Captains-Log

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Europe just turned its removals regulation into a live procurement venue, and most suppliers outside the bloc haven’t noticed. The Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Buyers’ Club website went live this week, giving certified European suppliers and corporate buyers a single matchmaking layer under one EU-defined methodology. That is a quiet but important shift: the CRCF stops being a 2027 paper framework and starts behaving like the price-setting venue for what counts as a “removal” inside Europe. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why does one industrial CO2 project on the North Atlantic rim get a $2.6 billion sovereign check while another, on the opposite shore, gets sued by its pipe supplier? Same capture chemistry. Same decade. Same broad climate logic. Different geography, and the geography is doing almost all the work. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. On Wednesday, Zeke Hausfather posted a thread that quietly reframed the most expensive argument in carbon removal procurement. “We have a new paper out on the value of reversible carbon storage in a zero-emissions world,” he wrote. “We try and answer the question of when it makes sense to ‘rent’ vs ‘buy’ CDR” (@hausfath on Bluesky). ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week, four buyers entered the CDR market through four different financial instruments, and each instrument quietly disqualifies a different class of supplier. The buyer side is not one archetype. It is bifurcating, and the fragmentation is what’s driving the price dispersion that everyone keeps puzzling over. Start with the evidence. JPMorgan Chase extended $20M in venture debt to Charm Industrial alongside an expanded 61,500-tonne offtake, according to Charm’s announcement on LinkedIn. Venture debt is an instrument U.S. banks already understand from their tech book. It needs collateral. Charm has a pyrolyzer fleet and bio-oil injection wells, so the loan has something to attach to. That instrument quietly selects for capex-heavy operators with hard assets. A credit aggregator could not have taken this deal. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers landed this week that, read together, form a coherent critique of how the CDR sector is talking about itself. The headline figures are real. They are also small enough that the canonical sector report now calls the gap “hard to fathom.” The critics are no longer on the outside. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 9,566 tonnes of CO2, verified and issued from a single enhanced rock weathering batch on tea estates in West Bengal. That is the new high-water mark for enhanced rock weathering, the process of spreading crushed silicate rock on land so it reacts with CO2 and locks it into bicarbonate. Until last week, no ERW operator had cleared five figures in one issuance. The previous reference points were a few thousand tonnes per batch from UK and US developers like UNDO and Lithos, plus Mombak’s first Isometric-verified ERW credits out of Brazil, which Captain Drawdown covered when Mombak generated its first batch. Alt Carbon, founded by brothers Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal, just roughly tripled the category ceiling in one shot. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The maritime decarbonization story this week is that DNV verified a 98% capture rate on a Carbon Ridge onboard unit, and shipping press, LinkedIn, and several procurement desks are quoting it as if maritime CDR just shipped. It hasn’t. The number is real. The framing is wrong. And the gap between those two facts is exactly the accounting trap that will detonate maritime MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) in 2027. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story Graphyte locked in two operator-grade milestones in a single week. Sumitomo, a Japanese trading house with infrastructure-scale capital and offtake reach into Asian utilities and steel, took a backing position in the company. At the same time, the project landed a public listing on the Isometric registry with an inspectable file, prj_1J4P33N6W1S0RKE2. That combination, a sovereign-adjacent industrial balance sheet plus a registry-grade MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) record, is what direct air capture pure-plays have been trying and largely failing to assemble at this scale. It matters because durable removals still sit under 1% of delivered volumes per the 3rd State of CDR report, and the operators who break that ceiling will be the ones with cheap physical processes, a public audit trail, and an anchor buyer. Graphyte now has all three. ...

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 California just rewrote the rules of the largest US carbon market, and the rewrite quietly weakens the compliance demand that durable carbon removal was supposed to inherit. On May 29, Governor Newsom signed a reauthorization extending cap-and-trade (now rebranded cap-and-invest) through 2045, but the package increases free allowance allocation to refineries and utilities, softening the price ceiling that residual emitters would have hit. In the same week, the SEC moved to eliminate Biden-era climate disclosure requirements. The carrot and the stick for US corporate CDR procurement both got smaller at once. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Where does the EU’s 2030 carbon storage target break down geographically? Not in Brussels, where the rules are written, but in the member-state capitals where the pore space actually sits unbuilt. Two assessments published this autumn map the same problem from opposite ends. Read them together and the geographic mismatch becomes the story. ...