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 policy at one glance. Alberta’s TIER system, short for Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction, is the province’s carbon pricing regime for large industrial emitters. According to reporting from Carbon Herald, a new federal-Alberta agreement weakens the effective TIER price trajectory and loosens compliance obligations, and the change lands squarely on a $400 million Strathcona carbon capture facility whose investment case assumed a rising compliance price. The rules bind Alberta’s industrial emitters. They bite the moment a project’s revenue model, built on yesterday’s price curve, meets today’s revision. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The demand-side pessimists are fighting the last war on carbon removal The consensus. Ask a well-informed climate person why CDR isn’t scaling and you’ll get some version of what Dan Miller (@danmiller999 on Bluesky) posted this week: “CDR does exist but isn’t scaling because no one wants to pay for it. ‘We’ll make future generations pay for it.’ is our attitude so we can party harder now.” David Ho (@davidho on Bluesky) sharpens the same knife when he calls CDR “nonexistent.” This is not a fringe view. It is the dominant frame in academic climate circles heading into 2026: buyers won’t pay, tonnes don’t arrive, the whole edifice is vibes. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Within the next 180 days, at least one major CDR registry will either publish a methodology amendment addressing humidity-swing and water-managed DAC sorbents, or issue an explicit deferral notice acknowledging the gap. The forcing function is a new arXiv preprint, Vacuum Moisture Swing Direct Air Capture: A Low-Thermal, Water-Managed Pathway, which reframes the binding constraint of air capture from regeneration heat to water activity. Current DAC accounting frameworks, including Isometric DAC Protocol v1.3, were engineered around thermal or electrical regeneration energy. They do not separately quantify or audit water as a parasitic load or as a lifecycle input. That mismatch is now visible, and the first non-thermal sorbent project seeking issuance will surface it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique, in the critic’s own words “Smart Art,” wrote veteran energy journalist Peter Fairley (@peter.fairley.ca on Bluesky) this week, flagging ProPublica and Drilled’s False Promises investigation. The package’s operator-level charge is sharp: real capture installations chronically miss their design capture rates, and the industry papers over the gap with nameplate figures in press releases. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Europe just turned its removals regulation into a live procurement venue, and most suppliers outside the bloc haven’t noticed. The Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Buyers’ Club website went live this week, giving certified European suppliers and corporate buyers a single matchmaking layer under one EU-defined methodology. That is a quiet but important shift: the CRCF stops being a 2027 paper framework and starts behaving like the price-setting venue for what counts as a “removal” inside Europe. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why does one industrial CO2 project on the North Atlantic rim get a $2.6 billion sovereign check while another, on the opposite shore, gets sued by its pipe supplier? Same capture chemistry. Same decade. Same broad climate logic. Different geography, and the geography is doing almost all the work. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. On Wednesday, Zeke Hausfather posted a thread that quietly reframed the most expensive argument in carbon removal procurement. “We have a new paper out on the value of reversible carbon storage in a zero-emissions world,” he wrote. “We try and answer the question of when it makes sense to ‘rent’ vs ‘buy’ CDR” (@hausfath on Bluesky). ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week, four buyers entered the CDR market through four different financial instruments, and each instrument quietly disqualifies a different class of supplier. The buyer side is not one archetype. It is bifurcating, and the fragmentation is what’s driving the price dispersion that everyone keeps puzzling over. Start with the evidence. JPMorgan Chase extended $20M in venture debt to Charm Industrial alongside an expanded 61,500-tonne offtake, according to Charm’s announcement on LinkedIn. Venture debt is an instrument U.S. banks already understand from their tech book. It needs collateral. Charm has a pyrolyzer fleet and bio-oil injection wells, so the loan has something to attach to. That instrument quietly selects for capex-heavy operators with hard assets. A credit aggregator could not have taken this deal. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers landed this week that, read together, form a coherent critique of how the CDR sector is talking about itself. The headline figures are real. They are also small enough that the canonical sector report now calls the gap “hard to fathom.” The critics are no longer on the outside. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 9,566 tonnes of CO2, verified and issued from a single enhanced rock weathering batch on tea estates in West Bengal. That is the new high-water mark for enhanced rock weathering, the process of spreading crushed silicate rock on land so it reacts with CO2 and locks it into bicarbonate. Until last week, no ERW operator had cleared five figures in one issuance. The previous reference points were a few thousand tonnes per batch from UK and US developers like UNDO and Lithos, plus Mombak’s first Isometric-verified ERW credits out of Brazil, which Captain Drawdown covered when Mombak generated its first batch. Alt Carbon, founded by brothers Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal, just roughly tripled the category ceiling in one shot. ...