The Carbon Removal Scoop

In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme sits down with Delia Meth-Cohn, Co-founder of Rethinking Removals, to make sense of what happened to ISO 14060, the draft net zero standard for organisations. When Delia joined Sebastian in June, the draft had just opened for consultation. Since then it has drawn around 5,000 comments and failed its first ballot, a rare result at this stage of an ISO process.

Delia explains why this vote was different. Participation was capped at four experts per country because of the level of interest, few national standards bodies abstained, and the draft fell well short of ISO's thresholds of two-thirds approval with no more than a quarter of votes against. She walks through what comes next, a second draft and two more votes, and why publication now looks closer to 2028 than mid-2027.

Eve and Delia dig into why the draft felt rushed, why an ISO standard carries quasi-regulatory weight that SBTi does not, and how the ground is shifting underneath it, with ISO and the GHG Protocol rewriting the foundations of carbon accounting. Delia's challenge for the next round is to treat the comments as themes rather than wording, and to find the balance between flexibility and credibility without watering the standard down.

The conversation closes on removals. Speaking personally, Delia sets out how the next draft might handle anticipated residual emissions and the gap between cheap credits and expensive removals, and has a pointed message for a removals community she suggests needs to rethink its approach.

LINKS:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Delia Meth-Cohn: LinkedIn
Rethinking Removal
Our previous episode, Inside the ISO Net Zero Standard with Delia Meth-Cohn:
ISO/DIS 14060 Net Zero Aligned Organizations
Trellis, ISO members send net-zero draft back for revisions
SBTi Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0
ISO and GHG Protocol partnership on unified carbon accounting standards
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In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Sebastian Manhart sits down with Julia Reichelstein, co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep, and Tyler Manchester, Head of Voluntary Carbon at CFP Energy, to get the inside story of Vaulted's $35 million debt facility from Mediobanca. Julia explains why Vaulted grew on equity for its first two sites and why, with a delivery track record and a pipeline of new sites, it has now reached what she calls the "just add water" stage where debt is the right capital.

Tyler explains why this is CFP Energy's first debt transaction in carbon removal after two decades in carbon markets, and what it took to get comfortable: a developer with a proven record, high-credit offtakers removing market risk, and an insurer covering the residual project risk that institutional lenders expect. He is open about who else can get through the door, including the rough minimum loan size CFP will consider, and why he thinks the market's chicken-and-egg problem is finally starting to crack.

Julia makes the case that bankability starts long before anyone talks to a bank. She describes how the fine print of an offtake contract, the page she once skipped past, became the page lenders scrutinised most, and recounts the working capital fight that pushed registries and buyers towards monthly crediting. Both credit Frontier for brokering the introduction and publishing offtake templates others can reuse.

They close on policy. Every debt deal discussed in the episode closed outside Europe, and Tyler sets out what would change that: projectable revenue, ideally fixed forward prices or a liquid forward market. Sebastian lays down a challenge for the first European deal, and Tyler accepts it.

LINKS:
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Julia Reichelstein: LinkedIn
Tyler Manchester: LinkedIn
Vaulted Deep: Website
CFP Energy: Website (https://www.cfp.energy/)
Vaulted Deep secures $35 million in debt financing
Frontier offtake agreement template
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In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with Alexander Mäkelä, Chief Policy Officer at Carbon Gap, to dig into the Policy Levers Library: a new living database of 165 policy levers across six policy families, unveiled at Carbon Gap's Carbon Removal Policy Summit in Brussels. Alex's starting point is blunt. The sector keeps reaching for the same few tools, contracts for difference, direct procurement, the EU ETS, and that may be a failure of imagination.

Asked which lever Europe is leaving untouched, Alex lands on finance. Demand certainty dominates the conversation, but without bankability and capital ready to deploy, he argues, projects simply won't materialise. He makes the case for CDR debt that is as boring as renewables debt, and points to Stockholm Exergi's crowded capital stack as a sign of just how much it currently takes to get a BECCS project over the line.

Eve and Sebastian also put the library itself under the microscope: why there is no impact score among its eleven criteria, how the team scored every lever using case studies from Europe, North America and the Global South, and where a policymaker handed the link should actually start. The hosts push for something the tool doesn't do yet, connecting policymakers with those who have already solved the same problem somewhere else.

The conversation closes on advocacy, and why Alex thinks the sector is too reactive and too focused on Brussels when thousands of German municipalities alone have no plan for removals. Tune in to hear why Carbon Gap actively wants people to steal its work.

LINKS:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Alexander Mäkelä: LinkedIn
Carbon Gap: Website
Policy Levers Library
Carbon Removal Policy Summit
Our episode recorded at the Carbon Removal Policy Summit
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In this episode of The Carbon Removal Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart sit down with James Screen, who until recently led the team designing carbon removal policy at the UK's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. A year after the Scoop covered Alan Whitehead's independent review of greenhouse gas removals, James explains what the government's response actually is: not a grand strategy, but a staging post that sets out the UK's direction of travel and leaves the hardest questions for the Carbon Budget 7 delivery plan.

James is candid in sharing his personal views about where the response parts ways with the review. He explains why there is little political appetite to reopen what net zero means by adopting geological net zero, the outlook on woodland in the UK ETS, and reads the new "as soon as practicable" timeline for removals in the UK ETS against the backdrop of possible UK and EU ETS linking.

The conversation then turns to the GGR business models. James walks through how carbon contracts for difference sit on top of the network support model in clusters like Liverpool Bay, why he thinks the model can work for both voluntary and ETS sales, and why taxpayer subsidy cannot be the enduring answer. Sebastian and Eve also find themselves on opposite sides of whether the UK and Europe are making too narrow a bet on BioCCS and DAC.

They close on the reshuffle that followed the response, with James explaining why he sees continuity rather than radical change, and why the story of solar and offshore wind gives him real cause for optimism.

LINKS:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
James Screen: LinkedIn
Independent review on greenhouse gas removals: government response
Independent Review of Greenhouse Gas Removals by Alan Whitehead
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In this quarterly catch up, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart swap the guest chair for each other and look back at three busy months in carbon removal policy, with a few disagreements along the way.

They start with the EU ETS review and the joint statement from Europe's five CDR associations, which Sebastian helped coordinate. He shares some of the background scoop on where the associations lined up and where they didn't, from biochar and the link to the Carbon Removal Certification Framework to whether international credits belong in the ETS at all. Eve draws on her experience of the last time international credits entered the system, and Sebastian previews his first academic paper on what a credible international credit portfolio might actually cost.

Then comes the bigger question: is Europe putting all its eggs in the BioCCS basket, or is it six baskets? Sebastian worries that newer and potentially cheaper approaches are being left behind, while Eve makes the case for backing the projects that can deliver at scale now, and pushes back on the idea that all of Europe's CO2 is heading to the North Sea.

They close with a reality check on the EU buyers coalition, where the usual optimist and sceptic swap roles, slow progress on durable removals under Article 6.4, and why the headlines out of New York Climate Week may not tell the whole story for carbon removal finance.

LINKS:
Eve Tamme: LinkedIn and Website
Sebastian Manhart: LinkedIn and Website
Joint statement from five CDR associations on the EU ETS review
Mapping conflicts in carbon removal narratives (Prütz et al., Nature portfolio)
MEP Emma Wiesner: Let EU ETS Operators buy CDR Directly
Sebastian's preprint on international credit portfolios
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