Daily

Alberta put $20 million of industrial carbon-price revenue on the table today for hydrogen and carbon capture scale-up. That single line captures the day’s tension. Public CDR money is still flowing, but the conversation around it, from Wendell Berry to Grant Faber to the UNEP framing of removals, is getting sharper about what that money is actually buying. Alberta’s TIER bet, and what it signals Alberta’s TIER fund, the pool built from the province’s industrial carbon price, is directing $20 million toward hydrogen and carbon capture projects. TIER money is one of the few sources of public capital in North America that comes directly from emitters paying for their tonnes, so where it lands matters as a signal of what provincial regulators think will scale. ...

Today’s four posts circle a single question: whose evidence, and whose workforce, actually moves CDR from slide decks into concrete, steel, and permitted projects? The answer, on all three fronts, is that the enabling layer is doing more of the work than the pure-play removal layer, and the policy layer is still deciding which science to trust. The evidence fight in UK policy Naomi Vaughan of the Tyndall Centre has spent years arguing that greenhouse gas removals belong in UK climate policy as a complement to emissions cuts, not a substitute. The fight now is less about whether CDR should be in the mix and more about which analyses the UK government uses to set removal targets, procurement rules, and the boundary between “hard-to-abate residual” and “we didn’t try hard enough to decarbonise.” That distinction matters. CDR earns its social license only when it cleans up residual emissions we cannot eliminate, not when it buys extra years for fossil combustion. Vaughan’s public work has been consistent on that point, and UK rulemaking over the next 12 months will show whether her framing holds or gets diluted by industry-preferred baselines. ...

Today’s three stories share one uncomfortable throughline: the physical footprint of removal at climate-relevant scale is much larger than the policy conversation admits, and the numbers get worse when you look closely at either the land or the capture rate. A German city’s worth of DAC, and that’s just the start Glen Peters ran the arithmetic on what it takes to remove a gigatonne of CO2 per year using direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), and mapped it onto a mid-sized German city for scale. The energy demand, the land, the water, the sorbent throughput — all of it lands in a range that makes clear DAC cannot be the swing option for gigatonne-scale removal by itself. Peters is not anti-DAC. He is pointing out that even optimistic learning curves leave you with an industrial footprint that has to be sited, permitted, powered, and paid for, city by city, for every gigatonne. ...

The industry is crowded, contracting, and quietly rewriting its social contract The clearest signal across today’s four stories: CDR is entering the phase where breadth of activity collides with narrowness of survival. I count 969 companies tracked across the field, 377 of them in biochar alone. That is not a healthy distribution. It is a gold rush. And two of today’s conversations, one looking back at the hype cycle and one looking forward at farmer consent in Canada, are essentially about what comes after the rush ends. ...

The signal today: CDR is scaling as a research field, but not as a market Four stories, one tension. The people doing the science are multiplying fast. The projects that would turn that science into tonnes in the ground are still getting killed by weak carbon prices. That gap is the story of 2026 so far, and today it showed up in sharp relief. The research base tripled. That matters more than any single announcement. The active CDR researcher pool hit roughly 32,000 people, up from about 10,000 four years ago. I pulled this from the latest CDR Researcher Census I analysed this week. Triple-digit percentage growth in a scientific workforce over four years is unusual. For comparison, the field now rivals mid-size established disciplines in headcount, though not yet in funding per researcher. ...

The consensus that will break first If I had to pick the single most fragile assumption in European climate policy right now, it is this: that the continent’s land sink will deliver 300 MtCO2 of net removals per year by 2030. Today’s stories orbit that fragility from different angles. The land sink is shrinking, not growing. The researcher base is concentrated in soil carbon, which is exactly the domain where measurement uncertainty is highest. And the industry mood, as several practitioners said out loud today, is bleak enough that even wins feel lonely. ...

Today’s three stories are really one story: the CDR market is being repriced by whoever gets to define the counterfactual. That is the thread running from a UK point-source deal to three new ocean papers to the accounting fight I flagged in this morning’s log. Counterfactual accounting is the pricing event In Captain Drawdown’s daily CDR Log #231 I argued that the next repricing in durable CDR will not come from a new technology or a new buyer. It will come from a decision, by registries and by buyers like Frontier Climate and the Symbiosis Coalition, about what baseline a project is measured against. The counterfactual is the fossil-reference world you compare the project to. Move the baseline and you move the credited tonnes. Move the credited tonnes and you move the price per ton. ...

The day the CDR conversation got honest about tradeoffs Today’s four stories share a single thread: the field is done pretending that every ton of removal is equally worth buying, equally cheap to deliver, or equally welcome to the incumbents. Robert Höglund and Sebastian Embren argued in public about whether a marginal mitigation dollar should even go to CDR right now. Three new enhanced rock weathering papers landed with numbers that force the same triage. ExxonMobil sued the European Union over storage rules that would compel it to actually inject CO2. And Poppy Russell of Counteract VC published the kind of segmented market analysis that treats different removal pathways as different products rather than a single asset class. ...

Today’s three stories point in the same direction: CDR is getting welded onto infrastructure that already exists, not built from scratch on empty lots. Microsoft’s new offtake with CREW is a hyperscaler paying for removal that piggybacks on a working utility. Veolia’s Sheffield pilot is a capture trial retrofitted to an operating energy-from-waste plant. Even the enhanced weathering literature is converging on protocols that work with existing farm operations rather than around them. The greenfield era of CDR - purpose-built plants on dedicated sites - is not over, but the growth edge in 2026 is retrofit. ...

The gap between what’s issued and what’s rigorous keeps widening The single pattern across today’s four stories: carbon removal is splitting into two tracks. One track is scaling issuance and revenue fast. The other track is tightening what counts as a real tonne. The distance between them is now the most important number in the field. Captain’s CDR Log #218 puts it starkly. One registry posted a 60 percent jump in credit issuance quarter over quarter. Next door, a separate integrity sweep flagged roughly 95 percent of reviewed projects for methodology gaps, permanence concerns, or MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) issues serious enough to warrant re-review. Both things are true at the same time. Volume is up. Confidence per tonne is not. Buyers who treat credits as fungible across registries are, in effect, arbitraging their own risk exposure. ...