CDR

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 15 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. The week’s signal isn’t a single megadeal — it’s the slow consolidation of plumbing. Microsoft re-entered the buyer narrative just as Europe’s Buyers’ Club inched toward operational status and Singapore-plus-World-Bank stood up new Article 6 infrastructure. Meanwhile, a Nature paper put a serious crack in the integrity story underpinning US forest offsets, a reminder that the integrity layer is still load-bearing for everything being built on top. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 21 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/400-What-kind-of-leader-does-my-CDR-company-need-me-to-be-w-Julia-Reichelstein--Vaulted-Deep-e3jiss8 TL;DR Vaulted Deep is on track for ~50,000 tonnes of durable removal this year, up from 25,000 tonnes cumulative to date — credible scale-up for a non-biochar developer. Reichelstein frames Vaulted as a waste management company first, CDR second; gets paid on the disposal side, which sidesteps biomass-competition risk entirely. The Microsoft ~5M-tonne offtake (signed 2024) underwrites site development through ~2040 — the deal that turned them from operator into builder. Most of the conversation is leadership philosophy, not technical. Useful if you’re a founder; thinner if you came for measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) or geology specifics. Spin-out mechanics from Advantek get a rare honest treatment — including why venture-backed spin-outs are scarce. Ross Kenyon hosts Julia Reichelstein, co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep, for a wide-ranging conversation that’s roughly one-third Vaulted operations and two-thirds founder psychology. If you’ve heard Reichelstein on the technical circuit before, this is the softer cut — useful for understanding how she thinks, less useful if you want to interrogate the deep-well injection thesis. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 30 Ap. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/carbon-removal-is-stuck-in-low-earth TL;DR Friedmann argues CDR 1.0 built the scaffolding (registries, raters, taxonomy) but isn’t structured to close commercial deals — reframing, not bashing. Five pillars to unlock CDR 2.0: technical readiness, project assurance, standardization, bankability, transactional ease. Useful checklist, light on novelty individually but coherent together. Headline claim: deals die at the CFO, not the CSO. Risk management, not price, is the binding constraint. Rings true with what buyers actually say. Pointed critique: 5,000-ton pilots don’t interest 100kt-scale buyers like Microsoft/JPM/Airbus. Sector is still over-indexed on first-of-a-kind storytelling. Intro segment announces the Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub at Thetford Mines — 800Mt tailings, Frontier RFP open through May 22, 2026. Naim Merchant hosts Julio Friedmann (Chief Scientist, Carbon Direct) to walk through Carbon Direct’s new “CDR 2.0: Five Pillars of Successful Project Deployment and Delivery” report. The episode is essentially a guided tour of why durable carbon removal deal flow has stalled and what specifically needs to change at the buyer-procurement-bank interface. There’s also a 4-minute opening from Merchant announcing the Quebec Surficial Mineralization Hub partnership between Carbon Removal Canada, Frontier, and Thetford Mines. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Fri, 15 Ma. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/cbam-and-international-credits-whats-just-changed-with-dan-m TL;DR Draft Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism implementing act (published 13 May 2026) lets importers deduct carbon costs paid abroad — including, controversially, international credits. First-time clarity worth knowing. Hard cap: international Article 6 credits can offset at most 10% of a CBAM liability. But most third-country ETSs already cap offset use at 5-10%, so binding impact is modest. No quantitative cap on domestic credits used inside a third-country mandatory regime. Maleski can’t justify the asymmetry; nor can the hosts. Genuinely odd policy choice. “Effective” carbon cost is net of free allocation — so Brazil, Turkey, Korea ETSs in ramp-up phase deliver near-zero deduction regardless of headline carbon price. Important reality check. Anti-gaming safeguard is “independent persons” verifying paid prices. Maleski openly notes clients ask how to inflate intra-group credit prices. Thin guardrail. The CDR Policy Scoop (episode link) reconvened Dan Maleski of Ruby Advisors one day after the Commission dropped its draft implementing act on Article 9 of CBAM — the provision letting importers deduct carbon costs already paid in the country of origin. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme spend 30 minutes parsing what the act actually says about international credits, the 10% cap, and why the consultation (closing early June) still leaves big pieces missing. ...

