CDR

Take on a YouTube video from Musa Tule, originally posted 2026-10-05. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b34GVwxE66s TL;DR Explainer on Canada Nickel’s Crawford project near Timmins, Ontario: a 41-year, ~1.6 Mt-nickel mine whose ultramafic tailings can mineralize CO2. Mechanism covered accurately: serpentinized ore rich in brucite reacts with concentrated CO2 in-circuit, forming magnesium carbonate in hours. Useful for a lay audience. Title is wrong on its face — this is carbon capture and storage, just mineralized. Overstated. Economic framing is the real signal: carbonation as the business case that justifies a sulfide mine in an Indonesia-flooded market. Transcript cuts off before any tonnage or cost numbers for the carbonation itself. Treat the scale claim as unverified here. A general-interest Canadian channel (video here) walks through the Crawford nickel project and Canada Nickel Company’s plan to inject concentrated CO2 into tailings while they’re still moving through the processing circuit. The substantive argument is that a mine’s waste stream — millions of tonnes of already-crushed, already-reactive rock — is a cheaper mineralization reactor than anything purpose-built. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Bite-Size Climate Tech, originally published Tue, 29 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lydiaclinzi/episodes/CO-to-Ethylene-with-Alex-Ip--CERT-Systems-e3piese TL;DR CERT Systems makes ethylene from CO₂, water and electricity via direct electrolysis; drop-in identical to fossil ethylene. This is utilization, not removal — keep that straight. Market framing: ~200 Mt ethylene/yr, ~250 Mt CO₂ emitted making it. Useful order-of-magnitude anchor. Scale today: a direct-air-capture-to-ethylene pilot at ~1 kg CO₂/day. Target: tens of tons of ethylene/yr “in the next couple of years.” That’s ~2–3 orders of magnitude. Cost: competitive with bio-based polyethylene, still a premium over fossil. Parity thesis rests on refinery integration (O₂, H₂, heat) and cheaper electricity. Plausible, unproven. Tencent CarbonX award funds the commercial demo and pushes CO₂-based materials into consumer products via CarbonXMade. Notable: Chinese corporate capital, not Western buyers. Lydia Clinzi’s Bite-Size Climate Tech hosts Alex Ip, co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based CERT Systems, in a roughly 25-minute Season 5 conversation (“Climate Tech Is Just Good Business”). The episode covers the electrolyzer mechanism (the “sandwich” of catalyst-coated electrodes stacked into a reactor), the drop-in argument, current scale, the cost path, and what the CarbonX win unlocks. It is pitched at a general audience, with an eight-year-old explainer segment. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 30 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/the-minister-betting-big-on-biochar-with-minister-peng-chi-m TL;DR Taiwan has set a 1 Mt biochar carbon removal target for 2030 — but no biochar crediting methodology exists yet and one plant is operating. Aspirational, not a roadmap. Minister Peng’s math: ~1.3 Mt of Taiwan’s ~5 Mt annual agricultural waste, ~500 pyrolysis units. Feedstock imports are politically and legally (Basel) blocked. Demand driver is the semiconductor sector; TSMC alone may need ~10 Mt/yr of credits. CCS at $300–500/t is priced out; biochar is the “now” option. Taiwan’s ETS runs on the EEX platform and is being designed to accept biochar credits. Article 6.2 deals (Paraguay MOU) are the workaround for non-UNFCCC status. Useful as a case study in top-down CDR target setting before the value chain exists. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Taiwan’s Environment Minister Chi-ming Peng on The CDR Policy Scoop, recorded 28 September, two weeks after he announced a 1 Mt biochar removal target for 2030. The conversation covers the origin of the target, feedstock and pyrolysis capacity numbers, how the target plugs into Taiwan’s carbon fee and forthcoming emissions trading system, and how a non-Party to the Paris Agreement intends to trade credits. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 24 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/The-palm-nutcracker-that-became-a-carbon-dioxide-removal-companyw-Uzoma-Ayogu-of-Biochar-Industrial-Group-e3p96kt TL;DR BIG’s model: don’t build greenfield biochar plants; bolt pyrolysis onto existing agroprocessors who already have feedstock, permits, weighbridges and farmer trust. Sound framing. Value split is 20/60/20 of carbon profit (BIG / partner / capex funder); 80/20 early when BIG carries the risk. Rare to hear the terms stated. Target fully loaded removal cost of $50–70/t. Stated as a goal, not a demonstrated number — treat accordingly. Pyrolyzer uptime went 38% → 87% in a year; two larger systems due end-2026 and Q1 2027. Cassava trials: 21–50% yield gains on acidic soils (pH 4.5–5.9). Promising but small, self-reported, and only ~20% of physical biochar sold so far. Ross Kenyon hosts Uzoma Ayogu, CTO of Nigerian palm-kernel processor Releaf and cofounder of its spinout Biochar Industrial Group (BIG), which just closed a pre-seed round. The episode traces how a decade-old agri-supply-chain business ended up issuing Nigeria’s first industrial biochar credits, why the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) arm had to be a separate entity, and what BIG now offers other West African processors. ...

