The DACR Enterprise Hour

Most carbon removal conversations start with the atmosphere — how much CO2 needs to come out, how fast, and at what cost. Fewer start with the soil. And yet soil is where some of the most operationally credible, commercially viable, and agriculturally transformative carbon removal work is happening right now.

In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Kubilay Tok to examine biochar carbon removal — what it is, what it delivers, who it serves, and why the sector that most needs it is still not adopting it fast enough.

What You'll Learn

• How biochar turns agricultural waste into long-term carbon removal while improving soil health.

• Why biochar's farming benefits, including higher yields, lower fertiliser costs, and better water retention, may matter more than carbon credits alone.

• How stronger standards and verification can separate high-quality biochar credits from low-quality ones.

• Why carbon markets could help make biochar adoption financially viable for farmers.

• What needs to change for biochar and carbon removal to scale across farming communities.

The science of nature-based infrastructure works. The technology works. The engineering works. And yet the gap between what it can deliver and what actually gets built keeps widening — not because of a failure of capability, but because of a failure of valuation. We do not have the tools to measure what a forest is worth when it does not burn. We cannot price the value of water retained, heat absorbed, or flooding prevented. And so we do not fund it. Until the bill arrives.

In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Joshua Harrison to examine that valuation gap — what it costs, where it shows up, and what it would take to close it before the next megafire, the next flood, the next data centre moratorium.

What You'll Learn

• Why nature-based infrastructure remains underfunded despite proven science, technology, and engineering.

• The staggering economics of wildfire prevention, climate damage, and the infrastructure investment gap.

• How evapotranspiration, shade, and living green infrastructure can cool cities and manage water.

• What Los Angeles and Denver reveal about balancing water, energy, data centres, and ecological limits.

• Why traditional economics struggles to value environmental benefits and how pricing full-system value could change investment decisions.

A conversation with David LaGreca, Managing Director of Voluntary Carbon Market Services, EcoEngineers.

Institutional capital is beginning to move into the carbon removal space. States like Colorado are proposing frameworks like the Carbon Takeback Obligation that would require fossil fuel companies to offset lifecycle emissions through certified CDR credits, escalating from 25% in 2027 to 100% by 2032. The enthusiasm is real. The policy ambition is significant. And yet the question underneath all of it — how does any buyer actually know that what they are purchasing is what it claims to be — remains one of the most consequential and least honestly discussed problems in the climate economy.

In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with David LaGreca, a Colorado-based carbon market verifier and methodology developer who has spent years building the integrity infrastructure that makes everything else in the carbon removal market possible.

What You'll Learn

Verification is the thin line between a claim and hot air. David describes the diligence process as the layer between a claim of carbon removed and confirmation that it actually happened. Colorado's Clean Heat Plan has opted to build on voluntary carbon market protocols developed over decades, which means the integrity infrastructure being constructed here is not starting from scratch — but it is being stress-tested in real time.

The hardest methodological problems right now are feedstock sustainability and project bankability. For biomass-based approaches, the critical question is sustainable yield — how much biomass can be removed from a given landscape without adverse effects on soils and ecosystems. And for projects funded exclusively on carbon revenue, the fluctuating demand cycle has exposed a fundamental vulnerability. Companies need to be independently solvent, with carbon as a key component but not the exclusive avenue.

The CDR market's credibility problem stems partly from a founding posture that dismissed everything that came before it. David argues the market is now correcting course, recognising that resilience requires bringing in allies rather than calling everyone a foe, and that scale comes from stable businesses across multiple project types — not from moving fast and breaking things.

Colorado's ambition is real. But the state needs to bring technical experts — not just policy architects — into the room. Whether the Carbon Takeback Obligation builds on what has worked or gets captured by the best marketing the market has to offer will determine whether it drives genuine removal or compliance theatre.

His answer to what the CDR market needs to get right in the next three years: audit. Independent, rigorous, technically qualified verification without skin in the game. That unglamorous function is the load-bearing wall between high aspirations and total oblivion.

