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 question: who buys a removed tonne, and where do they live? Canada and the EU now give opposite answers. On 2026-09-24 Canada said it will develop a carbon removal policy framework under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, the article that lets countries cooperate on their national climate targets, according to Reuters. The European Commission’s proposal to bring permanent removals into the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) predates that announcement. What landed alongside the Canadian news was a joint statement from five European removal associations welcoming the proposal and pushing for design changes (Carbon Herald). So these are not two governments moving in step. One is announcing intent, the other is already arguing over clauses. The direction still contrasts cleanly: Ottawa treats removals as an export, Brussels as a domestic compliance input. ...

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 CarbonPlan’s latest Modeling Bytes installment found that swapping daily weather inputs for monthly or annual averages raised modeled rock weathering by 10-20% across eight example sites, and the carbon removal number did not move in step with it. That gap, between how much rock dissolves and how much CO2 a buyer can claim, is the whole business of enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the practice of spreading crushed silicate rock on farmland so it reacts with CO2 in soil water. The critics are not saying the rock does nothing. They are saying the conversion step deserves the same scrutiny as the field data. ...

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 “Sometimes the future-tech is used as excuse to do nothing in the present.” That is Aurel Wünsch (@aurel.indoorco2map.com on Bluesky), applying the mitigation-deterrence argument to DAC. The market news that gives his line new teeth this week: Spiritus has signed its first three letters of intent with US oil and gas producers for on-site CO2 supply for enhanced oil recovery (Carbon Herald). ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The prevailing view at every CDR panel I have watched this year runs like this: novel removal projects (enhanced rock weathering, direct air capture, bioenergy with capture and storage) keep stalling because publics don’t understand them. Fix the messaging, run a town hall, publish a nice explainer, and the NIMBY problem eases. Kevin Lee Caster captured the mood bluntly on Bluesky: “Sadly, far too many people have been tricked into opposing Carbon Dioxide Removal and Sequestration as this story clearly demonstrates” (@kevinleecaster on Bluesky). Opposition, in this frame, is a comms failure. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Last week, Etienne Schneider posted a short, precise warning into the middle of Europe’s biggest CDR policy fight. “CDR is often linked to mitigation deterrence (MD): the risk that expected removals delay or replace emission reductions. The EU and UK now plan to integrate CDR into their emissions trading schemes,” he wrote (@etienneschneider on Bluesky). That is the whole question in two sentences. It is also the question the EU ETS revision is about to answer, whether negotiators want to face it or not. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The three biggest CDR operator moves this week share one structural feature: none of them invented a capture step. ADM, Vaulted Deep, and Exomad Green are each monetizing a CO2 or biomass stream that already existed as an industrial cost. Start with ADM. The company entered the voluntary carbon market this week with 800,000 tonnes of removal capacity registered on Puro.earth, according to Carbon Herald. Those tonnes are not new capture. They are CO2 already being separated at ADM’s ethanol and agricultural processing facilities, now routed into a market structure that can sell them as durable removals. Puro.earth flagged the entry on LinkedIn as “Significant news for the engineered carbon removal market”, which is itself notable: the “engineered” label now stretches to cover industrial CO2 co-product streams from ag processing. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers this week point the same direction. The gating factor for a saleable tonne of carbon removal is no longer whether the technology works. It is whether the tonne fits inside a specific rulebook: ICAO’s CORSIA, the London Protocol, a registry protocol a regulator has blessed, or a corporate-claims framework built by SBTi and Gold Standard. Policy is setting price, permanence, and eligibility. ...

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 team led by Shannon Sterling has posted the first quantified field trial of river alkalinity enhancement, adding alkaline minerals to the Kvina River in southern Norway and measuring the resulting carbon removal. The preprint, Quantified Carbon Dioxide Removal from an Alkalinity Addition Field Trial in the Kvina River, Norway, landed on CDRXIV this month. It matters because it moves a whole pathway class, river alkalinity enhancement, or RAE, from a whiteboard concept to a number. And it does so in a very specific place, chosen for very specific reasons, which is the story worth pulling apart. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. What does “biochar carbon removal” actually mean in 2026? Two seed rounds closed this week under the same pathway label. PyroCCS in Germany raised from Lotus One and Counteract. Biochar Industrial Group raised $1.5M pre-seed for pan-African expansion. Both are called biochar. Reading the two announcements back to back, they describe different businesses. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The largest enhanced rock weathering deal ever signed also quietly redefines what a “carbon removal” contract is. This week Google agreed to buy 1 million tonnes of methane elimination by 2030 and 1 million tonnes of ERW (enhanced rock weathering, spreading crushed basalt to draw down CO2) removals by 2040 from Terradot, and marketed the two together as one climate product. The bundling is the story. If this template sticks, every pure-removal seller will have to explain why their tonne is not swappable with a blended one. ...