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
Two industry position papers dropped inside a few weeks of each other, both aimed at the same target: getting permanent carbon dioxide removal (CDR) written into the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) before the Directive’s next review closes. The Negative Emissions Platform’s paper on integrating permanent carbon removals into the EU ETS is the supplier-side opening bid. The DVNE Policy Brief on Carbon Removal in the EU ETS is the national-level echo. Together they bind on nobody. But they tell the European Commission which arguments the industry will run through MEPs and DG CLIMA between now and the review.
The mechanism
ETS integration is a demand-signal problem. Today, an installation that emits a tonne of CO2 buys an EU Allowance. There is no legal route for that same installation to hand in a tonne of verified permanent removal instead. NEP and DVNE want that route created, with guardrails: only durable removals count, only above a strict quality bar, and only for genuinely residual emissions. The mechanism they are pushing changes incentives at the margin. It turns a voluntary buyer into a compliance buyer, which is the difference between a letter of intent and a bankable offtake.
Chris Bataille (@chrisbataille.bsky.social) put the underlying dynamic bluntly: with weak short-term policy stringency, “firms are going to redirect their R&D to deep mitigation, but not impose a lot of short term pain on their balance sheets.” Without a compliance signal, removals stay in R&D. That is the gap these two papers are trying to close.
The current state
Pre-review lobbying phase. The ETS Directive review is the concrete forcing event. Neither paper is legislation. Both are inputs to the drafting officials will do over the next year. In parallel, member states are already writing state-aid cheques to keep permanent removal projects alive while the framework catches up: Finland has granted €26.6M to three industrial bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) projects, per coverage tied to the European Commission’s ETS pages. Public money is bridging the gap the ETS refuses to.
What practitioners are saying
The advocacy calendar is being run in formation, not solo. Carbon Gap (@carbongap) is convening a Policy Summit panel explicitly framed around “How do we integrate carbon removal into the EU [ETS]” in the same window as the NEP paper drop. French CDR startup Rainbow is sending named practitioners into the room: on 16 September, “Clément Georget and Grégoire Guirauden will participate in Carbon Gap’s Carbon Removal Poli[cy Summit]” (@rainbow on LinkedIn). That is not one paper landing in isolation. That is a coordinated push.
Meanwhile NEP’s membership base keeps growing. Waste-to-energy operator Sysav and capture developer Emicap both joined recently, giving NEP more names to cite when it walks into DG CLIMA claiming to speak for the supplier side.
The next decision point
The ETS Directive review is the decision. The pre-review consultation window is where these papers earn or lose their influence. Watch for whether the Commission cites either document by name, and whether NEP, DVNE, and France’s national CDR association AFEN, which is already pressing Paris on the same question, converge on one joint text. Three parallel positions get filed. One aligned position gets read.
What to track
The leading indicator is not the papers themselves. It is whether the next batch of Commission-published review documents adopts the specific vocabulary NEP and DVNE are pushing: permanence tiers, separate accounting for removals versus reductions, and a hard residual-emissions gate. If those phrases show up in DG CLIMA drafts, the industry lobby is winning the framing fight. If they don’t, expect member states to keep filling the vacuum with cheques.
For buyers, the honest read is this: some fraction of your post-2030 compliance obligation may be settleable with removals, but only if the Commission accepts the framing these two papers propose. Plan for both outcomes. And keep the residual-only constraint front of mind. Removals in the ETS are for what cannot be abated, not a license to slow the phase-out. See Why Carbon Removal Needs More Than Trees for why that boundary matters when durability enters compliance markets.
Citations
- Negative Emissions — Negative Emissions Platform’s paper on integrating permanent carbon removals into the EU ETS
- Dvne — DVNE Policy Brief on Carbon Removal in the EU ETS
- Bluesky — @chrisbataille.bsky.social — Bluesky post
- Europa — European Commission’s ETS pages
- LinkedIn — @carbongap — LinkedIn post
- LinkedIn — @rainbow on LinkedIn — LinkedIn post
- Negative Emissions — both joined recently
- Energynews — already pressing Paris on the same question