His closing advice to anyone on the fence about buying carbon removal credits: buy one now, from a registry carrying the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market's CCP label, and keep the market alive.

About David LaGreca

Managing Director, Voluntary Carbon Market Services, EcoEngineers. Colorado-based carbon market verifier and methodology developer working across biochar, BECCS, ocean-based CDR, and novel removal pathways.

A conversation with Dr. André Sobolewski, CEO of Elektra Minerals and former founder of Blue Skies Minerals.

The carbon removal sector has a storytelling problem. Not a technology problem. Not a capital problem. The problem is that the sector has developed a habit of presenting its ambitions as its achievements, its projections as its outputs, and its potential as its present reality. The result is a credibility gap the market itself created — and that the market itself must close.

In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi sits down with Dr. André Sobolewski — a man who spent three decades inside the industrial process of cleaning up what industry leaves behind, and three and a half years discovering what the carbon removal market is not yet equipped to support. He built Blue Skies Minerals, watched it enter insolvency in March 2026, and founded Elektra Minerals one month later. He did not leave the field.

What You'll Learn

The credibility gap in carbon removal is not one thing — it is three. Oil and gas companies claiming carbon removal credentials through enhanced oil recovery. Founders promising to remove one gigaton per year by 2035 to attract investors, setting expectations the technology cannot meet. And a genuinely promising but wobbly young industry that André compares to a toddler just learning to walk — one it is unfair to criticise for not running a marathon.

Voluntary commitments without enforcement mechanisms have produced cheap, non-credible carbon credits because there are no consequences for cheating beyond reputational damage. André points to Sweden as one of the few examples where binding limits with real teeth exist — and argues that until that standard spreads internationally, the market will not mature at the speed the climate requires.

What Blue Skies Minerals needed was not better technology. It needed the same ingredient that transformed water treatment in mining: government pressure. When regulators set firm limits and enforced consequences, mining companies that insisted treatment was impossible became creative overnight. Carbon removal needs that same forcing function.

The path forward is not only through large centralised factories. André makes the case for dispersed cooperative models — farmers supplied with biochar by local industries, supported by government — achieving large-scale removal through many small local organisations. This, he argues, is a crisis of imagination more than a crisis of technical capability.

About Dr. André Sobolewski

CEO, Elektra Minerals; former founder, Blue Skies Minerals. PhD, University of British Columbia. 18 years developing biological treatment systems at Microbial Technologies Inc., 3 years designing mine discharge water treatment at AMEC, and over a decade of environmental impact assessment work at Clear Coast Consulting.

On the evening of May 18th, 2026, the Denver City Council voted thirteen to zero to pass a one-year moratorium on new data centre construction in the city. Not a close vote. Not a committee referral. Every single member of the council — in a city that already hosts nearly fifty data centres — voted to stop building more of them.

In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi examines what happened, why it happened, and what it reveals about the collision between the AI economy and the physical landscape of the American West.

What You'll Learn

Denver had no rules for data centres when CoreSite began construction on its DE3 facility in the Globeville, Elyria-Swansea neighbourhood in north Denver — one of the most environmentally burdened zip codes in Colorado. No zoning standards. No water-use regulations. No energy requirements. No community impact assessments. Data centres were treated like warehouses. The city approved a nine million dollar tax incentive for the project before understanding what it was approving. The moratorium is the direct consequence of that governance gap.

The resource arithmetic is not intuitive and needs to be examined specifically. CoreSite's two existing downtown Denver data centres used a combined average of roughly 3,000 gallons of water per day over the past three years. The new DE3 facility is estimated to use 235,000 gallons of water per day — an increase of approximately 78 times — in a state where 93 percent of all 64 counties are under moderate-to-exceptional drought and the Colorado River basin is operating under long-term allocation stress.

Colorado's state legislature had the opportunity to set statewide standards for data centre development and passed on it. Two competing bills died in committee in May 2026 — one that would have incentivised data centres through voluntary water efficiency standards, and one that would have required large data centres to simply report their annual water use. Two hundred and thirty-eight lobbyists registered positions on one or both bills. The legislature could not agree on whether to incentivise or regulate. It did neither. Five days later, Denver acted unilaterally. Jefferson County voted the same way the next day. Longmont the week after.

