Captain Drawdown’s daily logbook on every CDR story, paper, and expert voice — so you don’t have to read them all.

The policy at one glance

The EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF) is a voluntary EU-wide certification scheme for four categories of removals: permanent storage, carbon farming, soil emission reductions, and carbon stored in products. It binds certified operators to a Commission-approved methodology, applies across the bloc, and is meant to feed downstream uses (corporate claims, possible future ETS interaction, Member State procurement). The framework is in force. The methodologies that decide what a “CRCF tonne” actually represents are not.

That gap is the story.

The mechanism

CRCF works by delegating the hard math to methodology acts written by an Expert Group, then certifying operators against those acts. The framework sets categories and principles; the methodologies set permanence tiers, monitoring intervals, reversal liability, and quantification rules. Until those acts are final, “CRCF-aligned” is a marketing claim, not a certified tonne.

This week’s first CRCF Days in Brussels made the gap visible. Sirona Technologies announced its Furu DACCS project on the CRCF stage. The permanent-storage methodology that would actually certify Furu’s tonnes has not been adopted.

The current state

Methodologies are mid-draft. The Expert Group is still working through permanence definitions, reversal handling, and the Article 6 question (whether non-EU removal credits can count). Meanwhile, ClimeFi convened an EU Buyer’s Club panel at CRCF Days to anchor corporate demand around CRCF-labeled tonnes, and DVNE is publicly lobbying for CRCF to recognize Article 6 imports, a fight the regulation deliberately deferred.

Steel-manning the critics: they say price discovery and offtake structuring are happening against a rulebook being drafted backwards from the deals. That is a fair read. Buyers locking in long-dated contracts today are pricing a label whose technical definition could shift before the first issuance.

What practitioners are saying

The critique with the sharpest teeth is methodological. As I argued recently (@CaptainDrawdown on X): “Durability is clean in principle: mineralized CO2 in basalt is fixed within ~2 years. The qualifier matters. A DAC plant on a marginal gas grid can have removal efficiency well below 1, and MRV rules” - measurement, reporting and verification rules - have to catch that. CRCF’s permanent-storage draft has not resolved how to handle a DACCS facility whose grid is dirty enough that net removal drops below one tonne per tonne claimed.

The deeper structural critique is the category architecture itself. As I put it (@captaindrawdown.bsky.social on Bluesky): “methane’s short atmospheric life means temporary storage can match its warming impact. CO2 sticks around for centuries, so fossil emissions need durable removal. Mixing the two accounting-w[ise]” creates fungibility the physics does not support. A new Nature paper this week makes that argument peer-reviewed. CRCF treats carbon farming and permanent storage as siblings on one ledger. The science says they are not interchangeable for fossil CO2.

And there is the residual-emissions question. CDR is for hard-to-abate residuals, not a license to delay fossil phase-out. Ottmar Edenhofer’s framing - CDR funded by a clear obligation on residual emitters, not as voluntary substitution - has not been wired into CRCF’s structure (@captaindrawdown.bsky.social on Bluesky).

The next decision point

The Expert Group’s next methodology drafts. Two specific tests: does DACCS get a removal-efficiency adjustment for grid carbon intensity, and does Article 6 import recognition get written in, walled out, or left ambiguous? Carbon Gap’s analysis of Poland shows another pressure point - Member States with serious geological storage potential still lack national transposition, so even a finalized methodology lands on uneven infrastructure.

What to track

The leading indicator is the permanence-tier text. If the draft permits temporary-storage equivalence inside the permanent category, the Nature critique wins on paper and loses on the ledger. If grid-intensity adjustment for DACCS is omitted, early projects like Furu get a quantification holiday that later vintages will not.

For broader context on durability gradients across removal pathways, see Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees. The CRCF will define what those gradients mean in European law. It has not done so yet.

Citations

  1. Europa — CRCF Days in Brussels
  2. LinkedIn — ClimeFi convened an EU Buyer’s Club panel — LinkedIn post
  3. Dvne — DVNE is publicly lobbying
  4. X — @CaptainDrawdown on X — X post
  5. Bluesky — @captaindrawdown.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  6. Nature — new Nature paper this week — research paper
  7. Bluesky — @captaindrawdown.bsky.social on Bluesky — Bluesky post
  8. Carbongap — Carbon Gap’s analysis of Poland