The CDR Policy Scoop

Grant Faber, Head of Standards at Absolute Climate, joins Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart. Grant previously served as Director Capture Hubs program manager at the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, and the conversation picks up on the widely circulated article he published mapping out exactly where the US DAC Hubs program stands today.

Grant walks through why disbursement has stalled at roughly two and a half percent of the original three and a half billion dollars in funding. Much of the delay traces back to the lengthy contract negotiation process that follows every award announcement: milestones, budgets, environmental compliance, and cybersecurity plans all have to be finalized before a dollar moves, a process that consumed nearly his entire tenure at DOE before the change in administration froze everything.

The conversation turns candid on the terminations that followed. Grant explains why the cancellations fell disproportionately along party lines, and reveals that DOE itself admitted in court that projects were chosen for termination on a purely political basis. He also recounts his own experience of being caught up in the so called Valentine's Day massacre, locked out of his systems weeks after the inauguration.

Grant closes by breaking down what remains: a billion dollars reprogrammed to nuclear funding and one point three billion still sitting unobligated, and offers his sharpest advice for policymakers elsewhere, move quickly, build coalitions across the political spectrum, and design funding to land in every state, not just the ones that already agree with you.

Links:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Grant Faber: LinkedIn
Absolute Climate
The Status of DOE's $3.5 Billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs Program
DOE Alumni Network
Grant's directory, A list of every direct air capture company in the world
Grant's directory, A list of every carbon dioxide removal company in the world:
USA Spending, the federal spending database referenced for DAC Hubs obligation and outlay data:

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In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart dig into the cost assumptions behind the European Commission's EU Emissions Trading System review proposal, a month after the impact assessment first set out what BioCCS, DACCS, and biochar carbon removal are actually expected to cost between now and 2040. Sebastian has spent the past weeks tracing where those numbers come from, and brings in Hansjorg Lerchenmuller, Chairman of Biochar Europe, and Eadbhard Pernot, Executive Director of Carbon Management Europe, to stress test the modelling against real project economics.

The picture that emerges is one of a forecast built on remarkably thin foundations. All the Commission's numbers trace back to just four sources, and because the medium scenario is simply an average of a low and a high estimate, a single shaky assumption can drag the whole range off course. For BioCCS, that means a low cost calibrated against an unverifiable 2022 conference remark and a transport and storage figure of just 38 euros a ton that barely holds up against real infrastructure costs. DACCS fares little better, with the entire range resting on a single McKinsey report whose underlying assumptions were never published.

Biochar gets the most detailed correction. Hansjorg lays out where the European industry actually stands, more than 235 plants and a real scalable price closer to 175 to 200 euros a ton, well above what the Commission's own modelling implies.

The conversation closes on a shared plea: better data, more transparency about assumptions, and more developers willing to submit real transaction numbers before the next round of forecasts gets built.

Links:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Hansjorg Lerchenmuller: LinkedIn
Eadbhard Pernot: LinkedIn and Carbon Management Europe
Sebastian Manharts’ Why the BioCCS costs in the ETS proposal simply don't add up
McKinsey’s Carbon removals: How to scale a new gigaton industry
European Biochar Market Report, 5th edition
CDR.fyi
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In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Lisa DeMarco to unpack the legal machinery behind Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. A letter of authorization is an enforceable contract by which a host government permits a project to export a piece of its own climate progress. Lisa explains that it only counts as genuine under Article 6 if it conforms exactly to the minimum requirements set out in Article 6.2 or 6.4. She warns that letters of approval, acknowledgement, or no objection are routinely confused in the market, and points listeners to the model LOA forms she helped develop with the World Bank.

The conversation turns to the KOKO cookstove project in Kenya, where two government entities each argued they lacked the authority to issue the LOA, leaving no party accountable when the project collapsed. Lisa breaks down the three part diligence host governments should complete before signing an LOA: confirming which branch of the state actually holds authority, checking the export will not take the country off track from its NDC, and reviewing domestic constitutional questions around trading natural resources.

