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 250 Mt figure settles how much, not which tonnes or whether they arrive Carbon Gap’s explainer on the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) puts a single number in front of European removal suppliers: the European Commission plans to fund 250 million tonnes of carbon removal through the ETS by 2040 (Carbon Gap on LinkedIn). The plan itself traces back to the Commission’s July legislative proposal for the ETS review, so the volume is not new. What Carbon Gap adds is the framing. The post says the rules now have to answer two questions: will they make sure the removals happen, and which removals will count (same post). I think that framing is right, and it changes how suppliers should read the number. 250 Mt is a ceiling on possible demand. It is not a commitment to any method. ...

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 Ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) credits are sold by the tonne, but the removal behind each tonne is set by the water the alkalinity goes into. Last week, on 1 and 2 October, three open data deposits and one preprint landed that each treat location as the variable rather than the footnote: a global coastal efficiency study with its figure data and code on Zenodo, a lab dataset on how flow affects hydroxide dissolution, and a 20-day microcosm study from the upwelling system off northwest Spain. Read together, they say an OAE project’s address decides its carbon math. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Does a carbon removal developer need one big named buyer before a lender will write a cheque? Two debt deals that landed in the same news cycle answer that question two different ways, and the fact that both closed is the finding. AMP borrowed against a facility whose credits feed a single Google contract. Vaulted Deep borrowed against a national expansion with no single offtaker named in the financing coverage. Both lenders said yes. Both borrowers handle garbage for a living. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers, two of them from recent announcements and three from undated modeling and commentary, point at the same gap: the word “tonne” on a removal invoice says nothing about how long the carbon stays out of the air. Critics argue that silence is a defect in the product itself. On the evidence below, they are mostly right. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critic is the model’s own issue tracker The sharpest critique of biochar unit economics right now is not from a skeptic outside the field. It sits in the open issue tracker of the Biochar_AG model (@domwoolf/Biochar_AG on GitHub), where Issue #106 states the problem in two sentences: “It assumes every plant sells all its heat, year-round. Rural residue areas rarely have large heat users (industrial process heat, district heating).” The issue adds that the model has no spatial heat-demand layer, so revenue per tonne may be overstated exactly where crop and forest residues actually sit. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Taiwan’s biochar target will be counted under rules written elsewhere, and those rules rest on stability methods that researchers are still assembling. A national target that borrows its measuring stick Peng Chi-ming, Taiwan’s environment minister, told a European podcast that his ministry is aiming for 1 million tonnes of biochar carbon removal per year by 2030, and that it will build its certification and trading system by referencing four outside frameworks: the EU’s CRCF (the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming regulation), the European Biochar Certificate (EBC), Japan’s agricultural biochar strategy and the EU CRCF Buyers’ Club (Taiwan’s environment minister Peng Chi-ming sets a goal of 1 million tonnes of biochar carbon removal per year by 2030). Three of the four are European. None is Taiwanese. That is a reasonable shortcut for a ministry that wants an internationally compatible system, and it has one consequence Peng did not spell out: whatever those frameworks assume about how long biochar carbon stays in the ground, Taiwan’s target inherits. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Farm lime in the Mississippi River Basin removes carbon on net, at about 90% of its ideal CO2 removal potential, and the lime spread there since 1900 adds up to roughly 0.44 GtCO2 (billion tonnes of CO2) of removal. That is the headline of Agricultural liming is a carbon sink in the Mississippi River Basin, a Nature paper from Tim Jesper Suhrhoff, Christopher Reinhard, Yoshiki Kanzaki and colleagues. Most emissions inventories book that same lime as a CO2 source. One of them is wrong. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast: operating retrofits, not new builds, will supply most durable tonnes buyers can actually receive through March 2027 Durable CDR volume over the next six months will come mostly from plants that already run. ADM’s Nebraska bioethanol capture operation, now offering credits through Puro.earth at 800,000 tonnes per year, is the clearest case. Its Columbus facility opened in 2025 on more than a decade of ADM capture experience, so the operator risk (does the compressor run, does the well accept CO2, does the meter agree with the model) is largely behind it. New-build developers face all of that risk ahead of them. The practitioner’s question is not who has the best process. It is who can hand a registry verified tonnes this year. And the answer is retrofit plants. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. £783,749.20. That is the value of the tender Climeworks won from the UK government to offset emissions from a construction project, reported by Quantum Commodity Intelligence at roughly $1.04 million. The state was a rule-setter. Now it is also a buyer. Until this award, the UK’s role in removals ran through targets and frameworks. A Nature Climate Change paper notes that the UK is the only country that explicitly separates emissions reductions from removals, and that it carries a 5 MtCO2 deployment target for novel CDR by 2030. That target tells suppliers what the government wants to exist. It does not put money on a contract. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Austria has published a draft law to end a storage ban that has stood since 2011 Austria, a country with no coastline and no offshore storage of its own, has published a draft Kohlenstoffdioxid-Speicherungsgesetz, a CO2 Storage Act that would lift the national ban on geological CO2 storage in place since 2011 (Europe Says). It is a draft. Permitting conditions, scope and timing are not settled, and no developer can treat it as a legal basis for injecting a single tonne yet. But the direction is what matters. For fourteen years the legal answer to “can captured CO2 stay in Austria?” was no. The draft reopens the question, and the coverage reads it as a removal story, specifically an opening for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), rather than only a fossil-plant capture story (Bytes Europe). That is the right reading for a landlocked country. ...