The European Commission has welcomed the provisional agreement between the European Parliament and the Council on the first EU-wide voluntary framework for the certification of carbon removals.
The certification framework aims to help the EU to reach climate neutrality by certifying carbon removals, prevent greenwashing and create new business opportunities. The European Climate Law, signed in 2021, legally binds the EU to become climate neutral by 2050.
The agreement sets out certification rules for:
Industrial carbon removals, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), or direct air carbon capture and storage;
Binding carbon in long-lasting products and materials, such as wood-based construction materials or biochar; and
Carbon farming, such as restoring forests and soils and avoiding soil emissions, rewetting of peatlands, more efficient use of fertilisers, and other innovative farming practices.
The provisionally agreed Regulation will improve the EU’s capacity to quantify, monitor and verify the authenticity of all these forms of carbon removals.
In particular, it sets out rules to recognise certification schemes that demonstrate compliance with the EU framework, and a specific set of criteria to ensure the high-quality of carbon removals and the transparency and credibility of the certification process.
The agreed criteria will ensure that carbon removals are correctly quantified; store carbon for an agreed long-term period (a minimum of 35 years for carbon stored in products); go beyond existing practices and don’t just reward the status quo; and contribute to broader sustainability goals, for instance by providing positive impacts on biodiversity.
An EU registry, due to be in place within four years, will create transparency about certified carbon removals. In the meantime, the registries of existing certification schemes can be used.
The Regulation provides a prioritisation of the certification methodologies that should be developed. On this basis, the Commission, supported by a Carbon Removal Expert Group, will continue its work to develop credible and tailored certification methodologies for the different types of carbon removal activities.
Only around 2 Mt of biogenic CO2 are currently captured per year, mainly in bioethanol applications, according to the IEA.
Plans for around 20 facilities together capturing around 15 Mt CO2 per year of biogenic emissions have been announced since January 2022.
Based on projects currently in stages of deployment, carbon removal via BECCS could reach just under 50 Mt CO2/yr by 2030, which falls far short of the approximately 190 Mt CO2/yr removed through BECCS by 2030 in the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario.
Targeted support for carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and BECCS in particular, will be required to translate recent momentum into operational capacity.
The IEA adds that the current policy landscape is insufficient to address barriers to higher-cost applications, such as in power and industry.
The European Parliament and Council now need to formally approve the agreement. Once this process is completed, the new legislation will be published in the Official Journal of the Union and enter into force.
source: gasworld.com (Dominic Ellis)