Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers dropped into the CDR literature and market this week. They point in the same direction: the addressable market is smaller, slower, and more contingent than the headline tonnage claims suggest. Every one of these figures either shrinks a pathway, revokes past tonnes, or attaches a condition that most 2024-era models did not price. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story A field trial off a working oyster farm produced the first direct biological measurements of olivine exposure on a commercial shellfish species, and the effect was small. Emilia Jankowska and colleagues posted the preprint Limited impact on oysters in first-of-its-kind field trial of marine CDR on CDRXIV in January 2025. This is not a mesocosm and not a model. It is olivine deployed in the water near cultivated oysters, with the animals themselves as the receptor. For a decade, marine enhanced rock weathering (ERW, the practice of dissolving crushed silicate rock to draw down CO2) has been blocked by an unfalsified hypothesis that olivine will poison shellfish. The field has tested that hypothesis on the animal regulators actually care about. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three policy events this week did more to define CDR demand than any buyer coalition announcement. Heidelberg shelved a $1.36B cement capture project in Canada. The UK closed a consultation on domestic CO2 supply. Bangladesh issued its first Article 6 authorization. Read together, they say the same thing: credit-buyers alone cannot make a market when state procurement rules are absent, ambiguous, or auctioned to the highest political bidder. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus Ask any European climate policy shop how the EU closes its 2030 gap and you will hear the same answer: the LULUCF (land use, land-use change and forestry) sink delivers roughly 300 MtCO2 of removals, and engineered CDR fills a small residual. This 300 MtCO2 line sits inside the EU’s climate architecture, national accounts, and the sizing of every removal instrument being drafted right now, including the emerging permanent-removals pathway into the EU ETS (Negative Emissions Platform). Land does the heavy lifting. Engineered removal is the garnish. ...

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 “One buyer at 93% of demand is a market failure, not a market. Microsoft’s 80% cut proves it. Public procurement across methods, like reverse auctions with delivery contracts, would fund learning curves.” That was my read on Bluesky this week (@captaindrawdown on Bluesky), and it is the sharpest version of the structural critique now aimed at voluntary CDR. Strip away the tonnage headlines and the argument is simple: a market with one dominant buyer is not a market. It is a concentration risk with a sustainability report attached. ...

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 Enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is being sold as one of the most measurable, durable removal pathways in the CDR toolkit. Buyers pay a premium precisely because grinding basalt onto soil is supposed to leave a traceable inorganic carbon signal. A newly published four-year German pot trial found no such signal above measurement noise. If the longest continuous field test can’t detect the carbon that Isometric, Puro, and Frontier Climate protocols are certifying, the case for paying on modeled tonnes deserves a hard second look. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Where should the next corporate mitigation dollar go? Into a tonne of carbon removal priced by an open market, or into a coal-mine methane vent that could be plugged tomorrow at a profit? Two European advocates writing this month give directly opposite answers, and the answer your procurement team picks will be encoded in whichever standard you sign onto. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. On November 12, Tim Jesper Suhrhoff posted a chart that ought to change how enhanced weathering buyers read the literature. His finding: peer-reviewed terrestrial enhanced weathering papers are doubling every 2.8 years. Preprints are doubling every 1.3 years. “Enhanced weathering publications are growing exponentially. For peer-reviewed terrestrial EW papers, the estimated doubling time is ~2.8 years (R² = 0.92). Outside formal peer review, growth is even faster: ~1.3 years,” he wrote (@climatejesper.bsky.social). Enhanced weathering (ERW) is the CDR pathway that spreads crushed silicate rock on land to accelerate the natural reaction between minerals and CO2. The science underneath it is now moving faster than the review system that certifies it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three policy fronts, read together, expose CDR’s real regulatory risk. Switzerland bound companies to interim removal volumes in January 2025. The Science Based Targets initiative opened comments on its draft Net Zero Standard 2.0 in March 2025, and the final standard is still pending. And this week a rural revolt against CO2 pipelines in the US and Canada got loud enough that Carbon Brief flagged it as the read of the week. Read together, the fight has shifted. It is no longer whether removals count. It is whether demand-side rules will force buyers to procure tonnes before the physical infrastructure to deliver them is socially permitted. ...

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 deal flow forms a map, not a technology chart. Five numbers from five jurisdictions show that where a project sits, and under which regulator, is now the primary determinant of whether it finances. The pathway matters less than the postcode. 1.77 million credits. Rwanda authorized Econetix to market up to 1.77M CORSIA-eligible credits under Article 6, per Biochar Today’s reporting on the ICAO letter. This is a government-issued letter of authorization sized for compliance aviation demand. Article 6 supply is being minted at the host-country level, and Rwanda moved first at this volume. ...