Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1. The story A field trial on CDRXIV lands a direct hit on enhanced rock weathering’s favorite mineral. Daniel Maxbauer and colleagues spread crushed rock on a midwestern U.S. cornfield and measured what happened. Their result: coarse-grained basalt produced no statistically detectable CO2 removal signal, while steel slag did, and even the slag signal appeared only on soil that started out acidic. Slag on near-neutral soil showed nothing significant either. Basalt is the feedstock most ERW startups are selling and most buyers are underwriting. A null result on that mineral, in the heart of U.S. row-crop agriculture, deserves more attention than it will probably get. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus is simple and everywhere: the world needs roughly 10 gigatonnes of durable carbon removal per year by 2050, and that number comes straight from the science of the Paris temperature targets. Buyers size their portfolios against it. Startups pitch against it. Policy-facing writing treats “closing the gap to 10 Gt” as the sector’s organizing problem, as in this Open Access Government piece on closing the carbon dioxide removal gap, which is a fair sample of how the framing gets deployed downstream. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique “This is indeed one of the reasons why I think there is still a justification for the old practice of seeing CDR as a form of geoengineering. They both decouple climate variables from cumulative emissions.” That’s Oliver Morton (@eaterofsun on Bluesky), and the target is any CDR pathway whose mass balance does not cleanly close. Enhanced rock weathering (ERW), where crushed silicates dissolve in soil and the resulting alkalinity is assumed to travel to the ocean for long-term storage, is exactly that kind of pathway right now. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Peter Reinhardt just spent two hours on the record explaining how to turn crop residue into carbon buried a kilometer underground. On Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal, the Charm Industrial CEO walked through the company’s full pipeline: gather waste biomass, pyrolyze it into a thick bio-oil, then inject that oil into deep geological formations where it stays. It is the most detailed operator interview any durable CDR chief executive has given this quarter, and it reads less like a pitch than a plant tour. ...

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 Biochar is currently the highest-volume durable carbon dioxide removal credit category by tonnes issued, and most of those credits are certified under one document: Verra’s VM0044. That methodology is now open for a revision, and the choices Verra makes in this drafting window will set the permanence and quantification math for a large share of the durable CDR market for years. If you sell, buy, or verify biochar tonnes, this is the moment the numbers get decided. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why can one European seabed take funded engineering money for CO₂ storage this year while another, with comparable storage rock beneath it, cannot legally accept a single tonne? That is the question the North Sea and the Baltic Sea now answer for anyone planning permanent carbon storage in Europe, and the answer has almost nothing to do with what is underground. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Puro.earth says its median time from carbon removal supplier submission to credit issuance dropped to 22 days in 2026, down from 40 days in 2025, per its own LinkedIn announcement. That figure is self-reported and not independently audited, so treat it as a claim, not a verified statistic. But if it holds, my forecast is this: by Q1 2027, time-to-cash, not price per tonne, becomes the primary axis of competition among durable CDR registries, and registries that cannot clear issuance in under 30 days will lose material share of new biochar and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) supplier registrations. The reason is arithmetic. Every day a verified tonne sits unissued is a day of working capital a thin-margin operator must finance. Cutting median latency from 40 to 22 days shortens the cash conversion cycle by nearly three weeks per batch. On a simple 12 percent annual cost of capital, that is roughly 0.6 percent of credit value saved per cycle, illustrative math on my part, and it compounds across every batch a facility ships. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Capture technology is being sorted into national stacks before it ever reaches a competitive market. Three deals reported this week, each in a different jurisdiction, follow the same template: a domestic anchor absorbs or bankrolls a capture startup, and the credits get spoken for before any buyer sees a price. ...

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. The European Commission has adopted the first technical methodologies under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation, covering afforestation, agroforestry, and soil carbon, according to the Commission’s certification-schemes page. Italian legal analysts at Rete Clima report that the framework treats carbon farming units as temporary by design, with monitoring obligations attached. Who is bound: project developers seeking EU certification, the certification schemes that will audit them, and any buyer making claims on the units. When it bites: the moment the first schemes are recognized and units start issuing. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The most influential analysts in carbon removal have declared the traditional voluntary carbon market dead. Robert Höglund, one of the sector’s sharpest public voices, published what amounts to an obituary in The end of high hopes for the traditional VCM, framing SBTi’s non-endorsement of reduction credits as the final nail in the coffin. In a companion post the same week, he argued that “In practice, removals-only requirements for corporate net zero is the highest-integrity choice and the only one that aligns with the global definition of net zero” (In theory, emission reduction credits are as good as removals). That view now dominates buyer coalitions and corporate net-zero discourse. ...