A registry is the ledger. A standard is the rulebook. For carbon dioxide removal (CDR), they are what turns “we removed a tonne of CO₂” into a serialized credit that someone can buy, count, and retire. A standard defines what counts as removal and how it must be measured. A methodology applies those rules to one specific process. Independent auditors check the project against the rules, and the registry issues the unit and tracks who owns it. When a buyer asks whether a credit is trustworthy, they are really asking whether each of these layers did its job. When a lender asks whether a project is bankable, much of the answer depends on whether a recognized standard has a methodology that fits the project’s process. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 12 candidate stories considered, 6-9 picked. Each link carries our 1-2 sentence take so you don’t have to click everything to know what’s there. Two direct air capture companies made moves this week that say more about where the money is than where the CO2 ends up: one is relocating to Norway, the other is lining up oil producers as customers for enhanced oil recovery. Alongside that, mineralisation showed up in three different registers (a croplands field study, a lab concrete mix, and a cement-waste review), and the nature-based and ocean pathways drew the kind of scrutiny that arrives once a method starts scaling. The thread is that removal is being tested less on chemistry this week than on where it sits in the real economy and on the ground. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Plan Sea: Ocean Interventions to Address Climate Change, originally published Thu, 10 Se. Listen: <> TL;DR Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) walks through the ReSCUE Oceans Act, a bipartisan bill to set up a federal framework for marine CDR research. Useful primer, light on specifics. Bill would coordinate NOAA, NASA, NSF around mCDR (including ocean alkalinity enhancement). No dollar figure — “we’ll work that out.” Notable gap. Bipartisan co-sponsors: Schatz (D-HI), Murkowski (R-AK) in Senate; Bonamici and Buddy Carter (R-GA) in House. Realistic path unclear this Congress. Separate win discussed: bipartisan bill to block NSF from decommissioning the Ocean Observatories Initiative buoys. Small but concrete measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)-adjacent story. On the Trump administration gutting NOAA’s mCDR capacity: acknowledged as a problem, no strategy offered beyond “hopefully rehire.” Wil Burns (American University’s Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal) and guest co-host Priyanka Hooghan (Carbon to Sea) interview Rep. Suzanne Bonamici in her Capitol Hill office. The conversation covers the ReSCUE Oceans Act — Removing and Sequestering Carbon Unleashed in the Environment and Oceans — plus her work as bipartisan Oceans Caucus co-chair and a side fight over ocean observing infrastructure. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Untangling Climate Finance, originally published Mon, 17 Au. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/untanglingclimatefinance/episodes/S4-E8-Anton-Root-on-the-State-of-the-Voluntary-Carbon-Market-e3n7jvj TL;DR Anton Root (AlliedOffsets) says weighted-average VCM credit price roughly doubled from ~$3 to ~$7/t since early 2024 — useful data point, driven by mix shift not scarcity. ~1.6 Gt of issued-but-unretired credits sitting in registries, growing ~200 Mt/year. That’s ~8 years of demand overhang. Underrated structural problem. CDR-specific read: >1,000 sellers historically, only ~800 all-time buyers of engineered removals. Consolidation is here; offtake-less projects are in trouble. CCP-tagged issuances in H1 2026 (~18 Mt) nearly matched all of 2022+2023 combined. Integrity signal is real in the numbers, not just the marketing. Asia overtook Europe as largest source of new credit demand last year. Tencent flagged as a high-quality-removals buyer. Jay Tipton hosts AlliedOffsets co-founder Anton Root for a data-heavy read on the voluntary carbon market. It’s mostly VCM-wide, but there’s a meaty CDR segment on seller/buyer imbalance, pricing, and offtake dynamics that’s worth an hour if you’re on the supply or buyer side of durable removals. ...