The-Cdr-Policy-Scoop

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 16 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/live-from-brussels-the-carbon-removal-policy-summit-with-rod TL;DR Live from Carbon Gap’s first Carbon Removal Policy Summit in Brussels — four governance levels (international, EU, national, local) as the frame. EU “Buyers Club” is now the “Buyers Coalition” — open, not membership-based — and being positioned as a test ground for a future Emissions Trading System purchasing facility, possibly by 2029. Carbon Gap dropped a Policy Levers Library (~165 levers) plus a forthcoming Foundations of Carbon Removal book. Genuinely useful reference infrastructure if it lands as demoed. Real unresolved problem surfaced: Carbon Removal Certification Framework credits don’t yet map to national greenhouse gas inventories under IPCC methods. Without that link, Member State targets can’t pull on CRCF supply. Achim Steiner’s line — removals concentrated in few buyers, few countries, few technologies — is the honest diagnostic of where European durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR) actually sits. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme record live from Brussels across two days of Carbon Gap’s inaugural Carbon Removal Policy Summit, with a mid-day sit-down with Carbon Gap policy director Rodica Avornic. The episode is a running commentary on what got said on stage — Buyers Coalition futures, ETS integration guardrails, post-2030 Member State targets, and the awkward plumbing between CRCF credits and national inventories. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 08 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/mep-peter-liese-the-rapporteurs-take-on-removals-in-the-eu TL;DR Liese wants Parliament to pull removals integration forward to 2028, not the Commission’s 2031 — big signal for offtake timing. He argues for scrapping the cap on removal volumes in the ETS; if costs fall like solar did, why limit uptake. Bold, will meet resistance. Wants biochar added to eligible methods alongside DACCS and BECCS, capped ~20% max. First MEP I’ve heard commit to this on record. If the CDR-cost gap is bigger than the Commission modeled, his fix is to issue more allowances to fund the shortfall. Novel mechanism. Backs a strong link to the CRCF and wants removals inside the international-credits envelope — Namibia cement plant DACCS as concrete example. Hosts Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme get Peter Liese — the European People’s Party MEP who is Parliament’s rapporteur on the current EU ETS (Emissions Trading System) revision — on the record days before his draft report drops on 11 September 2026. The conversation is a near-exhaustive walk through what Parliament’s amendments to the Commission’s July 2026 removals-in-ETS proposal could look like. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Tue, 01 Se. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-is-really-happening-to-dac-hubs-with-grant-faber TL;DR Only ~2.5% of the original $3.5B DAC Hubs budget has been disbursed; contract negotiation ate most of the Biden term before terminations froze things. $1B of hub funding was reprogrammed by Congress to nuclear; ~$1.3B sits unobligated but not rescinded — dormant, not dead. DOE admitted in court that project terminations were chosen on political basis; cancellations skewed toward blue-headquartered primes even when projects sat in red states. Both TA3 megahubs (Project Cypress, South Texas) survived the retention list — Grant credits BIL/IRA’s deliberate red-district geography strategy. Grant’s speculative but useful scenario: unspent CDR appropriations pile up, and 2029 brings a sudden multi-billion-dollar “we’re back” moment. Take with salt. Grant Faber — former DAC Hubs program manager at DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, now Head of Standards at Absolute Climate — joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart on The CDR Policy Scoop to walk through his recent Substack article mapping the actual state of the US DAC Hubs program. This is the most granular public accounting of what survived, what got killed, and what’s still sitting in an account somewhere. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 23 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/what-does-cdr-actually-cost-in-europe-with-hansjorg-lerchenm TL;DR Commission’s ETS review cost forecasts for durable CDR trace to just four sources (McKinsey 2023, Ramboll Ecologic 2025, NEGEM 2023, CDR.fyi 2023) — thinner foundation than the policy weight implies. Bio-CCS low-cost anchor of €172/t leans on €165/t of assumed energy revenue and calibration against an unverifiable 2022 Drax conference remark. Overstated confidence. direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) range comes entirely from a black-box McKinsey report; no inspectable assumptions on energy, T&S, or learning rate. Useful flag. Biochar low bound (€37–66/t) reflects Global South artisanal systems; Hansjörg says European scalable price is €175–200/t. First-time-cited industry number worth having. Practical asks: modelers should use current CDR.fyi data, be transparent about assumptions, and suppliers should submit transaction data. Signal-dense. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Eadbhard Pernot (Carbon Management Europe) and Hansjörg Lerchenmüller (Biochar Europe) to stress-test the cost assumptions behind the European Commission’s July 2026 ETS review impact assessment. The episode walks through bio-CCS, DACCS, and biochar carbon removal cost curves line by line — where the numbers actually come from, and where they fall apart. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 17 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/article-6-letters-of-authorisation-explained-with-lisa-demar TL;DR A letter of authorisation (LoA) under Article 6 is a legally enforceable contract against the sovereign — not paperwork. Useful reframing for developers who treat it as admin. Letters of approval, acknowledgement, and no objection are NOT LoAs. Only documents conforming to Article 6.2/6.4 minimum requirements count. Market confusion here is rampant. KOKO’s collapse in Kenya hinged on two ministries each denying authority to issue the LoA. Concrete cautionary tale for LoA counterparty diligence. Since Jan 2025, ~35 projects authorised, ~100 Mt max volume — versus EU 2040 demand potentially in the hundreds of millions. Supply gap is real. No retroactive revocation of units post-first-transfer (COP29 clarification), but entity-level revocation for fraud/breach is being reserved — and should be. