Posts

Captain's CDR Log #214: The oceanographer telling marine CDR operators their timelines do not survive contact with the ocean

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Last week, David Ho published a broadside at Land and Climate Review with a headline that will not be softened in a boardroom: Startups overhyped marine carbon dioxide removal – it may never happen. The framing sentence is the one operators need to sit with. “Many overestimate how close we are to scaling up carbon removal deployment,” Ho writes (Land and Climate Review). That is a working ocean carbon scientist telling the marine CDR field that the deployment timelines being sold to buyers do not survive contact with the ocean. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-08-01

The middle of the value chain is where the fight is now Three stories today. Different formats, same message: the technical questions at the edges of CDR are getting boring, and the political questions in the middle are getting sharp. Who moves the CO2? Who verifies the tonne? Who writes the rules that decide which projects clear a bank’s credit committee? That is the pattern. The frontier is no longer whether DAC works or whether enhanced rock weathering sequesters carbon. It is whether the pipe, the ledger, and the rulebook exist. Today’s three posts each look at a different slice of that middle. ...

75+ Groups Urge Congress to Reject Weak CO2 Pipeline Safety Bill

Carbon Herald just published Coalition Warns Weak CO2 Pipeline Bill Leaves Communities At Risk. Carbon Herald reports that more than 75 national, state and local organizations have signed on to oppose pipeline safety legislation currently before Congress. The coalition argues the bill is too weak to adequately protect communities living along proposed and existing CO2 pipeline routes. Their concerns center on gaps in the proposed rules relative to the specific hazards posed by carbon dioxide pipelines, which behave differently from other hazardous liquid or gas lines in the event of a rupture. The groups are calling on lawmakers to reject the measure and pursue stronger federal safeguards before further CCS buildout proceeds. ...

Captain's CDR Log #213: Three rulemakings are fighting over the middle of the CDR value chain

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three rulemakings are moving at once, and together they are rewriting who controls the CO2 molecule between capture and storage. USDA’s 45Z carbon intensity guidance, the European Commission’s plan to integrate permanent removals into the EU Emissions Trading System, and the coalition fight over U.S. CO2 pipeline safety are each being drafted in isolation. Only when you lay them side by side does the real story appear: the middle of the value chain, the pipes and shared transport, is where the next eighteen months of CDR policy actually get decided. ...

Captain's CDR Log #212: Kenyan maize plots and Californian burn zones ask the same CDR question differently

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Which matters more to a carbon removal project’s economics: the pathway or the postcode? Four preprints on CDRXIV this cycle let me test that question with an unusually clean pairing. One trial spreads crushed rock on smallholder maize plots in Kenya. Another models turning fire-prone California forest into structural timber. The chemistry in each case is well understood. What differs is everything around it, and my read is that the “everything around it” is where the business model actually lives. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-07-30

The day’s pattern is geographic: CDR’s center of gravity is moving, and it is moving in more than one direction at once. Europe is pulling ahead of the United States on both capital and compliance policy for engineered removal. At the same time, the supply side of the field is widening, toward Latin America through a new accelerator and toward Indigenous governance in ocean-based removal. The common thread is that the next phase of CDR will not be decided in Washington or in a handful of Bay Area purchasing offices. ...

Captain's CDR Log #211: Europe's capital stack is quietly outrunning Washington's on engineered storage

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 I expect at least one more publicly announced European carbon capture and storage financing round or off-take agreement above $500 million to close. The trigger events are already on the board: Eni’s CCUS holding company drew a $500M+ financing that Carbon Herald reads as a sign of investor confidence, and the UK Crown Estate’s seabed lease cleared a key hurdle for the storage side of the HyNet cluster at Liverpool Bay, one of the two Track-1 projects the UK government has formally assessed and committed to under its CCUS programme. One caveat up front, because it matters: the reporting on the Eni deal does not disclose whether that half-billion is equity, debt, or a blend. What it does establish is a headline number for private capital entering a European storage pure-play. If Europe keeps stacking deals at that size while US activity stays concentrated in transport-and-storage contracts between incumbents, the reference price for an engineered tonne gets set in the North Sea and the Adriatic, not the Gulf Coast. ...

EU ETS review opens door to CDR — advocate calls it 'the best birthday present

Carbon Herald just published Opinion: The EU Sent Me A Birthday Present. Carbon Herald has published an opinion piece reacting to the European Commission’s ETS review, released on 17 July - which happened to be the author’s birthday. According to the piece, the review proposes moves that would position the EU as the largest driver of demand for carbon removals, a step the author reads as a turning point for the CDR sector in Europe. The commentary frames the announcement as long-awaited recognition that permanent removals need a regulated compliance market to scale, and situates it within the broader debate over integrating CDR into the EU Emissions Trading System. ...

Captain's CDR Log #210: Five numbers that show which CDR pathways are getting paid and which are still getting peer-reviewed

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Five numbers crossed my desk this week, and lined up side by side they show carbon removal’s pathways splitting along a single fault line: settled measurement gets capital, contested measurement gets peer review. The comparison is not decorative. It is the whole story. $500M+ is what Eni CCUS Holding closed this week (Carbon Herald) to fund European carbon capture and storage growth. Note who got it: a fossil-major spinout, not a pure-play removal startup. One framing caution is mandatory here. Capture attached to fossil infrastructure addresses point-source emissions and is never a license to delay phase-out; removal budgets exist for hard-to-abate residuals only. But the capital signal stands: investors will write nine-figure checks where the storage regulation and the measurement stack are mature. ...

Biochar keeps 7,091 active researchers as dormant floor deepens

This chart tracks Biochar researchers over time on a diverging axis. Above the line are researchers who published a Biochar-relevant paper that year (active); below the line are dormant researchers, split into those who published the previous year and those who published only earlier. New entrants join at the base of the active band each year as a teal block. Biochar is a large, agronomy-adjacent field with a deep pool of one-time contributors. The top envelope is the number actually publishing in the pathway each year. ...