CDR

Captain Drawdown’s weekly Sunday selection — 9 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 candidate pool this week skews academic, with five research artefacts against two industry items. That makes for a cleaner-than-usual read on where the methodological frontier sits: ocean CDR efficiency, carbon-cycle asymmetries under net-negative pathways, and the discourse layer sitting on top of it all. On the commercial side, Climeworks is the only operator making noise. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Bite-Size Climate Tech, originally published Sun, 30 Au. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lydiaclinzi/episodes/Brineworks-From-Magic-Box-to-Upgraded-Suit--CO--H-for-E-Fuels-e3o34o3 TL;DR Brineworks pivoted from direct ocean capture to a closed-loop land-based system using purchased salt + reverse-osmosis water. Bigger addressable market, but loses the “ocean is free feedstock” story. Co-produces CO₂ and hydrogen from one electrochemical pH-swing box — pitched as the differentiator vs. other electrochemical direct air capture players optimizing purely for energy efficiency. Cost targets: sub-$200/t CO₂ by 2030, near $100/t by 2035. Aggressive but in the same range peers are quoting. Explicitly designed for intermittent operation (20-50% capacity factor) on cheap solar/wind — a design choice worth taking seriously. Target customer is e-fuel project developers, not carbon removal buyers. This is really a feedstock company now, not a durable removal company. Lydia Clinzi hosts Joel Parman, CTO and co-founder of Brineworks, returning to Bite-Size Climate Tech two years after his first appearance. The episode covers Brineworks’ pivot from direct ocean capture to a land-based closed-loop electrochemical system that co-produces CO₂ and green hydrogen for synthetic fuels. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Studio Energie, originally published Tue, 08 Se. Listen: https://soundcloud.com/studio-energie/gijsbrecht-gunter-yara-over-de-businesscase-van-nederlandse-co2-in-de-noorse-bodem TL;DR First cross-border CCS chain in the world went live: 800 kt/yr CO2 from Yara Sluiskil shipped to Northern Lights in Norway, 15-year contract, ~12 Mt total. Yara’s site director admits on-record the project doesn’t pencil at current ETS (~€85/t); needs a premium plus avoided carbon costs to close. Netherlands scrapping its national CO2 surcharge on top of ETS actively worsens the business case for the front-runner — Gunter says the FID likely wouldn’t be taken today under current conditions. Useful concrete cost benchmark: RED III-compliant green hydrogen for their ammonia would imply ~€15,000 per ton CO2 avoided. Damning number, first time I’ve seen it stated this cleanly. CAPEX ~€200M on Yara’s side; contract with Northern Lights “a multiple” of that. Not disclosed further. Remco de Boer (Studio Energie) interviews Gijsbrecht Gunter, director at Yara Sluiskil, on opening day of the first cross-border CCS chain — Dutch ammonia CO2 liquefied, shipped 800 km, injected under the Norwegian seabed via Northern Lights. In Dutch. The conversation is unusually candid about the economics, which is why it’s worth an hour. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 08 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/mep-peter-liese-the-rapporteurs-take-on-removals-in-the-eu TL;DR Liese wants Parliament to pull removals integration forward to 2028, not the Commission’s 2031 — big signal for offtake timing. He argues for scrapping the cap on removal volumes in the ETS; if costs fall like solar did, why limit uptake. Bold, will meet resistance. Wants biochar added to eligible methods alongside DACCS and BECCS, capped ~20% max. First MEP I’ve heard commit to this on record. If the CDR-cost gap is bigger than the Commission modeled, his fix is to issue more allowances to fund the shortfall. Novel mechanism. Backs a strong link to the CRCF and wants removals inside the international-credits envelope — Namibia cement plant DACCS as concrete example. Hosts Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme get Peter Liese — the European People’s Party MEP who is Parliament’s rapporteur on the current EU ETS (Emissions Trading System) revision — on the record days before his draft report drops on 11 September 2026. The conversation is a near-exhaustive walk through what Parliament’s amendments to the Commission’s July 2026 removals-in-ETS proposal could look like. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 03 Se. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/Removals--avoidances--and-what-Wendell-Berry-thought-of-making-tonnes-fungible-e3o9d89 TL;DR Ross Kenyon’s solo reflection on Wendell Berry’s death, wrapped around an essay he wrote for Removr on removals vs. avoidances in one portfolio. Mea culpa: Nori tried to build a “better” registry from scratch; Kenyon now says the convergence of legacy registry designs is structural, not a willpower failure. Useful concession. Argues durable CDR’s cultural separatism from the broader voluntary carbon market has become a liability, not a moat. Fair, and increasingly the consensus. Would pick rainforest protection over carbon removal if forced to choose. Provocative framing, thinly defended. Name-checks Martin Freimüller (Octavia) and Robert Höglund as CDR-side voices moving toward portfolio thinking. Signal for where the discourse is drifting. Ross Kenyon, Nori cofounder and long-running host of Reversing Climate Change, delivers a solo episode (link) that pairs an obituary for Wendell Berry with a piece he wrote for the Removr registry on why durable removals and avoidances belong in the same portfolio conversation. It’s part personal essay, part market commentary — you’ll get more of the former than the latter. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.com/p/11-somebody-here-needs-to-say-this TL;DR Anonymous submitter argues artisanal biochar gets a scrutiny pass that industrial projects don’t — and that gap is where bad actors are hiding. Sharp, overdue take. Specific red flag: daily production logs on public registries showing identical output across monsoon and dry season. Concrete, checkable, damning if true. dMRV (digital measurement, reporting, verification) providers check data completeness/format, not plausibility against public rainfall records. That’s a real registry gap. Water-for-quench competing with irrigation water in rain-scarce regions — a farmer-cost story the “farmer-first” crowd doesn’t tell. First ~15 minutes is Ross’s AI-doom monologue. Skip to the submission unless you want that too. Ross Kenyon’s Climate Workers Anonymous publishes anonymous submissions from climate workers. This episode’s submission is a pointed critique of artisanal biochar carbon credits from someone who’s clearly been reading registry data. The first ~15 minutes is Ross editorializing about artificial general intelligence and Stripe’s “singularity is here” investor memo — you can skip to the submission without loss. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-is-really-happening-to-dac-hubs-with-grant-faber TL;DR Only ~2.5% of the original $3.5B DAC Hubs budget has been disbursed; contract negotiation ate most of the Biden term before terminations froze things. $1B of hub funding was reprogrammed by Congress to nuclear; ~$1.3B sits unobligated but not rescinded — dormant, not dead. DOE admitted in court that project terminations were chosen on political basis; cancellations skewed toward blue-headquartered primes even when projects sat in red states. Both TA3 megahubs (Project Cypress, South Texas) survived the retention list — Grant credits BIL/IRA’s deliberate red-district geography strategy. Grant’s speculative but useful scenario: unspent CDR appropriations pile up, and 2029 brings a sudden multi-billion-dollar “we’re back” moment. Take with salt. Grant Faber — former DAC Hubs program manager at DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, now Head of Standards at Absolute Climate — joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart on The CDR Policy Scoop to walk through his recent Substack article mapping the actual state of the US DAC Hubs program. This is the most granular public accounting of what survived, what got killed, and what’s still sitting in an account somewhere. ...