Louisiana CDR Open Call Targets Pilots From 1,000 to 100,000 Tonnes Per Year

A four-week application window closes on November 13, 2026 for Louisiana carbon removal developers seeking backing under a new open call that spans pilot projects up to 100,000+ tonnes of CO2 per year. Newlab, Shell GameChanger and Louisiana Innovation launched the call on October 16, 2026.

The initiative sits under the Louisiana Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) Initiative, announced in September 2026 as a public-private effort to position the state as a global hub for CO2 removal technology development and deployment. This call is the mechanism's first concrete funding pipeline.

Which material pathways qualify?

The call is deliberately broad on technology. Eligible streams include:

• Direct air capture (DAC) and hybrid pathways
• Biomass-based approaches: biochar, biomass storage, bio-oil, and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)
• Enhanced rock weathering (ERW)
• Marine CDR
• Innovations in sensing, measurement, reporting and verification (MRV)

Organizers want to demonstrate how Louisiana's industrial, geological, coastal and agricultural resources can support the selected pathways, and to identify where deployment opportunities and constraints actually lie.

What scale is on offer?

The call supports high-durability CDR projects at three commercial and technical readiness levels. Each tier is defined by an indicative scale for the project's next deployment milestone.

• Tier one — pilot stage: up to 1,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
• Tier two — demonstration stage: roughly 1,000 to 10,000 tonnes per year.
• Tier three — deployment-ready or near-commercial: roughly 10,000 to 100,000+ tonnes per year.

The tiered structure matters for the wider carbon removal sector. Most announced US capacity sits at the pilot end; a call that explicitly courts 100,000-tonne near-commercial deployments signals that Louisiana wants operating plants, not laboratory experiments.

What must applicants show?

Two conditions apply. Applicants must demonstrate a viable path to deployment within Louisiana, and a willingness to collaborate on site-specific deployment scenarios. No project escapes scrutiny: organizers state that any selected project remains subject to technical validation, commercial evaluation, applicable permitting, and relevant environmental and regulatory requirements.

The permitting caveat is not decorative. Louisiana has become the testing ground for marine carbon removal in the United States — the Environmental Protection Agency issued its second-ever marine carbon removal pilot permit in the state — and the regulatory pathway for novel CDR pathways remains largely unwritten. MRV innovations being eligible for support alongside removal technologies is a tacit acknowledgment that measurement remains a sector bottleneck.

Why Louisiana?

The state offers an unusual combination: heavy industrial infrastructure, suitable geology for storage, a long coastline relevant to marine CDR, and agricultural land applicable to biomass and enhanced weathering pathways. The initiative's framing treats these as deployment assets to be matched with technology providers, rather than as passive geography.

For developers, the value on offer is less grant capital than access — to sites, to state-level coordination, and to a corporate backer in Shell with a commercial interest in scaling removal. What the call does not specify is the size of financial support per project; that detail is absent from the announcement.

What happens next?

The near-term milestone is the November 13, 2026 application deadline. What follows — selection of projects, the tier mix that gets backed, and whether any tier-three project clears 100,000 tonnes per year against Louisiana's permitting regime — will determine whether the state's leadership claim is built capacity or a press release.