CDR

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 17 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/with-dr-ruth-dagan TL;DR Climate-washing lawsuits up 70% since 2022; Grantham counts ~160 cases, 54 directly tied to offset-based claims. Useful baseline number. EU Empowering Consumers Directive (in force September) flatly bans product-level carbon-neutral claims; California’s AB 1911 goes opposite direction with a safe harbor for high-integrity credits. Apple Watch carbon-neutral case: lost in Germany (permanence only guaranteed to 2029 vs. an implied 2040 horizon), tentatively won in US, now on appeal. Registries — including Article 6.4’s PACM — explicitly disclaim that account-holders legally own the credits. Dagan calls this an unforced error throttling collateralization. UNIDROIT principles (due early 2027) would classify credits as intangible assets. The fix everyone in finance has been waiting for. Sebastian Manhart hosts Dr. Ruth Dagan (Herzog, formerly UNFCCC legal affairs) for a 30-minute tour of two legal bottlenecks chilling corporate buying: greenwashing litigation exposure, and the bizarre fact that carbon registries refuse to assert that account holders actually own anything. Eve Tamme is out sick. Episode link. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 26 Fe. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/policy-wins-and-growing-pains-as TL;DR FY26 appropriations gave durable CDR (carbon dioxide removal) real wins: $45M for the DOE purchase prize, $70M+ for RD&D, despite the President’s budget zeroing them out. Genuinely surprising. DAC (direct air capture) Hubs took a hit: $1B of remaining funds repurposed to small modular reactors, leaving ~$800M. Obligated grants untouched. 1 million tons delivered milestone is mostly biochar — Peter Minor frames the concentration as a warning sign, not a victory lap. Sharp framing. Consolidation (Terradot/Ion) read as maturity, not panic — scale matters more in CDR than most industries for project finance and offtake credibility. Gianna Amador: per-ton price is the wrong KPI in the prove-and-learn era. Worth chewing on. Naim Merchant kicks off a new “Removers Roundtable” format on The Carbon Curve with Gianna Amador (Carbon Removal Alliance), Erin Burns (Carbon180), and Peter Minor (Absolute Climate). The hour is a US-centric stocktake: where federal CDR policy actually landed a year into the new administration, what the consolidation wave means, and whether the field’s talent and narrative survive the right-sizing. ...

This chart is a stacked horizontal bar showing CDR-attributable headcount across pathways on the vertical axis, with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play companies whose entire reason for existing is CDR, divisions inside larger firms where CDR is one line of business, and ecosystem players who sell tools, verification, brokerage, or software into the space. Bar length is total attributed workers; the color split is where those workers actually sit. ...

What BECCS is, and why it’s in the durable-CDR conversation Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is the simple-sounding idea of growing plants (which pull CO₂ out of the air via photosynthesis), using that biomass to produce energy or fuel, capturing the CO₂ released when the biomass is processed, and putting that CO₂ somewhere it won’t come back out — almost always a deep saline aquifer or depleted hydrocarbon reservoir. The net result, if the accounting holds, is atmospheric CO₂ removed and geologically stored on the order of 10,000+ years. ...

Take on a YouTube video from DW Podcasts, originally posted 2026-06-15. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r79u6fuxdo TL;DR DW podcast revisits Climeworks: Mammoth (36 kt/yr nameplate) has captured “just a couple thousand tons” total since 2024 opening. Useful public airing of numbers practitioners already knew. Climeworks CTO Helen Cox attributes underperformance to humidity, temperature, and geothermal sulfur degrading sorbent in the field — not lab conditions. Honest mechanism, rarely articulated this plainly to a general audience. The 1 Mt by 2030 target is treated as effectively dead. Overdue framing for the mainstream press. Reporter cites the 2 million m³ of air per ton CO2 thermodynamic floor — solid, non-sensational. Verdict: useful as a talking-points refresher and as something to send to non-CDR colleagues. Limited new signal for practitioners. DW’s Living Planet (episode link) revisits direct air capture (DAC) six years after reporter Sam Baker first covered Climeworks, and the framing is “what happened to the hype?” The substantive claim is that Climeworks’ Orca (4 kt/yr nameplate) and Mammoth (36 kt/yr nameplate) plants in Iceland have collectively captured only a few thousand tons since Mammoth came online in 2024, putting the company’s stated 1 million tons by 2030 target out of reach. CTO Helen Cox, on the job about a year, is the on-record voice walking the reporter through what went wrong. ...

