Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.
Why this matters now
In a single week, two major buyer coalitions launched on opposite ends of Eurasia, and they are not the same animal. Singapore’s ARC Coalition pools voluntary corporate money across Asia-Pacific for a mix of avoidance and removal credits. The EU’s CDR Buyers’ Club is being designed as a demand aggregator for durable removals tied to a forthcoming compliance regime. If you sell tons, the difference between these two clubs is the difference between two very different decades.
What is it?
A “buyers’ club” in carbon markets is a coordinated purchasing vehicle. Companies pool capital, agree on quality criteria, and place larger offtake orders than any single buyer could justify alone. Frontier Climate’s advance market commitment is the template. What is new this week is that two regional clubs launched with sharply different designs.
ARC (the Coalition to Accelerate Carbon Credits in Asia) is voluntary and corporate-led. It targets 10 million tons and covers both avoidance and removal. The EU CDR Buyers’ Club is narrower: durable removals only, scoped to the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF), and explicitly framed as a bridge to bringing removals into the EU Emissions Trading System.
Who’s involved?
ARC’s founding members include Tencent and CATL, with backing from GenZero and Ecosperity, Singapore’s market-building institutions. Singapore’s government has also committed US$15 million to the Global Green Growth Institute’s Carbon Transaction Facility and launched an Article 6 Carbon Facility, wiring the coalition into sovereign-to-sovereign trading under the Paris Agreement.
The EU CDR Buyers’ Club is being shaped by Carbon Gap’s discussion paper, released ahead of CRCF Days in Brussels. It pulls in European corporates already buying durable CDR and aligns them with the Commission’s regulatory timetable.
What just happened?
ARC launched in Singapore with the 10-million-ton headline and the Tencent and CATL anchors (Carbon Herald). Two days later, Carbon Gap put the EU Buyers’ Club paper front and center at CRCF Days, framing it as a way to seed demand before ETS integration of removals.
The timing is not coincidence. New research from the Carbon Business Council shows corporate CDR demand is gated on policy clarity. Both jurisdictions are responding to the same diagnosis with different prescriptions.
Charm Industrial (@charmindustrial on LinkedIn) put the moment plainly: “The challenge is no longer just proving the science. It’s building the market infrastructure that allows durable carbon removal to scale responsibly.”
The comparison that matters
Voluntary clubs move fast and can write large checks, but the demand evaporates in a recession or a sustainability-officer reshuffle. Compliance-linked clubs move slowly but produce price floors that survive political cycles. ARC’s blended avoidance-plus-removal scope risks the same integrity questions that have dogged voluntary markets for a decade. The EU vehicle’s tight focus on durable removals is narrower but sturdier. For suppliers of durable removals like enhanced weathering operators (see our primer on enhanced weathering), the choice of which club to engage is a bet on which regime defines your offtake for the next ten years.
Open questions
- Will ARC publish a removal-vs-avoidance split inside its 10-million-ton target, or keep them blended?
- Does the EU Buyers’ Club paper trigger a Commission proposal to integrate removals into the ETS, and on what timeline?
- Will Asian durable-CDR suppliers be eligible for EU club purchases, or will geography fragment the buyer pool?
- What price floor does each club establish, and how far apart are they?
Further reading
- Carbon Gap: CRCF Days Buyers’ Club paper
- Carbon Business Council: Corporate CDR Purchasing Hinges on Policy Clarity
Citations
- Carbongap — Carbon Gap’s discussion paper — PDF
- Carbon Herald — Carbon Herald
- Squarespace — corporate CDR demand is gated on policy clarity — PDF
- LinkedIn — @charmindustrial on LinkedIn — LinkedIn post
- Carbongap — Carbon Gap: CRCF Days Buyers’ Club paper