Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR market got new public plumbing this month, and it counts tonnes far better than it counts cleared prices. Of the deals I looked at, only one, Frontier Climate’s purchase from 44.01, published a firm dollar figure and a firm tonnage in the same breath. The new tools show supply, maturity and indicative price, not what buyers actually paid Nasdaq and Relae launched a Carbon Issuance Calendar that Puro.earth describes as a centralised view of upcoming durable CDR offtake, bringing together delivery timelines, indicative pricing and project maturity assessments in one place. That is more than a volume list. But indicative pricing is a seller’s forward signal, not a record of what a buyer agreed to pay, and the gap between the two is exactly the number developers and lenders need. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 10,000 years is the minimum storage guarantee Stefan Rahmstorf says carbon sequestration must meet before it counts as acceptable climate mitigation, and he does not think anyone can give it. The number is not new. Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf.bsky.social on Bluesky) pulled it this week from a 2006 German government advisory report he co-authored and quoted it word for word: “Therefore, sequestration can only be regarded as an acceptable climate mitigation technology if long-term CO2 storage for at least 10,000 years can be guaranteed.” His gloss was five words long: “I.e., it is not a realistic option.” The reference point it displaces is the one the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry actually works to, where monitoring horizons run in decades and permits in years. Twenty years on, the co-author still treats his own threshold as disqualifying. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Add biochar to a field that is also getting crushed rock and you get, at best, the same inorganic carbon removal and a soil organic carbon pool that starts moving. That is the combined reading of two recent studies, and it answers a question that stacked-practice developers mostly skip: is weathering plus an organic carbon input a sum, or an interaction? ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The United States has injected 100 times more CO2 into oil fields than into dedicated storage over four decades. That is ProPublica’s finding, quoted by Lisa Song (@lisalsong.bsky.social on Bluesky): “Over the last 40 years, American companies have injected 100 times more CO2 into drilling fields as a way to extract more oil than they have into what CCS industry insiders call ‘dedicated’ CO2 storage reservoirs.” Meanwhile Octavia Carbon reports its Kenyan pilot is now pulling CO2 from the air, and CarpeCarbon has signed to put its first industrial-scale DAC unit at a Michelin plant in Italy. Capture is the visible half. The half that decides whether a tonne counts, the well, the permit and the certificate, is where the rules are being written now. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Simon Evans attached a single number to the UK net-zero debate in one line: “For context, the CCC says that the net cost of reaching net-zero by 2050 is… £108bn over 25 yrs” (@drsimevans.carbonbrief.org on Bluesky). The post said nothing about carbon removal. That is exactly why I am writing about it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Global underground CO2 storage reached 43.6 million tonnes in 2024, while a maize plot in Shenyang received biochar at 2.63 tonnes per hectare per year, a ratio of roughly seventeen million to one. Both numbers are real and both matter for CDR, but neither converts into the other. This week’s figures each arrive in the unit their host geography can produce: a basin, a plant, a field, a mine, or a national treasury. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Two recent CDR debt deals point to the same gate, and it is not the offtake. Citi’s $72M note for Applied Carbon’s Texas biochar and HASI’s $34M term loan for Terradot’s rock weathering each put the real underwriting work on one question: who absorbs a tonne that never gets verified. They answer it in opposite ways. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Peak warming moves by at most about 0.025 °C. That is what novel carbon removal plus geological storage buys by 2050 in a new preprint, even when the model is told to assume the best. The critique, in the authors’ words The paper is Merfort, de Jonge-Anderson, Dorndorf et al., on Research Square, titled ‘Limited contribution of novel Carbon Dioxide Removal and Geological Carbon Storage to reducing peak warming’. Its abstract states that ’even under highly optimistic assumptions, geological carbon storage and novel carbon removal contribute only 32–51 GtCO₂ cumulatively by 2050’, a total it benchmarks at ‘approximately one year’ of global emissions. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 0.27%. That is the share of the EU Innovation Fund’s latest €3.4 billion round that went to direct air capture, the first time the program has funded one at all. The first EU DACCS grant is a ceiling, not a cheque The European Commission selected Sirona Technologies’ Furu project for up to €9.1 million (about $10.2 million), making it the first direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS, meaning machines that pull CO2 from ambient air and lock it away permanently) project ever backed by the Innovation Fund. The award sits inside a round that spread €3.4 billion across 77 projects in 23 countries. Independent coverage from Balkan Green Energy News flagged two debuts in the same round: a small modular reactor and a direct air capture project. So DACCS entered the Commission’s flagship industrial grant program through the same door as nuclear. It just entered with a much smaller suitcase. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. AI entered CDR this week in three roles at once: as a measurement tool, as a buyer, and as a competitor for the clean power and land that removal depends on. Nearly all the public commentary on AI and climate landed on the third role, and the role with the most direct effect on credit quality, measurement, drew the least scrutiny. ...