Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. CarbonPlan published a review this week of Lithos Carbon’s first commercial enhanced weathering credit issuance, and the findings should stop every durable CDR buyer mid-contract. CarbonPlan’s analysis says Lithos’s gross removal numbers are surprisingly high and that the team could not reproduce them from the public record. This is the same group whose 2021 forest offset work forced a reckoning in the voluntary market. They are now aiming that same lens at enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the pathway most of the industry has been selling as DAC’s cheaper, near-term successor. The timing matters: ERW developers are the loudest voices at SF Climate Week right now, pitching ERW as the scalable answer after Microsoft’s high-profile pause on some purchases. A credibility challenge to the flagship issuance lands at the worst possible moment. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Biochar’s week was not about credits. It was about assets. In seven days, CHAR Technologies closed on an industrial facility in Quebec, Mangrove Systems absorbed Grain Ecosystem’s project-development pipeline, and a German municipal utility signed on as both offtaker and heat customer. The signal is not who bought tonnes. It’s who bought the plants that make them. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council just signed a BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) offtake with Microsoft for 626,000 tonnes. That’s not the headline most people will remember from this week. But it should be. The structural innovation inside that deal, and the four other numbers below, point to a CDR procurement stack that almost no one is staffed to execute against. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week’s Bluesky chatter wasn’t about the next Microsoft-sized offtake. It was about something quieter and more consequential: Sara Vicca’s note that author teams for the IPCC 2027 Methodology Report on CDR Technologies, CCU and Storage are mobilizing. The fight over who defines durable removal has started, and the experts weighing in aren’t aligned. ...

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 is building the plumbing faster than ever. But the one customer who was paying for most of what flows through it just stopped writing checks. Microsoft has paused all carbon removal purchases, according to reporting from Carbon Herald and Heatmap News. This is not a minor procurement hiccup. Microsoft has been responsible for roughly 90% of global durable CDR demand. When a market has one buyer and that buyer freezes, you don’t have a slowdown. You have a structural crisis. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR sector is panicking about losing credit buyers. Meanwhile, the most resilient carbon removal companies don’t need them, because they’re selling concrete, pavement, and insulation. This is the split that matters right now. While the voluntary carbon market wobbles and major buyers hit pause, a parallel track of CDR is quietly embedding itself into physical products that people already purchase for reasons that have nothing to do with climate guilt. It is happening across biochar, mineralization, and CO₂ utilization at the same time. And it changes the economics of carbon removal in ways the credit-obsessed conversation is missing. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR sector is panicking about losing its biggest patron. But the infrastructure to make that patron optional is being built right now, in parallel, and mostly being ignored. Microsoft has paused new carbon removal purchases. The reaction across the CDR community has been swift and anxious. As James Temple put it: “MSFT is the carbon removal market, so if this is anything more than a brief pause, it’s a v. big deal & v. bad news for an already shaky sector.” He’s right. Microsoft’s outsized role as buyer, signal-sender, and de facto market-maker means this pause sends shockwaves far beyond Redmond. Dirk Paessler noted that the CDR community immediately treated the news as an industry-wide crisis. Even Biochar Today flagged the Microsoft story, which is telling. Biochar has arguably the strongest standalone economics of any CDR pathway. If even that community feels the need to sound the alarm over a single corporate buyer stepping back, it reveals just how deeply the voluntary patronage model has colonized CDR’s collective psychology. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR industry doesn’t have a demand problem. It has a customer concentration problem. And Microsoft just made that painfully clear. Robinson Meyer broke the news this week: Microsoft Is Pausing Carbon Removal Purchases, with the tech giant accounting for more than 90% of industry volume last year. Read that number again. More than ninety percent. When one buyer represents that much of your total market, you don’t have a market. You have a dependency. James Temple put it plainly: “MSFT is the carbon removal market, so if this is anything more than a brief pause, it’s a v. big deal & v. bad news for an already shaky sector.” - James Temple (@jtemple.bsky.social) ...