CDR

Take on a YouTube video from Local Land Services NSW, originally posted 2026-07-20. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuk18apLFWI TL;DR Speaker claims Australian biochar carbon sells at ~AUD $200/tonne on voluntary markets — higher than what an ACCU method would pay. Useful pricing datapoint. ANZBIG targets 50 million tonnes of biomass pyrolysed annually: $6B biochar + $3B removals + $1-2B energy. Aspirational, no timeline given. Energy co-product pitch: $300-400k in thermal energy value per ~5,000 tonnes of biomass processed (she states the ratio inconsistently in the talk). Title says livestock; the transcript is almost entirely production economics and industry advocacy. Feed applications barely appear in this segment. Melissa Rebeck — chair of the Australian New Zealand Biochar Industry Group (ANZBIG) and business development lead at pyrolysis equipment vendor Metamorph Engineering — presents to a Local Land Services NSW farmer audience on biochar production economics. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuk18apLFWI. Despite the title, this is a talk about the business case for on-farm pyrolysis, not livestock feed trials. ...

Take on a YouTube video from Local Land Services NSW, originally posted 2026-07-20. Watch the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx6J74S07xk TL;DR Australia still has no domestic biochar carbon method; producers must use international registries like Puro.earth. Practical confirmation from a state advisor, not news. Cited spread: biochar credits at ~AU$150–200/tonne vs Australian Carbon Credit Units at ~AU$40–50. Useful anchor for Australian project economics. Biochar application is eligible inside Australian soil carbon projects — but capped at 100 kg/ha/yr unless biomass is on-farm or from a designated waste stream. Applied biochar carbon must be deducted from measured soil carbon stock gains. A detail many farm-facing biochar pitches skip. Registration walkthrough (additionality, EPA compliance, end-use traceability) is basic but accurate. This is a five-minute talk by Emily Wilson, natural capital adviser at Local Land Services NSW, given at a farmer-facing biochar event funded under a NSW decarbonisation program. It’s an extension talk, not a technical presentation — but it’s a reasonably precise snapshot of how biochar intersects with Australian carbon crediting right now. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx6J74S07xk. ...

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 connecting thread this week is accountability — who checks the numbers, and what happens when they don’t hold. Two governments faced scrutiny over how removal money and removal policy actually get executed, two registries and frameworks opened up their accounting logic for inspection, and a stack of new bench science quietly explained why several pathways are slower or messier than the pitch decks suggest. If you only have ten minutes, read the policy pair; if you’re building or buying, the methodology cluster is where the money will move. ...

Three enhanced weathering papers landed on CDRXIV in close succession, and read together they give me the clearest snapshot I’ve had of where this pathway actually stands in late 2025. The Suhrhoff et al. systematic review — with a co-author list that reads like a who’s-who of the field — puts a median area-normalized CDR flux of 0.84 tCO₂ ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ on the table and converges global technical potential at ~0.2–2 GtCO₂ yr⁻¹. Cobo and Guillén-Gosálbez then argue that if you take empirical (rather than theoretical) weathering rates seriously in a life-cycle assessment, inland deployments starting in 2030 face a median 11-year lag before net CDR turns positive. And Gholamahmadi et al. offer the first structured synthesis of how ERW changes the soil’s ability to hold and move water — with mixed results that complicate the “co-benefits” story. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Carbon Removal Newsroom, originally published Tue, 14 Ju. Listen: https://climateworkersanonymous.substack.com/p/4-the-denial-of-grief-plays-a-central TL;DR An anonymous submission argues for pausing all crediting of enhanced rock weathering (ERW) and ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) until end-to-end verification improves. Critical but fair. Core mechanism: open-system removals can’t be directly measured, so “phantom credits” used to offset real emissions pose both climate and reputational risk. Claims early findings already show actual removal well below estimates — no citations given, but directionally consistent with recent field-trial literature. Host Ross Kenyon explicitly frames all submissions as unverified. Treat this as practitioner-sentiment data, not evidence. The CDR-relevant content is roughly five minutes; the other two submissions (climate grief, virtue signaling) are off this beat. Episode #4 of Climate Workers Anonymous is Ross Kenyon’s anonymous-submission project: climate workers send in things they won’t say under their own name, and he reads them aloud. This episode carries three submissions, and one of them is a direct shot at the crediting of open-system carbon removal — which is why it’s worth flagging here despite the show’s soft format. ...

Take on a podcast episode from Reversing Climate Change, originally published Thu, 16 Ju. Listen: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/reversingclimatechange/episodes/408-The-impossible-taxonomy-of-carbon-dioxide-removal-e3m54kn TL;DR Solo episode: host Ross Kenyon reads his own Substack essay arguing that a “perfect” carbon-credit taxonomy wouldn’t meaningfully unblock climate action. Useful contrarian framing for a taxonomy-obsessed field. Core mechanism: categories like avoidance/removal/legacy fray at the edges immediately, yet practitioners communicate fine anyway — Wittgenstein’s “game” problem plus Polanyi’s tacit knowledge. His diagnosis: the real blockers are narrative and how humans handle the discount rate, not categorization gaps. Honest as a corrective, overstated where taxonomy is regulatory infrastructure. No guest, no numbers, no market data. This is a philosophy essay read aloud, not an episode you mine for figures. He explicitly doesn’t dismiss taxonomy work — “valuable work for some purposes” — he just demotes it from the critical path. Ross Kenyon goes solo on episode 408 of Reversing Climate Change, reading an essay he published on Substack, The Impossible Taxonomy of Carbon Dioxide Removal. No guest, no interview — just Kenyon working through whether the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field’s endless categorization projects actually matter. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 15 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/inside-the-fight-to-save-600-million-for-dac-with-vikrum-aiy TL;DR Heirloom’s VP of policy explains how the ~$600M Louisiana DAC Hub award survived Trump-era review — while other hub tiers got cut. Useful post-mortem, not spin. Winning argument wasn’t climate: LNG export carbon intensity, workforce transferability, and hyperscaler siting. A repeatable playbook, candidly described. 45Q’s $180/t is intact post-BBB, but reporting is in limbo: EPA’s GHGRP move broke the verification chain, Treasury’s safe harbor lapsed end-2025, replacement framework not yet issued. California’s cap-and-trade extension put CDR integration into statute and lets emitters comply via direct capital expenditure (CapEx) investment into removal facilities — Aiyer sizes the market “in the billions.” The $85M/yr Cap-and-Invest pot is small; the statutory integration is the real story. First detailed practitioner account I’ve seen of the mechanism. Sebastian Manhart hosts Vikrum Aiyer, Heirloom’s head of global energy and climate policy, on The CDR Policy Scoop for a 30-minute tour of US direct air capture (DAC) policy: the DAC Hubs rescue, the 45Q reporting gap, and California’s Cap-and-Invest program. ...