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme host Lisa DeMarco (Resilient LLP) for a 30-minute legal deep dive on Article 6 letters of authorisation: what they actually bind, how they fail, and why the pipeline of authorised credits is running well behind projected demand. If you’re a durable CDR developer pursuing Article 6 sales — or a buyer trying to understand what you’re actually buying — this is one of the more precise explainers I’ve heard. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 09 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/is-enhanced-rock-weathering-ready-for-scale-with-dirk-paessl TL;DR Solid-phase and aqueous-phase MRV on the same plot can disagree by orders of magnitude — tons vs kilos of CDR. Not a rounding error. Carbon Drawdown Initiative’s 300-litre buckets have shown zero enhanced-weathering signal after 1,400 days on Furt soil. Publishing the null result matters. ~20,000 credits certified across three geographies via three different solid-phase methods, while Verra declines to write a methodology. That gap is the story. Carbon Plan’s Lithos critique implies ~8.3 tCO₂/ha/yr vs a new Suhrhoff et al. median of ~0.8. 10× is not a discount factor, it’s a different claim. Dirk won’t name a year for ETS-readiness. Mel won’t either. Take that seriously. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart host Dirk Paessler (Carbon Drawdown Initiative) and geochemist Mel Murphy for a deep-dive on whether enhanced rock weathering (ERW) measurement is anywhere near the rigour policy frameworks like the EU Emissions Trading System or the Carbon Removal Certification Framework will demand. The episode runs long by the show’s standards and earns it. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 02 Au. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/inside-the-framework-for-residual-emissions-with-injy-johnst TL;DR Residual emissions has no shared definition — the term drifted from IPCC modeling into corporate net-zero plans without translation. Useful framing. Johnstone insists “hard-to-abate” (technological limit) ≠ “residual” (broader, includes demand-side and normative choices). Overdue distinction. Proposes three buckets: near-term abatable now, medium-term (2040) plausible tech, long-term (2050) speculative — with 5-year reassessment. Warns the medium-term bucket is where optimism bias silently shrinks today’s carbon removal (CDR) demand. This is the real signal. Compares SBTi v2 and draft ISO net-zero standards: ISO handles residuals with more specificity, SBTi punts implementation into future decades. Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme host Dr. Injy Johnstone (Oxford Net Zero) to unpack her Drax-funded report What Are Residual Emissions? — a term everyone uses in net-zero pathways and almost nobody defines the same way. The episode is a 30-minute methodological conversation, not a market update. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Mon, 27 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/the-eu-ets-scoop-verdict-our-honest-take-on-brussels-proposa TL;DR Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart disagree on whether the EU ETS removals proposal is a compliance market or a purchasing programme funded by one. The distinction shapes everything downstream. The cost assumptions look broken: €38/t transport and storage for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), €18/t for direct air capture (DAC). Developers privately say off by 2x+. The 250 Mt figure: Commission says target, proposal text reads more like an auction commitment. The rapporteurs will have to nail this down. Contingency asymmetry: non-delivered removals after allowances are auctioned have no backstop — unlike international credits, which trigger linear reduction factor adjustment. Biochar praised in the impact assessment, absent from the proposal. Nature-based solutions got a review clause; biochar didn’t. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart use this debrief episode of The CDR Policy Scoop to say what they couldn’t in their earlier interview with the Commission’s Mette Quinn: their unfiltered read of Brussels’ proposal to bring carbon removals into the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). It’s two policy insiders arguing productively, which is more useful than either of their LinkedIn posts alone. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 22 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/removals-enters-the-eu-ets-what-brussels-actually-proposes-w TL;DR The European Commission confirms a commitment to buy 250 Mt of permanent, domestic removals (bioenergy with carbon capture / direct air capture) for the EU Emissions Trading System — with a 2034 review clause. Commission cost modeling assumes no national subsidies layered on top. Given Nordic BECCS economics today, that looks optimistic. ETS operators can use certified removals for their own compliance from 2031 — no volume cap beyond deduction from the 250 Mt. Pay-on-delivery is the default, but Quinn signals openness to prepayment and offtake structures via Innovation/Modernisation Fund mechanics. Details unwritten. Commission’s own supply projection: ~48 Mt/year by 2040. The gap to the headline target is the real story. Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart got Mette Quinn — Deputy Director for Carbon Markets and Clean Mobility at DG CLIMA, and the official who led the ETS revision — on The CDR Policy Scoop five days after the Commission published the proposal. This is the closest thing to primary-source commentary you’ll get on the removals provisions right now. ...

Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Wed, 15 Ju. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/inside-the-fight-to-save-600-million-for-dac-with-vikrum-aiy TL;DR Heirloom’s VP of policy explains how the ~$600M Louisiana DAC Hub award survived Trump-era review — while other hub tiers got cut. Useful post-mortem, not spin. Winning argument wasn’t climate: LNG export carbon intensity, workforce transferability, and hyperscaler siting. A repeatable playbook, candidly described. 45Q’s $180/t is intact post-BBB, but reporting is in limbo: EPA’s GHGRP move broke the verification chain, Treasury’s safe harbor lapsed end-2025, replacement framework not yet issued. California’s cap-and-trade extension put CDR integration into statute and lets emitters comply via direct capital expenditure (CapEx) investment into removal facilities — Aiyer sizes the market “in the billions.” The $85M/yr Cap-and-Invest pot is small; the statutory integration is the real story. First detailed practitioner account I’ve seen of the mechanism. Sebastian Manhart hosts Vikrum Aiyer, Heirloom’s head of global energy and climate policy, on The CDR Policy Scoop for a 30-minute tour of US direct air capture (DAC) policy: the DAC Hubs rescue, the 45Q reporting gap, and California’s Cap-and-Invest program. ...