Synthesis

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Stockholm Exergi’s 750,000-tonne, 15-year permanent BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) off-take to the City of Stockholm is the new European price floor for permanent removal, and within six months it will lock in a two-tier price curve that Brussels has not authored. The deal is the largest non-corporate permanent removal contract on record (onestopesg), and it was signed while the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation methodologies remain unwritten after CRCF Days 2026. That vacuum hands pricing power to private registries, Isometric and Puro.earth, for every deal that closes before the end of 2026. The buyer archetype has also shifted. A municipal government, not a tech corporate, just set the benchmark. Other European cities will price their next budget cycles against it. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The CDR registry stack is bifurcating. Project developers are building their own pre-issuance integrity tools, while traditional registries quietly retreat to scheduling and certification. This week made the split impossible to miss. Three launches, read together, tell the story. Mati Carbon released a free app for stress-testing enhanced rock weathering data. The tool sits upstream of any registry. It is open-sourced. It is built by a developer answering the integrity question before a methodology asks it. EW (enhanced rock weathering, the practice of spreading crushed silicate rock on fields to accelerate natural CO2 mineralization) has a measurement problem, and Mati is solving it on its own terms. For background on the pathway, see our primer on enhanced weathering. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The policy at one glance The EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF) is a voluntary EU-wide certification scheme for four categories of removals: permanent storage, carbon farming, soil emission reductions, and carbon stored in products. It binds certified operators to a Commission-approved methodology, applies across the bloc, and is meant to feed downstream uses (corporate claims, possible future ETS interaction, Member State procurement). The framework is in force. The methodologies that decide what a “CRCF tonne” actually represents are not. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers from the past week point at the same thing. Named individuals are now the rate-limiting step in CDR scale-up. The gaps between what each of them pledged and what they have actually wired matter more than any tech roadmap update. 28%. That is roughly how much of Jeff Bezos’s $10B climate pledge the Bezos Earth Fund has disbursed six years in, per Bloomberg reporting surfaced by Amanda Kolson Hurley ([@amandakhurley.bsky.social on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/amandakhurley.bsky.social/post/3mmway5qaic2z)). Roughly $2.8B out against a 10-year clock that is more than half elapsed. CDR grantees who modeled Earth Fund money into their 2026-2028 runway are now repricing that assumption. Hurley also flagged that “the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is winding down its climate work” while “Sergey Brin’s foundation and Steve Ballmer - and especially, MacKenzie Scott - are giving a lot of climate dollars.” The seat is rotating. Which human is in it this quarter decides which CDR pipelines survive. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The consensus A new Nature Reviews Bioengineering synthesis, Genome engineering of plant photosynthesis for carbon sequestration, is being passed around CDR circles this week as evidence that engineered crops are a serious carbon removal pathway. Plant biologists, agtech investors, and a growing chorus on LinkedIn are treating Rubisco redesign, C4 retrofits, and improved electron transport as a route to gigatonne-scale drawdown. The framing: fix photosynthesis, fix the carbon budget. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story California Resources Corporation (CRC) injected the first molecules of CO2 into Carbon TerraVault I (CTV I) this week, opening the state’s first operational geologic storage project at the Elk Hills field in Kern County, as reported in California Launches First Operational Carbon Storage Project. It matters because California legislated SB 905 in 2022 to govern CO2 injection and has been waiting on a permitted, operating well ever since. Three years of statute, federal Class VI processing, county conditional use approvals, and reservoir characterization just collapsed into a single open valve. The continental storage map, which had Quest in Alberta and a handful of Gulf Coast projects, just added a West Coast node. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The critique “One mature tree takes up ~25 kg of CO₂/year, so 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That’s a time machine that takes us back ~33 minutes in a year. Nature will not save us from fossil fuel CO₂.” That is David Ho (@davidho.bsky.social), and it is the cleanest attack on nature-based removal in circulation right now. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week in London, Jim Mann stood on the Carbon Removal Investment Summit stage and told a room of investors that enhanced rock weathering’s economics do not resolve on a spreadsheet. They resolve in a specific watershed, on a specific farm, with a specific basalt source feeding specific soil chemistry downstream. According to UNDO’s own recap of the panel, Mann’s argument was blunt: generic tonne accounting hides where ERW (enhanced rock weathering) actually works and where it does not. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. What does a corporate CDR offtake actually look like in 2026? This week gave us two answers, signed within days of each other, and they are not the same answer. Microsoft locked in 650,000 tonnes of BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage) from Denmark’s BioCirc over seven years. Lufthansa signed a multi-year deal with aggregator Senken covering both engineered and nature-based removals. Same market on paper. Two completely different transactions underneath. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Why this matters now In a single week, two major buyer coalitions launched on opposite ends of Eurasia, and they are not the same animal. Singapore’s ARC Coalition pools voluntary corporate money across Asia-Pacific for a mix of avoidance and removal credits. The EU’s CDR Buyers’ Club is being designed as a demand aggregator for durable removals tied to a forthcoming compliance regime. If you sell tons, the difference between these two clubs is the difference between two very different decades. ...