In this episode of The CDR Policy Scoop, Eve Tamme and Sebastian Manhart follow up on their interview with Mette Quinn to hash out their own read of Brussels' proposal to fold carbon removals into the EU ETS, and they don't agree on much. Is this really a \"compliance market,\" or a purchasing programme that happens to sit on the ETS cap? Eve and Sebastian take opposing sides, and the answer matters more than semantics: it shapes how the whole mechanism should be judged.
The cost assumptions get the roughest treatment. Sebastian has spent the past week stress-testing the BioCCS and DAC numbers behind the impact assessment, and he's not convinced. The transport and storage figures look wildly optimistic against what he's hearing from Europe's biggest BioCCS developers off the record. Biochar comes off worse still: favourably discussed in the impact assessment, then dropped entirely from the actual proposal, with nature-based solutions getting an explicit review clause that biochar never received.
Timing is the other flashpoint. A 250 million ton removals commitment sounds decisive, until you line it up against a 48 million ton auctioning target for 2039 and realise the years don't match. Add in unresolved questions about who eats the risk on non-delivered offtakes or a shifting carbon price, and the \"who pays\" question stops being hypothetical.
They close on supply: will a demand signal alone be enough to pull removals out of the Global South, or will an undersupplied market let developers simply triage toward whoever pays most? Robert Höglund's observation that this may be the first major EU proposal to treat permanent removals as functionally equivalent to reductions gets a nod too, a precedent Eve and Sebastian both think could ripple well beyond the ETS.
Show notes: