Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. A Stanford-led paper in Nature Communications Sustainability dropped this week and broke the CDR feed open. Direct air capture has substantial health and climate opportunity costs argues that $100M/year on utility-scale wind or solar beats DAC on combined climate and health benefits across nearly every U.S. grid region through 2050. The fight isn’t over the numbers. It’s over whether the equation is the right one. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three deals this week show the same pattern. Hyperscaler and industrial buyers are not buying carbon removal credits anymore. They are buying portfolio construction services from a thin layer of intermediaries who now sit between every supplier and every dollar. Start with Boeing. The aerospace giant just contracted for 20,000 tonnes of removal across biochar and enhanced rock weathering, a process that grinds silicate rock to speed up natural CO2 absorption. But Boeing did not pick the suppliers. Supercritical assembled a six-supplier basket across two pathways and sold it as a single product. The buyer outsourced the diligence. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The rock-based carbon removal pathway has quietly stopped being a science project and started being a mining-industry pivot. Three announcements in three weeks, on three continents, all point to the same insight: tailings piles are the new feedstock asset class for durable CDR. Start with Quebec. The Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub launched with Frontier backing, and the framing is what matters. Frontier called Quebec’s industrial legacy, meaning its mining tailings, “one of the world’s biggest carbon removal opportunities.” Liability becomes feedstock. The throughput numbers are not small either. “Not spreading, either aerating large piles or using reactors. You do end up getting more mass at the end than you dig up due to carbonation, but we still expect on the order of >30k tons CO2 stored per acre.” - Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath.bsky.social on Bluesky). Per-acre density at that level is what separates a serious feedstock thesis from a boutique demo. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. While CDR Twitter argued about Microsoft’s procurement pause and Verra methodology fights, climate scientists were having a louder week. The physical signal got worse, the political ceiling got higher, and the people who study this for a living are not whispering. Here is what they said. “The new ‘Indicators of Global Climate Change 2025’ preprint (Forster et al.) shows a tripling of Earth’s Energy Imbalance relative to 1976-1995, using a IPCC AR6 methodology!” ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week tell one story: the accounting layer under voluntary carbon markets is cracking, and a replacement stack is being poured underneath in plain sight. Legacy standards are leaking whistleblowers and disqualifications. Newer registries are quietly shipping durable tonnes. 80,000 credits — BCarbon issued 80,000 verified CDR credits from Carbon Rho’s Red River biomass burial project (Carbon Herald). A nonprofit registry most corporate buyers couldn’t have named a year ago is now shipping durable tonnes. Verra and Gold Standard issued nothing of the kind this week. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. CarbonPlan published a review this week of Lithos Carbon’s first commercial enhanced weathering credit issuance, and the findings should stop every durable CDR buyer mid-contract. CarbonPlan’s analysis says Lithos’s gross removal numbers are surprisingly high and that the team could not reproduce them from the public record. This is the same group whose 2021 forest offset work forced a reckoning in the voluntary market. They are now aiming that same lens at enhanced rock weathering (ERW), the pathway most of the industry has been selling as DAC’s cheaper, near-term successor. The timing matters: ERW developers are the loudest voices at SF Climate Week right now, pitching ERW as the scalable answer after Microsoft’s high-profile pause on some purchases. A credibility challenge to the flagship issuance lands at the worst possible moment. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Biochar’s week was not about credits. It was about assets. In seven days, CHAR Technologies closed on an industrial facility in Quebec, Mangrove Systems absorbed Grain Ecosystem’s project-development pipeline, and a German municipal utility signed on as both offtaker and heat customer. The signal is not who bought tonnes. It’s who bought the plants that make them. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The Meadow Lake Tribal Council just signed a BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) offtake with Microsoft for 626,000 tonnes. That’s not the headline most people will remember from this week. But it should be. The structural innovation inside that deal, and the four other numbers below, point to a CDR procurement stack that almost no one is staffed to execute against. ...

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 Bluesky chatter wasn’t about the next Microsoft-sized offtake. It was about something quieter and more consequential: Sara Vicca’s note that author teams for the IPCC 2027 Methodology Report on CDR Technologies, CCU and Storage are mobilizing. The fight over who defines durable removal has started, and the experts weighing in aren’t aligned. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR market is building the plumbing faster than ever. But the one customer who was paying for most of what flows through it just stopped writing checks. Microsoft has paused all carbon removal purchases, according to reporting from Carbon Herald and Heatmap News. This is not a minor procurement hiccup. Microsoft has been responsible for roughly 90% of global durable CDR demand. When a market has one buyer and that buyer freezes, you don’t have a slowdown. You have a structural crisis. ...