Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Puro.earth says its median time from carbon removal supplier submission to credit issuance dropped to 22 days in 2026, down from 40 days in 2025, per its own LinkedIn announcement. That figure is self-reported and not independently audited, so treat it as a claim, not a verified statistic. But if it holds, my forecast is this: by Q1 2027, time-to-cash, not price per tonne, becomes the primary axis of competition among durable CDR registries, and registries that cannot clear issuance in under 30 days will lose material share of new biochar and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) supplier registrations. The reason is arithmetic. Every day a verified tonne sits unissued is a day of working capital a thin-margin operator must finance. Cutting median latency from 40 to 22 days shortens the cash conversion cycle by nearly three weeks per batch. On a simple 12 percent annual cost of capital, that is roughly 0.6 percent of credit value saved per cycle, illustrative math on my part, and it compounds across every batch a facility ships. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Capture technology is being sorted into national stacks before it ever reaches a competitive market. Three deals reported this week, each in a different jurisdiction, follow the same template: a domestic anchor absorbs or bankrolls a capture startup, and the credits get spoken for before any buyer sees a price. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance. The European Commission has adopted the first technical methodologies under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation, covering afforestation, agroforestry, and soil carbon, according to the Commission’s certification-schemes page. Italian legal analysts at Rete Clima report that the framework treats carbon farming units as temporary by design, with monitoring obligations attached. Who is bound: project developers seeking EU certification, the certification schemes that will audit them, and any buyer making claims on the units. When it bites: the moment the first schemes are recognized and units start issuing. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The most influential analysts in carbon removal have declared the traditional voluntary carbon market dead. Robert Höglund, one of the sector’s sharpest public voices, published what amounts to an obituary in The end of high hopes for the traditional VCM, framing SBTi’s non-endorsement of reduction credits as the final nail in the coffin. In a companion post the same week, he argued that “In practice, removals-only requirements for corporate net zero is the highest-integrity choice and the only one that aligns with the global definition of net zero” (In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals). That view now dominates buyer coalitions and corporate net-zero discourse. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story in one paragraph A new paper in Communications Sustainability, part of the Nature portfolio, proposes throwing out the way the carbon market sorts its products. Instead of labeling credits as avoidance, reduction, or removal, the authors argue projects should be classified by the physical carbon-cycle mechanism they act on: preventing a flux of CO2, protecting an existing carbon pool, or enlarging a pool (Mechanism-based framework enables consistent assessment of carbon offsetting projects). That sounds like taxonomy housekeeping. It is not. It is a rubric that would let corporate buyers judge every credit by what it physically does to the carbon cycle, something the old three-bucket system has never delivered. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers this week trace the same shape: CDR operators are retreating from headline tonnage promises and digging into narrow positions they can actually defend. The capital is going to certification rails, embedded products, and the power layer underneath removal. The gigatonne talk is getting quieter, and the invoices are getting more specific. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now. On 17 July, the European Commission publishes its review of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), Europe’s carbon market. The publication was just delayed by two days, a small signal of how contested the drafting still is. This single document will determine whether Europe’s new carbon removal certification framework becomes a source of real, bankable demand for CDR, or remains a labeling scheme with no buyer of last resort. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Mat Meredith went on the Raw Green podcast this week and framed his whole industry’s problem in five words. His team’s promo put it plainly: he sat down “for a wide-ranging conversation on enhanced rock weathering (ERW) and what it actually takes to prove carbon removal works” (@undocarbon on LinkedIn). Not what it takes to deploy. Not what it takes to fund. What it takes to prove. That word choice is the whole strategy, and the strategy has a postal code: Kingston, Ontario. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,200 tonnes. That is the total volume of greenhouse gas allowances that cleared on the debut trading day of Vietnam’s first national carbon exchange, which opened Monday. A single mid-sized coal unit emits that much in under two hours. The number to hold it against is $8.5 billion. That is what Abatable’s new report estimates as Southeast Asia’s CORSIA credit opportunity through 2035. CORSIA is the international aviation sector’s carbon offsetting scheme, and Abatable models Vietnam as a headline supplier within it. Run the math and day-one exchange volume works out to roughly 0.0004% of the annual tonnage that thesis requires. The gap between the marketed opportunity and the venue meant to clear it is not a rounding error. It is the whole story. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three carbon capture and storage (CCS) announcements landed this week, and together they answer a question the industry has been dodging. The variable that decides whether a project survives is no longer capture cost or reservoir geology. It’s who sits on the cap table. Projects with a sovereign or a First Nation holding equity moved forward. Projects built on private balance sheets alone died. ...