When that kind of industrial capability enters the DAC supply chain, cost curves change.
And we addressed the energy argument that keeps circulating: a new study puts actual numbers on DAC’s energy demand under the 1.5°C scenario. The numbers are smaller than the rhetoric suggests. The argument that “DAC needs too much energy” is worth reading carefully before repeating.
D. The Political Fragility Question
Felix Schenuit’s paper from Liberale Moderne — covered in our Germany CDR piece — made an argument that deserves more airtime than it got: CDR’s entire investment rationale rests on net-zero policy architecture. Remove the targets, and the demand disappears.
This isn’t hypothetical. Policy backsliding is active in multiple countries, and the question of what CDR is for when 2050 commitments get quietly revised is one the industry hasn’t fully answered. Schenuit argues CDR needs to demonstrate short-term, tangible value beyond carbon accounting. For BECCS and enhanced weathering, there are co-benefits to point to. For direct air capture, the case is almost entirely policy-dependent.
Canada’s position provides a counterpoint — government buying programs, new corporate headquarters, active procurement. But Canada is exceptional right now precisely because most other governments are not moving with similar urgency.
Signal vs. Noise
Signal: The 1 million tonnes/week milestone is real market maturation, not a single-deal anomaly. Multiple buyers, multiple pathways, multiple continents. That’s supply chain development.
Noise: PlanetWEST’s $30/ton DAC claim — clever concept, no published methodology, no independent verification. The current frontier is $300-1,000/ton depending on the project. Claims at 10x better than the frontier need data, not press releases.
Signal: Equatic’s OAE lab results — 96-98% CO₂ removal efficiency in seawater alkalinization. Ocean CDR is getting more empirically concrete. Arukah issuing the first Puro.earth biochar CORCs in Cambodia is geographic diversification of the MRV supply chain.
Pathway Pulse
Enhanced Weathering: Absent from deal flow this week, but CDI’s ongoing greenhouse work continues. Policy discussion active in Germany. Status: building.
DAC: Viciazites + Aircapture/Corning + energy demand study — good materials and supply chain week. Costs still far from targets. Status: advancing.
Biochar: Best week in memory. Google, Bolivia, Tsinghua, ClimeFi. Multiple geographies, multiple supply chain innovations. Status: accelerating.
BECCS: Stockholm BECCS gets EU’s first CRCF transaction. Finland maps pulp mill infrastructure. Drax exploring data centre colocation. Biomass sourcing questions unresolved. Status: maturing.
Ocean CDR: Equatic’s lab results add empirical weight. Still pre-commercial. Status: early.
Soil Carbon: Not prominent this week. Natural vs. tech CDR framing covered the broader context. Status: quiet.
Forests/Natural Sinks: Afforestation vs DAC explainer addressed the false competition narrative. Natural sinks are stressed, not stable. Status: under pressure.
The Long View
The CDR market is developing an interesting two-speed character. Procurement is moving faster than delivery. Policy is more fragile than investment assumptions suggest. And the geographies shifting fastest — Canada, Finland, Bolivia, Cambodia, China — aren’t necessarily the ones with the loudest climate policy noise.
The 1 million tonnes/week milestone is real. The 2.7% delivery rate is also real. Those two numbers have to converge if any of this works at the scale the climate math requires. For now, the gap between committed and delivered is where the work is.
One week doesn’t resolve that. But this one moved the numbers.
CaptainDrawdown is an AI-powered CDR media project by Carbon Drawdown Initiative. On a mission to speed up negative emissions.