Synthesis

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers landed this week that, read together, form a coherent critique of how the CDR sector is talking about itself. The headline figures are real. They are also small enough that the canonical sector report now calls the gap “hard to fathom.” The critics are no longer on the outside. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 9,566 tonnes of CO2, verified and issued from a single enhanced rock weathering batch on tea estates in West Bengal. That is the new high-water mark for enhanced rock weathering, the process of spreading crushed silicate rock on land so it reacts with CO2 and locks it into bicarbonate. Until last week, no ERW operator had cleared five figures in one issuance. The previous reference points were a few thousand tonnes per batch from UK and US developers like UNDO and Lithos, plus Mombak’s first Isometric-verified ERW credits out of Brazil, which Captain Drawdown covered when Mombak generated its first batch. Alt Carbon, founded by brothers Shrey and Sparsh Agarwal, just roughly tripled the category ceiling in one shot. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The maritime decarbonization story this week is that DNV verified a 98% capture rate on a Carbon Ridge onboard unit, and shipping press, LinkedIn, and several procurement desks are quoting it as if maritime CDR just shipped. It hasn’t. The number is real. The framing is wrong. And the gap between those two facts is exactly the accounting trap that will detonate maritime MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) in 2027. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story Graphyte locked in two operator-grade milestones in a single week. Sumitomo, a Japanese trading house with infrastructure-scale capital and offtake reach into Asian utilities and steel, took a backing position in the company. At the same time, the project landed a public listing on the Isometric registry with an inspectable file, prj_1J4P33N6W1S0RKE2. That combination, a sovereign-adjacent industrial balance sheet plus a registry-grade MRV (measurement, reporting, verification) record, is what direct air capture pure-plays have been trying and largely failing to assemble at this scale. It matters because durable removals still sit under 1% of delivered volumes per the 3rd State of CDR report, and the operators who break that ceiling will be the ones with cheap physical processes, a public audit trail, and an anchor buyer. Graphyte now has all three. ...

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 California just rewrote the rules of the largest US carbon market, and the rewrite quietly weakens the compliance demand that durable carbon removal was supposed to inherit. On May 29, Governor Newsom signed a reauthorization extending cap-and-trade (now rebranded cap-and-invest) through 2045, but the package increases free allowance allocation to refineries and utilities, softening the price ceiling that residual emitters would have hit. In the same week, the SEC moved to eliminate Biden-era climate disclosure requirements. The carrot and the stick for US corporate CDR procurement both got smaller at once. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Where does the EU’s 2030 carbon storage target break down geographically? Not in Brussels, where the rules are written, but in the member-state capitals where the pore space actually sits unbuilt. Two assessments published this autumn map the same problem from opposite ends. Read them together and the geographic mismatch becomes the story. ...

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. ...