Synthesis

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. ...

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 Louisiana’s legislature just killed the bills that would have let parishes ban carbon capture and storage projects inside their borders. The Louisiana House Natural Resources Committee blocked the parish-veto measures, which means Allen, Vernon, and Livingston parishes, all of which had been pursuing local moratoria, no longer have that tool. Siting authority for CCS now sits entirely with the state and, for the underground injection wells themselves, with the federal Class VI permitting program. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. 1,000×. That is the gap between durable carbon removal we are actually delivering today and what the median IPCC 2°C scenario quietly assumes we will be removing each year by 2050. The prior reference point most CDR boosters cite is purchases, not deliveries. CDR.fyi’s Q1 2026 market update puts cumulative durable purchases near 10 Mt and calls Q1 the largest quarter on record. That framing flatters the sector. Switch the denominator to tonnes physically delivered and verified, and the annual run rate sits under 1 Mt/yr. IPCC scenarios consistent with 2°C require 5 to 10 GtCO₂/yr by 2050. One million versus five to ten billion. Three orders of magnitude on the delivery line, four on the cumulative line. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three biochar papers landed this week that, read together, expose a fork in the road the credit market is pretending isn’t there. Pyrolysis temperature, not feedstock or region, is becoming the variable that decides what biochar actually is: a durability-first carbon sink, or a functional soil and industrial input. You cannot have both at full strength, and current credit methodologies price them as if you can. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The forecast Within 90 days, at least three more durable-CDR suppliers will announce “industry-integrated” deployments. By that I mean CDR equipment bolted onto an existing industrial host site - wastewater plant, data center, refinery, cement kiln, fermentation tank - rather than a greenfield capture plant on bare ground. The reason is operational: the host already has permits, power, a CO2-bearing stream or a heat sink, and often a balance sheet willing to share capital costs. That cuts the time from term sheet to delivered tonne, which is what buyers and public funders now score on. The Q1 2026 Durable CDR Market Update makes the metric shift explicit: deliveries, not announcements. ...