The show's central argument — that direct air carbon removal and AI data centres can form a paired industrial ecosystem, where data centre heat supports carbon capture and carbon removal reduces water cooling demands — depends on this pairing being done correctly. The Denver moratorium is what happens when the data centre half of that equation arrives without community consent, without regulatory frameworks, and without the governance infrastructure that makes the partnership viable rather than extractive.

The moratorium buys Denver one year to write the rules that should have existed before CoreSite broke ground. Whether that year produces binding protections, enforceable standards, and a regulatory framework that gives communities real power in the negotiation is the question that determines what Colorado's data centre future — and its climate economy — actually looks like.

Timestamps[0:11] Introduction and the May 18th vote[1:45] How Denver ended up with no rules for data centres[4:30] The community response — Globeville, Elyria-Swansea, and the GES Coalition[5:45] What the Colorado state legislature failed to do[7:30] The resource arithmetic — water, electricity, and heat[9:45] What this means for the climate economy and the DACR-data centre synergy[11:10] Closing — the governance gap and what the moratorium buys

Most climate conversations treat direct air carbon removal as a future technology — something that might matter in a decade if the science matures and the costs come down. On June 4, 2026, JPMorganChase made a different argument. Not with a press release. With a financial transaction.

In this episode, Collins Victory Odabi breaks down what the JPMorgan–Charm Industrial deal actually represents — a 90,000 metric ton carbon removal commitment, a $20 million venture debt facility, and a specific operational bet on Colorado's wildfire landscape as the feedstock for permanent carbon storage.

What You'll Learn

The deal is not a climate pledge — it is a financial analysis. JPMorganChase is the largest bank in the United States by assets, with legal obligations to its shareholders. When it returns to a second, larger carbon removal purchase with the same company and adds growth financing on top, the signal is that the investment passed financial scrutiny — not that the bank has become more environmentally conscious. That distinction matters enormously for what it tells us about where the carbon removal market is headed.

The wildfire connection is the insight most carbon removal conversations miss entirely. When forest managers thin a stand of trees to reduce fire intensity, they generate biomass — wood debris that has no commercially viable use and typically gets burned on site, releasing its carbon back into the atmosphere. Charm Industrial's model converts that biomass into bio-oil through fast pyrolysis and injects it permanently underground. The feedstock for carbon storage and the material driving Colorado's most acute climate risk are the same thing.

The voluntary carbon market's credibility problem makes this deal structurally significant. For most of its history, the voluntary carbon market has been dominated by low-quality offsets where the carbon claimed was often not additional, not permanent, and not verifiable. Bio-oil injection through Charm's process produces a measurable, permanent, verifiable physical outcome — and JPMorgan's willingness to pay for it at scale is a signal about where the quality end of the market is going.

Colorado is not peripheral to this story — it is the core of it. The Fort Lupton facility, the wildfire biomass supply chain along the Front Range, the forest management partnerships. The $20 million is being deployed here because this is where the feedstock is, where the operations are established, and where the infrastructure for scaling already exists.

The deal is proof of concept, not a solved problem. Charm processes thousands of acres annually. Colorado's high-risk wildfire landscape spans millions. Closing that gap requires policy, infrastructure, and workforce investment that is not yet happening at scale — and that is exactly what this show exists to examine.

Timestamps
[0:06] Introduction and episode framing
[0:47] What Charm Industrial does and how bio-oil injection works
[5:00] The wildfire connection — why Colorado's fire crisis and carbon removal are the same conversation
[8:02] What JPMorgan's financial analysis tells us about the carbon market
[8:57] What the deal signals about Colorado's role in the climate economy
[9:23] What still needs to happen — policy, infrastructure, and workforce
[12:11] The economic development story inside the carbon removal supply chain
[14:47] Closing — what the deal proves and what it does not

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