Lisa and the hosts also dig into revocation, distinguishing between a government's right to revoke a bad actor's authorization and the far more consequential question of retroactively cancelling units that have already changed hands, something she compares to printing a dollar bill and tearing it up. On corresponding adjustments, she lays out exactly when they are legally required by law and when not. However, even when projects don’t require corresponding adjustment, arranging a letter of acknowledgement from the government is crucial.

They close by sizing up the market: roughly thirty five Article 6 projects have been authorized since the start of 2025, worth about one hundred million credits combined, against a European Union that alone could need hundreds of millions of credits by 2040.

LINKS
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Lisa DeMarco: LinkedIn and Resilient LLP
World Bank: Letter of Authorization and Acknowledgement (incl templates)
IETA Article 6 Project Directory
Paris Agreement Article 6 Implementation Partnership

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In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme are joined by Mel Murphy, an independent geochemistry consultant, and Dirk Paessler, founder and CEO of Carbon Drawdown Initiative and Vice President of the Negative Emissions Platform, for a very special episode on how anyone actually knows enhanced rock weathering is working.

Mel explains the two dominant measurement approaches, solid phase and aqueous pore water, and why they often tell different stories about the same field. Dirk brings the view from Carbon Drawdown Initiative's own experiments: a field trial with no measurable signal, buried buckets that still show nothing after 1400 days, and a greenhouse programme now running hundreds of soil and rock combinations. The pattern that keeps surfacing is that results depend on the specific rock, soil, and method used.

That uncertainty has not stopped the market. Over 20,000 credits have been certified across Brazil, the US, and India, even as Vera has declined to build a methodology, citing immature science. Mel unpacks Carbon Plan's critique of credits from the US company Lithos, where an implied dissolution rate came out roughly ten times higher than a new peer reviewed estimate, and how registries like Isometric are adjusting requirements accordingly.

The conversation closes on cost. Measurement now eats up 56 percent of enhanced rock weathering's budget, the highest share of any removal method. Dirk and Mel discuss whether machine learning trained on greenhouse data and satellite based field mapping can bring that down, and why neither will commit to a timeline for readiness under something like the EU ETS.

Show notes:

Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Mel Murphy: LinkedIn
Dirk Paessler: LinkedIn and Carbon Drawdown Initiative
Questions about Lithos’ first ERW credit issuance
An Ecosystem of Carbon Dioxide Removal Reviews – Part 3: Enhanced Weathering
MRV Proxies for EW? A Guided Tour Through Our Data From Our Two-Year Greenhouse Experiment
Portfolio Spotlight: AEROC — Giving Enhanced Rock Weathering Its Eyes
Where does the CO₂-removal potential of enhanced weathering actually go?
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In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Dr. Injy Johnstone, Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Net Zero Lab, to unpack her new report, What Are Residual Emissions, which tries to bring clarity to one of climate policy's most used and least defined terms.

Johnstone explains why, more than a decade after the term entered use, there is still no shared definition. The IPCC modeling community that coined it works from different inputs than a corporate net zero team, and the timeline question, today's technology versus a 2050 horizon, changes the answer. She also draws a distinction the sector often blurs: hard to abate describes a technological limit, while residual emissions is a broader, more normative category shaped by choices about demand reduction and regulation.

The conversation turns practical as Johnstone breaks residual emissions into near, medium and long term buckets that corporates and governments can plan against. Sebastian presses on the middle bucket, where overly optimistic assumptions about future technology can quietly reduce carbon removal investment today. Johnstone and Eve also test the new SBTi and ISO standards released since the report's publication.

They close on equity: who decides an industry keeps its social license to keep emitting, and who absorbs the trade offs within a finite carbon budget. Johnstone argues these normative choices are already being made, whether admitted or not, and surfacing them is the first step toward distributing that cost fairly.

Links:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Injy Johnstone: LinkedIn
"What Are Residual Emissions” Report
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