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Captain's CDR Log #224: The Yale geochemist turning enhanced weathering's paper trail into infrastructure

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. On November 12, Tim Jesper Suhrhoff posted a chart that ought to change how enhanced weathering buyers read the literature. His finding: peer-reviewed terrestrial enhanced weathering papers are doubling every 2.8 years. Preprints are doubling every 1.3 years. “Enhanced weathering publications are growing exponentially. For peer-reviewed terrestrial EW papers, the estimated doubling time is ~2.8 years (R² = 0.92). Outside formal peer review, growth is even faster: ~1.3 years,” he wrote (@climatejesper.bsky.social). Enhanced weathering (ERW) is the CDR pathway that spreads crushed silicate rock on land to accelerate the natural reaction between minerals and CO2. The science underneath it is now moving faster than the review system that certifies it. ...

Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 companies mapped

This chart is a stacked bar count of every company in the CDR Directory, grouped along the x-axis by removal pathway (direct air capture, enhanced weathering, biochar, ocean alkalinity, and so on), with each bar segmented by business focus: pure-play producers, brokers and marketplaces, and firms where CDR is a side business bolted onto a different core model. The total height tells you which pathways are crowded with company formation. The segment mix tells you something a raw count hides: whether a pathway’s apparent size is built on operators actually delivering tonnes, on intermediaries reselling them, or on incumbents whose CDR line is a minor adjunct. Two pathways with identical totals can have very different underlying economies once you see the split. ...

Captain's CDR Log #223: How a registry rulebook rewrite is reshaping what biochar operators can sell

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 Isometric certified Standard v2.0 last week, and it is already the rulebook that new biochar and mineralization protocols are being written against. Not a draft. Not a consultation. The live version. It binds any project that wants to issue credits on the Isometric registry, and it tightens three things that decide operator economics: counterfactual biomass fate, leakage accounting, and durability evidence. See Isometric’s own certification notice for the pathway list. ...

Liverpool Bay CCS Wins UK Seabed Lease—But Financial Close Still Pending

Carbon Herald just published UK’s Crown Estate Seabed Lease Clears Way For Liverpool Bay CCS Project. Carbon Herald reports that Liverpool Bay CCS Limited has signed a seabed lease agreement with The Crown Estate, removing a major regulatory and property-rights barrier for the proposed carbon capture and storage project off the coast of North Wales and northwest England. The lease covers the offshore area intended for CO2 injection and permanent storage in depleted gas fields. The project is part of the HyNet North West cluster, one of the UK government’s priority industrial decarbonisation programmes. The agreement is described as a milestone that allows development activities to progress toward final investment decisions and construction. ...

Captain's CDR Log #222: The demand-side rules are racing ahead of the supply-side social license

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Three policy fronts moved this week, and together they expose CDR’s real regulatory risk. Switzerland bound companies to interim removal volumes. The Science Based Targets initiative opened comments on its Net Zero Standard 2.0. And a rural revolt against CO2 pipelines in the US and Canada got loud enough that Carbon Brief flagged it as the read of the week. Read together, the fight has shifted. It is no longer whether removals count. It is whether demand-side rules will force buyers to procure tonnes before the physical infrastructure to deliver them is socially permitted. ...

Biochar dominates CDR with 377 of 969 tracked companies

This violin plot sorts every pure-play CDR company in the Directory by its pathway (columns) and its headcount (vertical axis, log scale from 1 to 100+). Each dot is one company, coloured by its current liveliness tier — Active, Moderate, Suspect, or Likely Dead. The grey shape behind each column is the size distribution: where it bulges, that’s where most companies in that pathway sit. The value here is comparative. A raw company list tells you who exists; this view tells you where the weight sits. Pathways with most dots stacked at the bottom are dominated by sub-10-employee firms — many small entrants, few that have grown. Pathways with dots reaching up the column have produced operators that scaled past the founder-and-a-few-engineers phase. Colour (not vertical position) is what tells you the health story: red dots high up the column mean a sizeable operator went quiet; red dots on the floor are the long tail churning as it always has. ...

Captain's CDR Log #220: Five numbers from five jurisdictions redrawing the CDR map this week

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. This week’s deal flow forms a map, not a technology chart. Five numbers from five jurisdictions show that where a project sits, and under which regulator, is now the primary determinant of whether it finances. The pathway matters less than the postcode. 1.77 million credits. Rwanda authorized Econetix to market up to 1.77M CORSIA-eligible credits under Article 6, per Biochar Today’s reporting on the ICAO letter. This is a government-issued letter of authorization sized for compliance aviation demand. Article 6 supply is being minted at the host-country level, and Rwanda moved first at this volume. ...

CDR Daily Digest — 2026-08-07

Today’s three stories point in the same direction: CDR is getting welded onto infrastructure that already exists, not built from scratch on empty lots. Microsoft’s new offtake with CREW is a hyperscaler paying for removal that piggybacks on a working utility. Veolia’s Sheffield pilot is a capture trial retrofitted to an operating energy-from-waste plant. Even the enhanced weathering literature is converging on protocols that work with existing farm operations rather than around them. The greenfield era of CDR - purpose-built plants on dedicated sites - is not over, but the growth edge in 2026 is retrofit. ...

Veolia Launches UK's First Non-Amine Carbon Capture Trial in Sheffield

Carbon Herald just published Veolia Trials UK-First Non-Amine Carbon Capture Tech. Carbon Herald reports that resource management firm Veolia has partnered with Sheffield City Council to trial a next-generation carbon capture technology that avoids the use of amines. The pilot is described as a UK first for this type of non-amine capture chemistry. Amine-based solvents are the dominant approach in post-combustion capture but come with degradation, energy penalty and emissions concerns, which is why alternative sorbents are drawing attention. The outlet frames the deployment as a test of whether an alternative capture route can work at municipal scale in a real operational setting. ...

Captain's CDR Log #219: Microsoft's CREW offtake shows hyperscalers now buy CDR bolted onto existing utility infrastructure

Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all. Microsoft signed a long-term offtake with CREW Carbon this week, buying durable removal credits from a startup that captures CO2 at municipal wastewater treatment plants. The deal, reported by Carbon Herald, matters less for the tonnage and more for what it says about hyperscaler procurement logic. CREW has now raised over $35M in equity while booking more than $40M in signed offtakes across 10 utility deployments, according to The Carbon Curve. That ratio inverts the DAC pattern, where equity dwarfs contracted revenue for years. It suggests a specific thesis is taking hold among the biggest CDR buyers: pay for tonnes that come off infrastructure someone else already built and operates. ...