The pathway Enhanced weathering (EW) accelerates a chemical reaction that the Earth already runs at geological pace: the dissolution of silicate rocks by carbonic acid in rainwater. When fast-weathering rocks like basalt, olivine, or wollastonite are crushed to fine particles and spread — usually on cropland, sometimes in rivers, forests, or mine pits — the surface area available for reaction increases by orders of magnitude. CO₂ dissolved in soil water reacts with the minerals, producing dissolved bicarbonate ions that drain through soils to groundwater and eventually the ocean, where the carbon is stored on timescales of 10,000 to 100,000+ years. That long-tailed durability is why EW sits alongside direct air capture and mineralization in most “durable CDR” portfolios, even though it borrows infrastructure (quarries, ag spreaders) from existing industries. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 20 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. The week’s connective tissue is infrastructure quietly being rebuilt around CDR — Frontier and Cascade Climate setting de facto methodology standards, Canada and the EU bolting compliance scaffolding into place, and the AI-data-center narrative hardening from talking point into actual capital allocation logic. Underneath that, a bankruptcy and a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) warning paper offer useful counterweights to the build-out story. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 07 Ma. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/398-Scientists-vs--Engineers---the-Commercial-Pressure-on-Carbon-Dioxide-Removalw-Erica-Dorr--Samara-Vantil--Rainbow-e3j0jq0 TL;DR Rainbow’s head of science Erica Dorr and certification engineer Samara Vantil reframe the science-vs-engineering split as a false binary; both do applied work daily. The real gap is technical-vs-commercial. Useful framing for anyone who’s watched a salesperson promise a methodology change on a call. Concrete example: biochar lab samples cost ~€600 to ship Africa→Europe. That’s the kind of number that should anchor measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) requirement-setting. Defense of Charm’s “cut scope” posture as courage, not laziness — diminishing returns on the last sample are real and worth saying out loud. When project developers can’t deliver a data point, Rainbow’s default is a conservative discount factor, not rejection. Worth knowing if you’re a buyer reading their credits. Ross Kenyon hosts Erica Dorr (head of science) and Samara Vantil (environmental engineer, certification) of Rainbow, the carbon removal standard and registry. The episode is a follow-up to two essays Kenyon wrote for Rainbow on whether durable CDR needs more field engineers or more scientists, and lands somewhere more interesting than either piece: the science/engineering line is fuzzy, and the harder boundary is between technical teams and commercial. ...

Take on a podcast episode from REEF Roundup: 🪸Coral Reefs🐠 and 🐙Marine Conservation🦈, originally published Wed, 15 Ap. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reefroundup/episodes/Dr--Sambuddha-Misra-Drinking-Tea-to-Save-Coral-Reefs--The-Mechanics-of-Enhanced-Rock-Weathering-in-Darjeeling--S5E5-e3hsh58 TL;DR Alt Carbon’s chief scientist explains why Darjeeling’s foothills are a rare “supply-limited” weathering regime — solid mechanistic justification for site selection. 2025 Isometric-verified delivery claimed as Asia’s first enhanced rock weathering (ERW) credits; guest says next tranche is ~10x larger. Useful datapoint on Asian ERW supply. Current deployment ~80,000 acres, roadmap to 250k then 1M acres across Bengal and Assam. Ambition is real but measurement is the bottleneck. Honest admission: a million-acre deployment implies ~3M samples/year, more than all geochemistry has measured historically. New measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) methods required. Reported 25–100% crop yield uplift on degraded tea-estate soils from basalt micronutrients. Eye-catching, but no controls described — take with caution. Reef Roundup (a marine conservation show) hosts Dr. Sambuddha Misra, IISc earth scientist and chief scientist at Alt Carbon, for a surprisingly substantive walk through the geochemistry, MRV, and scaling math of enhanced rock weathering in the Himalayan foothills. The framing is coral-reef alkalinity, but the meat is durable CDR: basalt sourcing, supply-limited weathering regimes, Isometric verification, and the brick wall of sample-scale measurement. ...