Synthesis

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The new UN Environment Programme overshoot report is being read as a verdict: engineered carbon removal is unsafe or expensive, and cutting emissions with existing clean tech is already cheaper. Niklas Höhne (@niklashoehne.bsky.social) summarised it bluntly on Bluesky: “Technologien zur nachträglichen Entfernung von Kohlendioxid aus der Luft sind unsicher / sehr teuer.” That thread has travelled far this week, and it is becoming the political shorthand for CDR-in-general. Climate policy circles, EU ETS watchers, and a good chunk of the climate-science Bluesky crowd are nodding along. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week the biochar deployment engine ran hot in three geographies while two field papers landed on Zenodo and Carbon Research saying, essentially: your tonnage math depends on conditions you probably are not measuring. Operators are treating pyrolysis output as a commodity. The soil-carbon evidence is not cooperating. Start with the iron. CO2-Sync and Carbo-FORCE cut the ribbon on the CF-1000 commercial pyrolysis facility in Price, Utah, a working plant in the US Mountain West rather than a signed memorandum (Park Record). Days later the same operator announced a second plant with S.C. Pure Carbon Solution in Romania (Carbon Herald). Two continents, one operator, one week. On the buy side, the accelerator remove closed its 2026 pre-purchase activity with an Exothermite biochar deal, telling us where the last dollars of the buying cycle went. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Naomi Vaughan has her name on two linked preprints hosted on CDRXIV that examine how the UK builds the evidence base for its carbon dioxide removal policy. One, Slow but Sure: Expert Perspectives on Carbon Dioxide Removal Policy in the United Kingdom (June 2025), is an expert-elicitation study she co-authored with Smith and Forster. The other, Insights lost at points of vulnerability in UK policy evidence gathering on Carbon Dioxide Removal (October 2025), co-authored with Hope, names specific procedural chokepoints where non-industry and non-engineered-removal perspectives fall out of UK consultations. Both are back in focus now that 160 academics and civil-society leaders are pressing ministers to impose a carbon takeback obligation on fossil fuel producers, per Carbon Herald. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. “Direct Air Capture (DAC) is often argued as a small footprint form of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) & this is seen as an advantage. For Nuremberg (Germany) to take up its current per capita emissions…” — Glen Peters (@glenpeters.bsky.social) Peters, a lead author on IPCC carbon budget chapters, picks a single mid-sized German city and asks a question the DAC industry rarely poses in public: what would it take, on the ground, to remove that city’s per-capita emissions using DAC sited inside a European urban geography? His post walks through the arithmetic and lands on an uncomfortable result. The plant needed to offset Nuremberg would not tuck neatly beside Nuremberg. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Two preprints on ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE) posted to CDRXIV frame the same regulatory problem from opposite ends. One argues the lab evidence base is being generated at doses no real deployment would produce. The other reports a field trial that found no harm. The gap between them is the permitting question: what counts as a “realistic” perturbation when regulators write environmental review protocols for marine CDR? ...

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 Two things happened in parallel this month. A Nature paper argued that soil and critical-zone processes trap much of the alkalinity enhanced rock weathering (ERW) is supposed to send to the ocean. And Commons and InPlanet announced a distribution deal to sell more ERW credits to more buyers. The measurement debate and the sales channel are moving in opposite directions. If you buy or underwrite these tonnes, you need to understand the argument underneath the invoice. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. $205 million. That is the size of the low-interest state loan the North Dakota Industrial Commission just approved for Project Tundra, a post-combustion carbon capture retrofit on the Milton R. Young coal station (Carbon Herald). The prior reference point matters. Compare Tundra’s loan to Mantel’s $18M round for molten-borate carbon capture, one of the week’s headline private raises for a novel capture pathway. The public loan is roughly eleven times the private equity cheque, and it goes to a mature amine-style retrofit on a fossil asset rather than to an early-stage technology that could eventually serve removal use cases like bioenergy with carbon capture (BECCS). ...

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 Bangladesh’s Ministry of Environment has issued a Letter of Authorization to clean-cooking developer ATEC under Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, reported by Carbon Herald. The LoA is the sovereign act that converts a project’s future credits into ITMOs — Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes — which importing countries can count toward their own Nationally Determined Contribution targets. Without that signature, credits from a host country stay in voluntary-market territory and cannot flow into compliance demand backed by another government’s NDC. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers dropped into the CDR literature and market this week. They point in the same direction: the addressable market is smaller, slower, and more contingent than the headline tonnage claims suggest. Every one of these figures either shrinks a pathway, revokes past tonnes, or attaches a condition that most 2024-era models did not price. ...

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. The story A field trial off a working oyster farm produced the first direct biological measurements of olivine exposure on a commercial shellfish species, and the effect was small. Emilia Jankowska and colleagues posted the preprint Limited impact on oysters in first-of-its-kind field trial of marine CDR on CDRXIV in January 2025. This is not a mesocosm and not a model. It is olivine deployed in the water near cultivated oysters, with the animals themselves as the receptor. For a decade, marine enhanced rock weathering (ERW, the practice of dissolving crushed silicate rock to draw down CO2) has been blocked by an unfalsified hypothesis that olivine will poison shellfish. The field has tested that hypothesis on the animal regulators actually care about. ...