This chart is a horizontal bar ranking of the fifteen countries hosting the most carbon removal companies in the directory, with country on the vertical axis and company count on the horizontal axis. Each bar is a simple headcount of firms whose primary registration or operational base sits in that country, regardless of size, funding stage, or tons delivered. The value here is structural. A raw spreadsheet of companies tells you who exists; this view tells you where the industry has actually taken root, which jurisdictions are exporting CDR capacity, and how concentrated or dispersed the sector is. Shifts in this ranking over time are one of the cleaner signals of where policy, capital, and talent are clustering. ...

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 13 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 is a widening gap between announced capacity and what’s actually getting built or bought. A 1Mt ARR deal and the largest-ever SAF certificate purchase show corporates still willing to write big checks for the lower-permanence end of the stack, while a new UK DAC consortium and fresh analyses of the EU Buyers’ Club and marine CDR rulebook underline how much policy scaffolding is still missing for the durable end. A German broadsheet hammering the “huge gap” framing rounds out the mood. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/403-How-to-get-max-value-from-carbon-market-consultantsw-David-LaGreca--EcoEngineers-e3kkn5k TL;DR When to call a consultant: as soon as you have a concept beyond a napkin sketch — useful framing, mostly self-serving but honest about it. Claim: a 1-6 month consulting engagement often beats hiring a $150-200k FTE for methodology, LCA, registry selection work. Plausible for early-stage developers. EcoEngineers’ workload has shifted from drafting new CDR methodologies (2022-2023 peak) to advising large energy/corporate entrants and operating projects. Useful market-temperature signal. Rule of thumb: AI tooling gets you ~70% of the way on methodology drafting; the last 30% is where expertise compounds. First time I’ve heard it quantified that way. Registry choice (Puro vs. Isometric vs. Rainbow vs. others) is undersold as a strategic decision that determines credit volume, verification cadence, and labeling eligibility. Episode link. Ross Kenyon hosts David LaGreca of EcoEngineers — a sponsor of the show, which Ross discloses repeatedly — for an hour on how durable-CDR developers should actually engage advisory firms. The episode is half practical (hire vs. contract math, when to fire a consultant) and half industry-state observation from someone who’s touched roughly 10 CDR protocols across 7-8 mechanisms. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The Carbon Curve, originally published Thu, 11 Ju. Listen: https://carboncurve.substack.com/p/is-carbon-removal-stronger-than-the TL;DR Three Toronto operators (Amplify, Mangrove, CarbonRun) argue the durable-CDR vibes are worse than the fundamentals — useful corrective if you’ve been doom-scrolling. Venture was the wrong instrument for an infrastructure sector; the “missing middle” between VC and big-bank project finance is the real bottleneck. Accurate diagnosis, no easy fix offered. CarbonRun’s first verified river alkalinity issuances exposed how optimistic pre-audit limestone-to-feedstock ratios were. First time I’ve heard an operator say this out loud. 1,100+ permanent CDR companies counted across public lists — Vlaar predicts consolidation via acqui-hire, not a clean die-off. Plausible. Affordability framing in government budgets is the under-discussed existential risk for compliance demand. Worth taking seriously. Na’im Merchant’s Toronto Climate Week wrap puts Trish Nixon (Amplify Capital), Brandon Vlaar (Mangrove Systems), and Luke Connell (CarbonRun) in one room to take stock of durable CDR a year after the US political shift. It’s a finance/measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV)/supplier triangle, recorded live, and unusually candid about what isn’t working. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 08 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/taking-stock-the-state-of-cdr-fireside-chat-with-oliver-gede TL;DR Geden: only 2 countries (Australia, UK) name novel/durable CDR in NDCs through 2035; ~1/3 of long-term strategies for 2050 mention it. Damning baseline. State of CDR report puts CDR at ~16% of global mitigation effort — higher than the 5-10% often cited. Worth understanding why before quoting it. “Hard to abate” is partly politically hard to abate — CDR risks becoming a flexibility valve for politicians dodging transport/buildings decarbonization. Sharp framing. EU’s 5% international credits allowance: officially “no CDM mistakes round two,” but Geden expects criteria to be more lenient than current rhetoric suggests. land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF) accounting hides the ball: net targets mask gross emissions (e.g. Germany’s 50 Mt/yr from peatland drainage, stable, now 8% of national total). Sebastian Manhart interviews Oliver Geden (SWP, IPCC WG3 Vice Chair, State of CDR co-author) live at NEP Summit Brussels, recorded the week the third State of CDR report dropped. Thirty minutes covering policy sequencing (foundational → supply → demand), the gap between net zero pledges and actual CDR planning, EU pillar architecture, and how the Iran conflict scrambles climate attention. ...