Hey, I’m CaptainDrawdown

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. ...

The operator stack is finally visible Today’s stories share one thread: carbon removal is becoming an industry with a defined shape. We can see who builds, who measures, who buys, and how many people actually work in it. That picture is smaller than the press cycle suggests, but it is more legible than it was a year ago. The Graphyte-Sumitomo deal, paired with Graphyte’s listing on Isometric, shows the stack snapping into place. Graphyte does the carbon casting. Sumitomo brings industrial offtake and capital. Isometric certifies the tonnes. Three roles, three companies, one delivered tonne. That separation of duties is what a real industry looks like. It is also what buyers have been asking for: an operator they can contract with, a registry they can audit, and a balance sheet behind both. ...

This chart plots every pure-play CDR company in the Directory as a single dot. The horizontal axis is the company’s founding year (estimated from its primary domain registration), the vertical axis is its current headcount on a log scale, and the colour codes the company’s pathway. The shaded blue background traces overall company density — darker patches mark where the crowd of pure-plays sits. The value here is shape, not ranking. A bar chart would tell you how many companies exist in each pathway; this view tells you the entire industry’s growth contour at one glance — when did the wave of small startups hit, where are the rare big older operators, what cluster sits on the floor of “still under five people”. Outlier dots near the top of the chart are the names everyone already knows; the dense low band is where most of the industry actually lives. ...

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. ...

Today’s three stories all point at the same uncomfortable truth: the gap between where CDR needs to be and where it actually is keeps widening, and the reasons are increasingly structural rather than technical. A new capacity assessment finds the gap between planned CDR supply and what climate goals require is growing, not shrinking. Meanwhile a snapshot of the company landscape shows 377 of 969 tracked CDR firms are in biochar, a heavy concentration in one of the lower-permanence pathways. And Captain Drawdown’s own CDR Log #153 examined two assessments that both circle back to a geography problem: the rocks suitable for enhanced rock weathering and mineralization sit in jurisdictions whose rules are not built for them. ...

Heatmap News just published The Sorry State of Carbon Removal. Heatmap News covers the third State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report, a collaboration among researchers at Wisconsin-Madison, Maryland, Oxford, the Potsdam Institute, and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. The report estimates that humans intentionally remove about 2.2 billion tons of CO2 per year, roughly 5% of annual emissions, almost entirely through conventional methods like tree planting, forest management, soil sequestration, and wetland restoration. Novel approaches such as direct air capture, BECCS, enhanced weathering, and biochar account for less than 1%, growing from 1.4 million tons in 2023 to 2 million in 2025. To stay on a 1.5C path, novel removal would need to reach 70 million tons by 2030 and 360 million by 2035. ...

Each dot on this scatter is a single CDR pathway - direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, mineralization, and the rest. The horizontal axis counts how many companies are working that pathway; the vertical axis sums the employees across those companies. Linear scales on both, so distance on the page matches distance in the numbers. What this view reveals that a headcount table cannot is the shape of the industry. A pathway sitting high and to the right is crowded with firms and staffed deeply. One sitting high but to the left is a pathway dominated by a few large companies. Low and to the right means many small teams chasing the same idea. The spread between these corners is the story of where capital and talent have actually landed, versus where the field is still a cottage. ...

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. ...