Pathway to Pathways – Canadian Energy Minister Tim Hodgson said he is highly confident Alberta oil sands companies can absorb the cost of the C$16.5 bln ($12 bln) Pathways carbon capture project, after Ottawa and Alberta agreed on the trajectory of the province’s industrial carbon price, Bloomberg reported. The project, backed by five major oil sands firms including Cenovus, Imperial Oil, and Suncor, would capture CO2 from multiple facilities and store it underground in eastern Alberta, with a first phase targeting 6 Mt of annual emissions reductions by 2035 and a longer-term goal of 16 Mt. Hodgson said the agreement was needed before companies could be brought into talks, while Oil Sands Alliance president Kendall Dilling said the carbon price remains a competitive disadvantage but that a new oil export pipeline to Asia could shift the economics. Alberta plans to unveil its pipeline proposal by July 1, with the federal government pledging to consider fast-tracking the project if the province advances route planning, British Columbia engagement, and First Nations consultation.

Latin American countries advanced carbon market plans last week, with Argentina proposing a carbon credit regime and Brazil outlining the rollout of its future emissions trading system, as the region eyes Article 6 demand to unlock investment.

A bipartisan US proposal to expand reforestation infrastructure support could ease long-standing supply bottlenecks constraining nature and carbon projects, observers told Carbon Pulse.

Silver linings? – The CDR market could actually benefit from Microsoft’s reported retreat from purchasing, the CEO of Swiss direct air capture firm Climeworks told Bloomberg late last week. Christoph Gebald said if Microsoft does pull back from the carbon removal market, it could signal the next phase of CDR - an era marked by many cross-sector companies making serious offtake commitments. Microsoft denied in April it would pause its CDR purchase programme after reports circulated that the tech giant would step away from large scale procurement. Microsoft’s offtake agreements have accounted for a huge portion of the CDR market to date. The company has signed inked a BECCS deal.

Planned CO2 capture and storage (CCS) projects in the cement sector will capture less than 2% of the industry’s global emissions by 2035, despite the successful launch last year of the world’s first commercial‑scale CCS facility at a Norwegian cement plant, according to a new report.

The risk that a developer goes bankrupt or fails to deliver is the biggest obstacle to funding carbon removal (CDR) projects, financiers told a European Commission event on the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) scheme last week.

A new discussion paper has urged governments to rapidly establish a global governance framework for carbon removal (CDR), warning that the world is dangerously unprepared to manage the scale needed to meet climate targets.

The Article 6.4 Supervisory Body (SBM) has formally adopted a new tool for calculating the fraction of non-renewable biomass (fNRB), a key parameter underpinning baseline-setting in cookstove and biomass carbon activities, though has requested more granular country-level values be included following further work.

Marine carbon removal (mCDR) projects looking to use sargassum could benefit from more predictable and persistent blooms in the Atlantic, as floating seaweed mats have increasingly begun to sustain their own growth, according to a recent study.

Alkalinity enhancement, whether applied on land through enhanced rock weathering or directly in marine environments, faces questions over durability because dissolved mineral compounds are often lost during transport, and not fully captured in current monitoring, according to a study.